Event Preview: Planning for the future of work at Power Platform Community Conference 2025 (#PPCC25)

Power Platform Community Conference 2025 (#PPCC25) returns to Las Vegas the week of October 27 with a keynotes, educational sessions, and a range of pre- and post-event workshops. A range of Microsoft representatives will be on site, from executives and product team members to implementation, training, and pre-sales experts. 

Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar has been involved in Power Platform Community Conference since its inception, and the event’s priorities like community support and knowledge sharing will continue to inspire participants this year, she believes. She spoke to MSDW about her participation this year and how Power Platform continues to reach customers and partners as the tools shift toward AI tools, agents, and copilots. 

• Note: MSDW is a media partner of Power Platform Community Conference 2025 (PPCC25). Our readers can save $150 by registering with the code MSDW150. 

In a time of product transition, Sarkar believes the community’s spirit of supporting and educating peers will buffer people from uncertainty caused by shifting technology. She explained:

Everybody is deeply motivated to help people learn and skill up in something that might be new for them. That's kind of the basis for the Power Platform: taking people from non-traditional tech backgrounds and giving them the tools to solve whatever problem they've got in their business or life. 

That's why I think the Power Platform community speaks to people so much and the community aspect is so strong compared to most of the other tech communities that I've been a part of for twenty-five years. Actually helping other people skill up is probably the most important part of the Power Platform community. And that starts with Charles Lamanna and his senior executive friends, but also down to the latest person on the street who showed up that day saying, ‘Hey, I got sent here,’ or ‘I chose to come here.’

Microsoft’s focus on AI-related tools and capabilities will define this year’s event. That transformation will encourage users to move away from static apps and automations and toward new types of solutions built with AI-based tools and operating with help of agents and copilots. For the average Power Platform customer, learning to work within the context of Microsoft’s new vision could present new challenges. Sarkar acknowledges this and says she believes PPCC25 will take on this transition in real time.

PPCC25 is probably the biggest AI skilling project that Microsoft is doing in a conference format because we're not just looking at how you deploy AI in enterprises. We're asking: how do you actually learn how to use AI in your life and work? And Power Platform I think is probably one of the most approachable ways to learn about AI that is safe, secure, with enterprise guardrails, not leaking data, and really helping people understanding what's going on from the ground up.

The AI focus also means more Power Platform professionals will find themselves in the role of learning, perhaps more than they have done in past years.

It's day one again for us. We all got a little comfy with app building and automation development because again, Power Platform as a concept has been around since the 2016 era and the concepts [have been around even longer].

And a lot of us who've been in the tech scene for a while are like, yeah, cool, I know how to build an enterprise-driven app or an enterprise app. I know how to build an automation. I know how to build a chatbot. Done it for 30 years. It's not day one. 

But AI driven -- that's new, right? Imagine apps that have an adaptive UX.
That changes depending on what you're trying to do. That's new. Imagine automation that you dictate to and it plugs into all of the data sources that you have access to uniquely. That's new. 

Imagine building a true multi-agent system that is your assistant to help you do big things. Migrate a code base. Figure out what are the right sales leads to go after. Figure out which are the target customers that you should be looking at. Those are hard problems. They used to be manual labor for us, and now there's all these new tools that exist. But how can they exist and be useful for us in our specific business? The only way to figure that out, I believe, is in person..

The hands-on components of the event will be especially helpful in exposing people to the new capabilities, and Sarkar noted two ways attendees can ramp up their skills at the event. First is an agent hack where the event team hopes to attract lots of attendees to participate. It’s an activity that she has been waiting for since the early days of PPCC, she says.

Everyone who is attending the conference has an opportunity to participate in this hack, and it is important for many reasons. One is, of course, being a part of a global movement. That's pretty freaking cool. But the more important part is people are actually going to try to build a multi-agent system in person.

Working among others during a hack means everyone has the opportunity to quickly find answers to questions related to issues like licensing or data source connection. With access to Microsoft product team members circulating during the event, Sarkar says she expects hack participants to come away from it with working agents and an understanding of how to build them that they wouldn’t get trying to work through it on their own.

Sarkar also recommends the prompt-a-thon on Friday. Hosted by Chris Huntingford of Microsoft partner Cloud Lighthouse, this workshop will offer a lab experience featuring mentors who will help participants as they develop their copilot and agent prompting skills. She explained:

There are a lot of copilots and agents. There are a lot of ways to prompt them. But what are the best ways? Where are some prompt libraries you can grab some prompts from? What are the problems you're trying to solve? How can you build an entire solution with just prompts?

During the main conference program, Sarkar will be part of an advanced session with other Microsoft experts exploring the full experience of building your first copilot or multi-agent system that works with Azure. That presenting group, which also includes a Microsoft Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) and representatives from the Copilot Studio product team and Power CAT, will include perspective on broadening the agent development process to use the right tools from across Microsoft’s portfolio.

I come from a pro dev background, so I always say I think there's more power in the Power Platform than people realize and it comes from being able to plug into Azure and everything Azure gives you.

How do you pull in some of the cool new models that are in Azure? How do you connect to different data sources? How do you connect to MCP? How do you figure out how to build your copilot and then get a function from Azure to drop into your copilot and then showcase in M365?

So I don't think a lot of people understand that one of the benefits of building with Microsoft is you have an ecosystem. It's not like, hey, here's a low code tool, cool, that's nice. But how do you actually have work with pro developers to build a function or build some sort of a control or automation? How do you pull that into a low code agent and then how do you surface it?

That agent for your entire company to use through something like M365 copilot and show up as one of the agents in the corner. How do you actually do that? A lot of people have no idea. They don't even know they can do it. So it's it really is a soup to nuts, end to end of fusion team. 

It's pro devs, low code devs, and enterprise users working together to really understand how agents can benefit your business. 

PPCC25 experiences may also lead Power Platform users to think about the changing nature of IT roles and responsibilities in an era where Microsoft is pushing for solution development that relies on AI-focused tools. Traditional IT tasks could be set to change in ways that challenge experienced workers, says Sarkar.

A few of us who've been a little bit lazy in our career lately - not anymore. IT people I manage, they think ‘modernize and migrate’. Cool. Migrate, we know. Modernize, we don't know. How do you migrate great with AI? How do you deploy an AI solution. 

People working in Power Platform are way ahead of the game in the AI-verse because they just went through this. They know how to find the right data sources, how to build the right thing, who should have access, who should not have access, when to take it down. They've actually been through the rigmarole recently, so they're the most qualified to actually build and deploy AI solutions. So the fusion team concept is doing really well right now with people building AI apps.

And she believes developers may still have the greatest adjustment to make regarding AI’s disruption.

[Developers] used to be good at churning out lots and lots of code, and that is no longer the hardest thing in the world. And that is a gut check, an ego check for people like me. Now Copilot writes C++ code much better than me. So pro devs actually I think are getting the biggest reckoning.

Microsoft aims to persuade developers, architects, IT, and others at PPCC25 that the challenges they face in creating new business solutions, including those perhaps created by AI, can be solved with AI-first tools and cloud services. Roles will change, risks, responsibilities and complexity will shift, but Sarkar foresees Power Platform professionals adapting to the changes in demand for their talents. 

There are many new jobs that people don't understand yet. I don't think you know how many jobs are about to be invented that we don't know about yet. But conferences like PPCC25, we're going to start talking about this. We are going to all have a job reckoning; not in a job loss way, but in a ‘you better scale up yesterday’ way. And I truly believe events like PPCC25 are going to help us do that, not just the content, but other people who are in our boat.