Last week, on Wednesday, I spoke at the Bletchley Park AI User Group at our post build user group event! With Laura G-B covering her favourite things from Build and lots in the Data and Fabric space, Leon Gordon giving us his AI News & Views, including an awesome showcase of Onyx Data's case study presented at Build, and myself covering updates to Microsoft 365, Copilot and Power Platform, we had a jam packed evening!
For those who didn't make the evening, I wanted to still share out my favourite updates coming to Microsoft 365, Copilot, Power Platform and more in this post today! It's been 2 weeks or so now since Build... comment down below what your favourite announcements were! Have you managed to get hands on with anything new yet? Comment and discuss 💬
Copilot+ PC
So first up as one of my favourites feature wise is Copilot+ PCs. Microsoft is taking the personal computer to the next level with the power of generative AI and Copilot alongside Windows 11.
With Copilot+ PCs, we can now take advantage of a number of pretty interesting and exciting new features such as Recall, which lets users head back on what they were doing a while ago using search or a rewind. We can compose art 10x better than we all used to be able to do in Microsoft Paint, cranking Copilot up or down in its affect against a drawing which it mixes with a prompt you give it. Oh, and there's so much more!
Credit: Microsoft
Whilst the features coming to us all with Copilot+ PCs sound awesome, there are some people in the community not so reassured by the security aspect of the functionality with some calling Recall a "security nightmare". Check out the article from itpro.com below.
Solomon Klappholz
GPT-4o
Next up, whilst not originally announced at Build, I want to talk about OpenAI's new flagship model, GPT-4o. This new model is able to reason over audio, vision and text simultaneously and respond in real time allowing for an even more natural conversation and interaction with software. Check out the OpenAI demo below.
And at Build, GPT-4o was announced as generally available on Azure AI Studio with an API available.
GitHub Copilot Extensions
Okay next up is one of my absolute top favourites from Build, and it's GitHub Copilot Extensions! If anyone knows me well, and if you've been to any of my sessions lately, you'll know that GitHub Copilot is one of my favourite copilots. Now, with GitHub Copilot Extensions, we have the ability to extend and provide greater context to GitHub Copilot, with it being able to tap into Azure infrastructure status, our deployed resources, Microsoft 365 and Teams content, info from Docker, Stripe and so much more!
There are over 15 extensions already available out the box in limited beta for organisations to get working with, with the ability to further build your own extensions.
With this functionality, I'm super excited to try a use case I'm thinking about which mixes this feature as well as the new Power Apps as YAML functionality that has been announced!
Copilot in SharePoint
Next up is Copilot in SharePoint with an even more democratised way to create your own copilots from your every day files and content. Simply select a few files or folders and create a copilot or use the default copilot that comes with SharePoint sites!
Copilot Studio
On the topic of Copilot, let's talk extensibility, custom copilots and agent experiences with all of the new functionality coming to Copilot Studio out of Build!
Now with the latest in Copilot Studio, we're able to have Copilot carry on processes for us, learn and understand from conversations we've had in the past with it, take in more context and generally act like more of an agent!
In other news for Copilot Studio, we also now have greater capability around conversational analytics and telemetry that we can tap into to identify data from the interactions Copilot is having with our users.
Team Copilot
Now, another favourite from Build for me, yet for some potentially a controversial one from Microsoft with some previously side stepped wording? 🤔
With Team Copilot, Copilot now acts as a team member in collaborative sessions, it facilitates meetings, takes notes in Loop, manages projects, and collaborates in line in Teams chats with groups. Check it out...
Now, where previously Copilot was never given job titles, or titles which could resemble a role in an organisation such as 'Project Manager', this isn't the case with Team Copilot, raising questions around this topic.
Personally, I think Team Copilot will support teams with an additional AI assistant, and it will not replace the skills various roles bring to teams. Further again, Copilot will give us the time back to focus on the right things in our work lives. More broadly, I do think this may see roles start to change and shape differently in organisations, but I don't think Copilot will replace roles as some questions have been raised previously by others.
Microsoft Teams updates
Next up is updates to Microsoft Teams! Microsoft gave us a whole host of updates to Teams at Build including some of the following...
- Slash commands
- Collaborative code editing with new loop components
- Microsoft Designer and copilots in line in chats
Want to know more about the new features coming to Teams? Check them out at Microsoft Tech Community.
Power Apps
Finally, I want to round off with a whole host of updates coming to Power Apps. This year at build we got a Copilot feature we've been reaching out for ever since we first saw Copilot in Power Apps.
Until now we've had the ability to create a single Dataverse table using a natural language prompt which we can then turn into a canvas app. Now with Copilot in Power Apps, we're able to build a relational data schema which get's built on Dataverse to then turn into a fully functioning app.
I'm not completely sure what the app looks like once it is generated as Microsoft didn't showcase that functionality in their demo, however, check it out below and I'll update when I know more!
Alongside this awesome tool, we also have some of the following goodies coming to Power Apps...
- Canvas Apps as YAML
- In-app Copilot for mobile based apps
- Co-authoring with up to 10 collaborators
- Native git integration
These features are all at various stages in release at the moment with some at private preview but some available to the public in an early release environment via make.preview.powerapps.com.
That's all!
So, those were my favourite features announced at Microsoft Build 2024! Tell me what yours are below in the comments, and subscribe to LewisDoesDev to get my posts directly in your inbox! 💌