Microsoft Corp. today announced a number of updates for Power Platform, the company’s low-code/no-code tools for app development and business intelligence automation, that add new artificial intelligence capabilities to the platform to make it easier for users to describe processes.

The updates were announced during the Microsoft Ignite 2022 conference for developers and information technology professionals using Windows and the Azure cloud. Low-code and no-code refer to the ability to generate applications with little or no coding, allowing for apps, configurations and workflows to be developed and deployed quickly.

Within Power Platform is a system known as Power Automate, which automates workflows across apps and software-as-a-service platforms for business users by using a low-code interface where the workflow is described using a templating language to sequence triggers and events.

Power Automate is being updated with natural language AI capabilities that allow business users with no coding or technical experience to input a description of the workflow that they want to automate and the AI will build the flow in seconds. After that, the user can fine-tune the workflow in the flow designer and finalize it using Power Automate.

Using this feature, a user could simply type something such as, “If an employee moves a file into this folder, move the file into a folder based on the date, log it, and then run the processor that will edit the file.” After that the AI will generate the Power Automate workflow that will do this without the user needing to write any code that would execute these elements.

For document processing, Microsoft is putting AI to use with Intelligent Document Processing using Power Automate which can process documents without any need to write any code. This allows business users to process documents in bulk — such as invoices and account statements, which organizations can see at scale – using AI models that help reduce errors and increase the accuracy of extracted data.

Updates to the feature include feedback loops for users to allow users to retrain the model on documents that received low-accuracy scores, an additional document type for unstructured free-form data, additional language support for handwritten text detection, and the detection of tables in more than one page of a document once a user has tagged table-format data.

Power Pages, a low-code development and hosting platform for webpages, is now generally available and it has also received a number of updates. These include a full design studio with multi-step forms for users including stylesheets, 16 new template options allowing costuming look and feel, a tutorial section with videos and more. The pro-developer tools have also been updated to provide creators the ability to easily edit HTML, page styles and JavaScript.

Finally, Power BI, a self-service analytics tool, has a number of updates now in preview including connectivity to OneDrive and SharePoint, that allow users to edit documents stored in either service without needing to download the Power BI desktop app. With support for large data set reporting an “optimize” setting will mean a quicker response time for users.

Power BI now also integrates reports and datasets to Power Apps solutions as Dataverse components. With this new feature, when a user adds a new Power BI report or dataset to a solution, it will stay connected upon deployment. Solutions are a Power Platform tool that allows users to deploy apps built using Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse and other Power Platform services. This improves the export, import and customization process.

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