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).