DEV Community: April Dunnam

Adding Generative AI to your Power Apps with AI Prompts

April Dunnam — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 22:53:17 +0000

Did you know that you can harness the power of GPT in your Power Apps applications? You can leverage the built-in AI Builder Create Text with GPT model to create your own custom prompts and use those easily in Power Apps by adding them as a data source.

Check out this video to see how it's done:

youtube.com

If you want to learn more:

Use your prompt in Power Apps: https://aka.ms/powerapps-ai-prompts

Explore prompt ideas: https://aka.ms/power-prompts

Adding generative AI to your Cloud Flows with AI Prompts

April Dunnam — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 16:30:24 +0000

AI innovation in the Power Platform keeps getting better and better! Now an AI prompt can be added as an action within a Power Automate flow making it possible to generate text from inside an automated process.

In this video, @gomomohapi shows how you can add these Generative AI capabilities to your flows. Showing you how to configure the flow with the AI Prompt, how to retrieve user information and how to add an approval step for human review of the AI generated content.

Watch here:

youtube.com

If you want to learn more:
Use your prompt in Power Automate: https://aka.ms/PowerAutomate/CustomPromptsInFlow
Human review for automation with a prompt: https://aka.ms/PowerAutomate/AIHumanReview

Getting started with AI Prompts

April Dunnam — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 16:23:34 +0000

We're kicking off a brand new multi-week video series called "AI in Action - Powering up with Power Automate'. In this series, we'll explore some of the key generative AI features in Power Automate and AI Builder that are changing the automation game.

In the first video of the series, we'll be tackling AI Prompts. AI Prompts are powered by GPT and run on the Azure OpenAI Service. They are powerful tools that enable you to add Generative AI capabilities to your apps, automated workflows, and copilots. The Power Platform provides many template prompts that serve a variety of scenarios but you can also create custom prompts for customised use cases.

In this video, we’ll go over how you can get started with AI Prompts in AI Builder. Showing you where to access the Prompt Builder and how to create custom prompts with instructions, context, and dynamic values. You’ll also learn how to test your custom prompts once they have been created.

Watch here:

If you want to learn more about AI Prompts, check out these amazing resources below:
AI Builder GPT Prompts are generally available: https://aka.ms/PowerAutomate/GPTPromptsGA
Prompt Engineering Guide: https://aka.ms/promptguide
Documentation: https://aka.ms/AIPromptsOverview

Hack Together: The Power Platform AI Global Hack

April Dunnam — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:11:53 +0000

Are you ready to unleash your creativity and build amazing solutions with Microsoft Power Platform and AI?

If so, join us for Hack Together: Power Platform AI Global Hack, a virtual event where you can learn, experiment, and hack together with the new Copilot and AI features in the Power Platform.

What is Hack Together?

Hack Together is a global online hackathon that runs from September 14th to 28th, 2023.

It’s open to anyone who wants to explore the possibilities of using AI in the Power Platform, whether you are a beginner, advanced maker, admin or a professional developer – all are welcome! You can join solo or hack together as a team of up to 3 people.

The goal of Hack Together is to build solutions in Power Platform that leverage 1 or more Copilot and AI features. You can use any of the AI features available in Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages and AI Builder, such as:

Power Apps Copilot: Create apps faster and easier by generating app components based on natural language inputs.
Power Automate Copilot: Create flows faster and easier by generating flow steps based on natural language inputs.
Power Virtual Agents Copilot: Create bot topics with natural language and connect your bot to your websites to pull answers with GPT.
Power Pages Copilot: Leverage AI to create business grade websites and write content for your websites with GPT.
AI Builder Create Text with GPT model: Generate text content based on natural language inputs, powered by Azure OpenAI Service.
AI Builder Form Processing: Extract data from forms and documents with AI.

How to participate

To participate in Hack Together, you need to register for the event at https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai/register.

You will also need to have access to a Microsoft 365 account with a Power Platform license. If you don’t have one, you can see how to get one here.

Once you have registered and have access to the Power Platform, you can start building your solution! We’ve created a Learn Collection to help you get started: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai/learn

You can also join the Hack Together community here to ask questions, share ideas, and get feedback from Microsoft experts and other participants. Drop a comment in the forum and introduce yourself so you can get to know your fellow hackers!

You can submit your solution any time before September 28th, 2023 at 11:59 PM PST. You will need to provide a short video demo of your solution, a brief description of the problem statement, the solution overview, and the AI features used. You can submit your solution here.

Looking for more info about the event? Check out our site for all the details: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai

What are the prizes?

The best solutions will be selected by a panel of judges based on the following criteria:

-Innovation: How original and creative is the solution?
-Impact: How well does the solution address a real-world problem or opportunity?
-Usability: How easy and intuitive is the solution to use?
-Technical Quality: How well does the solution leverage the AI features in the Power Platform?

The winners will be announced the week of October 23rd. You get the opportunity to win the following prizes:

🏆 Grand prize winner – The best of the best! This category rewards the solution that meets all judging criteria, wows judges, and has potential real-world value.

$150 Gift Card
A Pair of Power Platform Branded Socks
A Power Platform Branded T-Shirt
A Power Platform Branded Backpack
A Special Edition of Code Magazine
🥇 Best AI-powered solution – This category rewards the solution that integrates AI in an innovative way.

