Book Image

Power Platform and the AI Revolution

By : Aaron Guilmette
Book Image

Power Platform and the AI Revolution

By: Aaron Guilmette

Overview of this book

In this AI era, employing leading machine learning and AI models such as ChatGPT for responding to customer feedback and prototyping applications is crucial to drive business success in the competitive market. This book is an indispensable guide to integrating cutting-edge technology into business operations and leveraging AI to analyze sentiment at scale, helping free up valuable time to enhance customer relationships. Immerse yourself in the future of AI-enabled application development by working with Power Automate, Power Apps, and the new Copilot Studio. With this book, you’ll learn foundational AI concepts as you explore the extensive capabilities of the low-code Power Platform. You’ll see how Microsoft's advanced machine learning technologies can streamline common business tasks such as extracting key data elements from customer documents, reviewing customer emails, and validating passports and drivers’ licenses. The book also guides you in harnessing the power of generative AI to expedite tasks like creating executive summaries, building presentations, and analyzing resumes. You’ll build apps using natural language prompting and see how ChatGPT can be used to power chatbots in your organization. By the end of this book, you’ll have charted your path to developing your own reusable AI automation patterns to propel your business operations into the future.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Preface

Artificial intelligence (AI) is commonly thought of as the capability of a machine or computer system to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence. Whatever your mental image of AI is—HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, or Brent Spiner as Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation—it probably represents only one or two facets of the growing capabilities in the field.

Until recently, most AI technologies revolved around machine learning—essentially, an automation of applied statistics. If you’ve forgotten your college statistics classes, it’s basically using large data samples to predict future data (for example, looking at recent home prices to predict future home prices). In the last year and a half, however, generative artificial intelligence (or GenAI, for short) has exploded onto the scene. Generative AI may be one of the most pivotal technologies created in the last hundred years. It’s a watershed moment for both individuals and organizations, potentially redefining what it is to be capable of creativity—or even thought.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, generative AI is the power behind some of the wildest technical cultural phenomena such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E, and Grok (as well as a host of other commercial ventures). Generative AI services can “create” content (based on their training data) that resembles the types of things that people can create. Instead of taking minutes or hours to compose content, many generative AI solutions can return responses in seconds.

Some of the most exciting use cases are around content summarization, reasoning over content in an almost human-like fashion, pattern matching, prediction, and analysis. Generative AI can also mix operating modes or contexts—for example, predicting values based on time-series data and writing a narrative to go along with it.

Throughout this book, we’ll explore some exciting ways to combine the expanding capabilities of different types of AI with Microsoft’s Power Platform tooling (including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio).