Copilot Takes on the Starring Role for Effective App Creation, Design, and Delivery in Microsoft Power Apps

The last time we introduced you to Copilot was in its application within Viva Sales, enhancing your sales processes. You can find out more here.

Now, Power Apps takes the limelight—a solution that provides the ability to easily develop custom apps to equip your business for success. Power Apps can now harness the capabilities of Copilot’s natural language processing to deliver a ‘prompt and response’ engagement style approach when generating apps. This advancement accelerates the process of creating an app from scratch, eliminating the time-consuming task of manually writing code.

In this blog, we will explore how to build an app using the power of Copilot and how it can transform the app creation, design, and delivery process and experience.

Transforming Applications with Copilot

Now, when creating an app, Copilot will be displayed within Power Apps—located at the top of the homepage—and can be prompted to build an app with certain specifications.

For example, when creating an app to track data breaches within your organization, you would first prompt the AI to “create an expense management application.” Copilot will then generate the application to meet your request.

Figure 1: The Power Apps homepage and Copilot prompt.

Once the Copilot has been prompted, as part of the app generation process, a Dataverse table sample of how the data will appear will be produced based on what was entered into Copilot AI.

Figure 2: Table generated by Copilot.

Alterations can be made to the table through prompting Copilot to ‘edit’—located on the right-hand side of the screen—to ensure your app is accurate and fulfills all your requirements. For instance, you can prompt Copilot to “make a first name and second name field instead,” and the app will update accordingly.

Figure 3: Table altered with changes prompted through Copilot.

With the table updated appropriately, the app can be created and published. Next, you will be seamlessly transferred into the Power Apps builder experience. Here you will find the main components, screens, fields, and options that Copilot has already created for you. This intuitive environment allows you to physically interact with and test the new app. You can open and edit existing test data or add new records as required.

Figure 4: Opening data in Power Apps builder experience.

Additional features such as Preview and App Checker are also available, which will recommend suggested changes to the app you have created. Preview in Power Apps allows you to view your application on a tablet, phone, or browser through responsive design, ensuring your app is optimized for all viewing device types. Meanwhile, App Checker creates an indicative list of formula issues within the application, such as accessibility problems, and provides ways to improve your overall app performance.

Figure 5: App Checker feature.

Copilot, the Star of the Show

There you have it—Copilot in Power Apps. Let’s sum up the key user benefits:

• Efficient, natural language processing ‘prompt and response’ approach
• No coding requirements
• An indicative list provided of suggested improvements to your application
• Application can be manually altered and edited throughout the process

The Power Apps Copilot has revolutionized low-code app development. Its transformative capabilities in low-code app development through an easy-to-use natural language prompt and response process showcase the future of app creation, delivering efficiency and unlocking the full potential of organizations.

Ready for your organization to steal the show and be a sensation? Explore the potential of Power Apps and Copilot AI by contacting our experts at Telefónica Tech today.