Ignite 2024: Microsoft introduces new ways to accelerate development in Power Platform

Power Platform customers will soon get access to new agent and application development tools, Microsoft announced as Ignite 2024 began. As part of the company’s slew of announcements from across their commercial product line, the Power Platform team revealed new and updated integrations, development tools, governance feature, and Copilot-branded features embedded into existing capabilities.

One of the key agent-building tools in Microsoft’s lineup, Copilot Studio, will offer its autonomous agent capabilities in public preview, according to Microsoft CVP Charles Lamanna. He explained:

Now, with Copilot as the new UI for AI, any organization can build powerful agents that augment their workforce and execute business processes right inside Copilot Studio—without any coding. Autonomous agents can work independently, detecting events like an email arriving, and use generative AI to trigger a series of actions. By automating complex tasks, these agents can orchestrate workflows and work unprompted alongside or on behalf of users or entire teams

As a successor to Power Virtual Agents, Copilot Studio’s rise benefited from riding the wave of ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022 with one of the first OpenAI-based generative AI applications ready to launch at Microsoft. Its early SaaS-based RAG-pattern allowed users to describe the type of chatbot or agent they wanted and let the service build a bot.

Omar Aftab, Microsoft VP for conversational AI, described other enhancements to Copilot Studio, including the upcoming introduction of voice capabilities that can be integrated into IVR systems.