I participated PowerUp Finland Live Meetup held in Innofactor at 28.11.2024

First my colleague from Digia Santeri Karttunen told how to change from customer to vendor. After that there were panel discussion about Microsoft Ignite releases and greatest stuff. This was first time PowerUp had panel discussion format and it was quite nice. No need to go trough the Ignite material first. Listen this session and then cherry pick what sounded nice and interesting.

The panel discussion

In the panel discussion there were Jukka Niiranen, Jaakko Heikkinen, Maria Fonsell and Terho Antila. The discussion was led by Antti Pajunen and commented by Kimmo Koski, Filipp Koivu and many others from the audience.

Copilot and Agents

The panelists were asked about Copilot, Agents and what was the most relevant thing related to them. Jaakko told that 80% of business operations do not necessarily benefit from previous LMM model where user have discussion with the Agent. Autonomous Agents are the new thing. Terho was wondering can half of the working day be spent walking in the forest talking to a Copilot Agent and doing work that way.

How do you convey the story of an autonomous agent to customers?

  • Information security is an essential issue.
  • There needs to be a governance model so that developing and using the agents do not get out of hand – the same as there was with Canvas Apps first introduced.
  • Technology does not replace solving business problems, but must still be delivered based on needs. Don’t take new technology as hammer and then start to see nails everywhere.
  • How do we ensure that the process is necessary at all? Consultants always need to take one step back and think about which business problem we are solving.
  • Like with all new tech stuff there needs to be R/D – first experiment to identify the right use cases.
  • At the end of the day, these are automations whose manual steps are made easier.
  • With autonomous agents one can build potential automation in advance, generative actions are ready and the agent decides what to do.

What is a declarative agent?

  • You can open a graphical window within the Copilot context that acts as an agent.
  • It is a wrapper for the Copilot Studio maker portal for citizen developers or normal users?
  • It is a bit like you can make an existing Canvas Apps into an agent, making the agent an application user and the agent becomes an application user who enters data into it.

Otherwise they wouldn’t be agents

Where do Agents go? To the default environment, but even the admins can’t see them. Antti Martikainen replied: Otherwise they wouldn’t be agents if we’d know where they are 🤣

From the audience: Can an agent help an employee, e.g. too many meetings. The agent helps the employee. Agent does something all the time in the background. CPU processor is running!

Terho is interested in bringing Azure AI Foundry to Copilot Studio. It’s hard to figure out when to jump from Azure to prodev (professional developers), citizen developers may have challenges here.

What new things were significant?

  • Current low code development will change.
  • The number of Power Apps will decrease and there will be more agents that adapt to the user’s context.
  • The same will be the case with Power Automate, which will perform contextual tasks.
  • In model-driven apps, you can chat directly with Copilot, so you don’t have to start filtering fields.
  • Business side is waiting for the 10 ready-made agents for CRM / ERP business, which will make everyday work easier.
  • Licensing will change also, pay-as-you-go, 0.01$/msg.
  • Project Sofia for finance analytics, why should we do this market or which product has the best coverage.
  • Future business applications will not include a ready-made user interface, but a user interface will be created for the user according to the user’s needs.
  • Filipp shouted: But we do have roles based forms 🤣
  • From the audience: Semantic kernel, but it requires making a procode bot.

But we do have roles based forms

In the future there should fusion teams

  • Professional developers need to collaborate more with low code people.
  • They need to be able to offer more than just black boxes (transparency for the development and what does the AI solutions do inside them).
  • Teams should consist of no code, low code and pro code developers.
  • Like XRM back in the days, developers made D365 implementation plug-in and Javascript, which consultants put in place, the same should be utilized in making AI.

Governance and administration (had big role in ignite sessions)

  • Purview supports Copilot Studio, if you talk to an agent and labels the conversation if the documents are confidential.
  • You can see in Purview who has asked certain things with certain labels.
  • Transcripts are in Dataverse!
  • CoE Starter Kit will be reduced and functions are moved to the Power Platform admin side – for managed environments – as well as licensing model.
  • Admin side will not as customizable as CoE Starter Kit is now.
  • Routing to VNET network is a managed environment feature, e.g. IP space restrictions.
  • Traffic in the customer’s own Azure network is limited, and not open to everyone with PP connector – this will enable hybrid implementations the new way without data gateways.
  • With managed environments you can completely block connector!
  • Dataverse table masked fields, all users cannot see the content – BUT Copilot might show the field value anyways 🤣
  • Environment group and dlp policy are one big thing as well!

Plan designer

  • With Copilot you can describe business needs. You provide descriptions and documentation.
  • Copilot tells you what a model-driven App or Canvas App you need. It will provide you the database model and relations, example data and security roles.
  • Can it implement the Solution package?
  • The plan can be modified before building the solution by discussing with Copilot.
  • Are senior architects replaced with plane designer?

Which tool would you make for yourself?

  • Niiranen – How could an agent help me?
  • Jaakko – Product registration.
  • Fonsell – A year ago I already made a licensing tool.
  • Terho – I can’t think quickly, the business side has so much planning work.

Thank you for all hosts and participants. It was nice to meet you all in a live meetup.