Power Apps agent vision will change apps and worker experiences in 3 ways: PPCC24

Microsoft officially reports 25 million monthly active users of Power Apps, though that number has already floated higher by a few million, the company advises. The service had about 1 million MAUs five years ago. 

Investment plans in Power Apps will cover “end-to-end” application development, Microsoft VP Ryan Cunningham told the Power Platform Community Conference 2024 audience last week, with a focus on delivering a service that can support vast new volumes of apps for the enterprise. He posed the challenge to the audience:

How do we work more flexibly, faster, …. and build new things that weren't possible before? 

Cunningham shared the Power Apps experiences of pharmaceutical giant Merck, which has over 42,000 MAUs, mostly on Power Apps Premium licenses. They have over 1,700 apps in production in a managed environment with a center of enablement to support the initiative. One of their successful apps has taken a tedious medical affairs planning process, which is different in each country, and reportedly reduced the level of effort by 90%, saving clinical teams 18,000 hours per year. The app replaces a manual process that required employees to populate information into PowerPoint documents for each plan. Its success has allowed the company to re-allocate nine technical employees to other projects, Cunningham said. 

More insight into Plan Designer

Microsoft Partner PM Director for Intelligent Studio Clay Wesener took the stage at PPCC24 to provide a more detailed demo of the Plan Designer tool that Cunningham had revealed earlier, a move that had surprised even Microsoft MVPs at the conference.