$75 Gift Card
A Pair of Power Platform Branded Socks
A Power Platform Branded T-Shirt
A Special Edition of Code Magazine
🥇 Best better together solution – This category rewards the solution that integrates AI in an innovative way. For example, a chatbot that automates common tasks or an app that uses AI to suggest relevant files for users.

$75 Gift Card
A Pair of Power Platform Branded Socks
A Power Platform Branded T-Shirt
A Special Edition of Code Magazine
🥇 Best Diversity, Equity and Inclusion solution – This category rewards the solution that helps make the Power Platform community more diverse, equitable and inclusive. For example, an app that helps makes sure you have a diverse lineup of speakers for events.

$75 Gift Card
A Pair of Power Platform Branded Socks
A Power Platform Branded T-Shirt
A Special Edition of Code Magazine
🏅 Plus, all hackathon participants who submit an app will receive a digital badge.

Join the fun!

Are you ready to hack? You will learn new skills, meet new people, and have fun along the way. Plus, you might win some awesome prizes!

We’ll have livestreams every week for you to learn more about the Power Platform and all the Copilot and AI features. We have a great lineup of Microsoft executives like Ryan Cunningham, VP of Power Apps and Stephen Siciliano, VP of Power Automate as well as our Power Platform Advocacy team and MVP’s that are ready to help you get up to speed so you can start hacking!

So, what are you waiting for? Register now and start hacking! We can’t wait to see what you create! 😊

Build a Power Platform Yearly Stats Application

April Dunnam — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 20:46:45 +0000

It's the end of another year, the time that we all look back and reflect on what we accomplished. As a Power Platform maker, it is a good idea to look back on what you built in the year and the impact you made.

To make this retrospection easier, I build "Power Platform Wrapped", a solution built on the Power Platform to help you get a customized overview of how many Power Apps you built, what you automated with Power Automate and more.

If you want to go straight to the solution and bypass the details, you can download the app here: Power Platform Wrapped

If you want to see a video walkthrough of the app and what it can do, check out this video:

How it's Built

Without going into too many boring details, I'll share a bit about how I built this solution.

The key pieces of information that I wanted to track are the number of Power Apps, Flows, Bots and Power Pages built. I started thinking about how to get that data and realized that all of that information is already available in the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit.

If you haven't installed the COE Kit in your environment then consider this your nudge to do so now! The COE Toolkit is a set of Power Platform assets (Flows, Power Apps, etc) that gives us additional administrative, governance and analytics capabilities. It runs a series of Flows to gather information about what is in your Power Platform environments and stores all of that data in custom Dataverse tables.

Since all of that data is already store in the COE toolkit, I decided to build on top of that for my year end stats solution. I built a simple Power Apps canvas app that pulls data directly from the underlying COE Dataverse tables.

I realize that not everyone has the COE kit installed so I built another version of the solution that uses the Power Platform Admin connectors instead. This separate solution uses a Power Automate flow to get all of this information using the Admin connectors and sends a summary email out.

If you're looking to help encourage and celebrate your Power Platform makers then this is a great template to try out!

Powerful Devs Conference

April Dunnam — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 18:52:36 +0000

Want to learn about how to leverage Fusion Teams and the Power Platform to build applications faster and with less code?

Join our experts at #PowerfulDevsConf on Sep 14, 8–11:30 PT (GMT+8).

You'll hear from community members, Microsoft MVP's and Microsoft execs. This is a LIVE event with a variety of topics ranging from custom connectors to ALM and more!

Scott Guthrie will kick things off with a fireside chat on why code-first devs should embrace the Power Platform. And we have an amazing closing keynote with Charles Lamanna and Amanda Silver as they talk about all the latest and greatest innovations and their take on the future of development.

Power Platform Custom Connectors Zero to Hero

April Dunnam — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 17:02:23 +0000

#PowerfulDevs Conference

RSVP HERE BY JULY 15:
https://aka.ms/powerfuldevsconf )

The Powerful DEVs Conference is the first virtual conference of its kind. We will showcase how developers can leverage the Power Platform to build applications faster and with far less effort. Connect with industry-recognized ProDev influencers, Microsoft Cloud Advocates, trusted and diverse community leaders, and members of the Power Platform Team.

BOOKMARK THIS FOR RESOURCES AND DISCUSSION WITH SPEAKERS

#powerfuldevs Conference: Join us on July 15th Online!

JennyMEvents for Microsoft Azure ・ Jul 10 '20

#powerfuldevs #powerplatform #prodev #programming

Revisit this page during the event to engage in live (and post-event) discussions on those topics with both speakers and community. The speakers will be here for a live Q&A for at least 30 minutes immediately after their session concludes. After the event, come back to find additional slides, videos, and resources for this session.

About This Session:

July 15, 2020: 11:00 PDT - 11:25 PDT

One of the most POWERful ways you can enhance the already rich native functionality of the Power Platform is with Custom Connectors. In this session, you’ll learn what custom connectors are and how to create one from scratch to get your business data into Power Apps and Power Automate.

About the Speakers:

April Dunnam is a Technical Architect @ Microsoft and a Microsoft Business Apps MVP alumni. Follow @aprildunnam on Twitter.

Additional Resources

aka.ms/powercustomconnectors

Slides

Subscribe to April's YouTube Channel