Microsoft Ignite 2023 has now started bringing us lots of new exciting announcements for Modern Work and the Power Platform! We have summarised the key announcements in this blog.
A big theme for the new announcements at Microsoft Ignite is Copilot, AI and how this is being added more to the apps and products we use daily. Copilot and AI introduce a new mindset for working by guiding and assisting users with tasks which otherwise may be lengthy or difficult to carry out. Copilot can also be a starting point for users to give them a head start with their tasks. For example, using Copilot to create a Power Automate flow from natural language saves them time and can also be a learning tool for new users of the product.
Microsoft Syntex has been renamed to SharePoint Premium. The functionality developed from Syntex can be broken down into Content Experiences, Content Processing and Governance.
For the full details of SharePoint Premium, please look at this Microsoft Blog post.
👉 Need help with SharePoint? Get in touch today to see how we can help!
Copilot for M365 has been in GA since the beginning of November, bringing Copilot into M365 apps for Enterprise customers. New Copilot updates have been added to Teams, Outlook, Microsoft Loop and Microsoft Word. One exciting new feature coming for administrators and IT leaders is the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, bringing insights into how employees are using AI and how it is affecting their productivity. This can help drive the adoption of the new AI tools available and measure the impact that Copilot is having in your workspace.
The full new functionality can be found in the Book of News.
Copilot Studio allows you to tailor Microsoft Copilots to your organisation’s unique processes and even allows you to make your own Copilots! The studio is built upon Power Virtual Agent technology, meaning that it is a low-code tool. You can tap into any system of record by using the hundreds of connectors already available within the Power Platform.
Building new Copilots works in the same way as building a Power Virtual Agent: you provide a trigger question, you point the Copilot to the right data source (actions) of where to look for the answer, and the studio can provide a response using OpenAI GPT technology.
This means Power Virtual Agents is now a part of the Copilot studio rather than a standalone Power Platform product.
Read more about the Copilot Studio here.
👉 Is your business ready for Copilot? If not, get in touch today for a chat about how we can help.
The Power Platform has seen a lot of Copilot functionality added since the AI tools were first introduced, so there have been no major announcements for Power Apps and Power Automate at Microsoft Ignite 2023. The biggest change announced within the Power Platform is that Power Virtual Agents are now a part of the brand-new Copilot studio.
Copilot doesn’t affect Encodian’s Flowr functionality within Power Automate, so you can keep using it like before. More third-party connectors are starting to be recognised by Copilot to be suggested when using Copilot to create flows. Keep an eye out for when this is available for Flowr!
👉 Need help with the Power Platform? Get in touch today to see how we can help!
To summarise, there have been lots of exciting announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2023 around Copilot, which unites Microsoft products with AI and continues Microsoft’s journey into the AI revolution that is here now!
Technical Evangelist
