What Is the Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft’s Power Platform puts business intelligence, app development, and connectivity software at your fingertips. Your team will save time by automating tasks, gain better insights by drilling down into data, and build virtual agents that cater to your unique operational processes.
What You’ll Manage
- Data and insights with Power BI
- No-code custom applications with Power Apps
- Task automation with Power Automate
- Chatbots for customers and teammates with Power Virtual Agents
How You’ll Benefit
- Get real-time insights into the data that matters
- Easily build applications to streamline business processes
- Automate redundant tasks to save time for value-adding activities
- Ensure rapid response times for customers and employees
What Does the Power Platform Do?
Microsoft’s Power Platform lets your business create custom applications, automate tasks and conversations, and drill down into data. You don’t need extensive experience with coding or software development to use the Power Platform—the goal of this software is to make business intelligence and application development more accessible for any type of business.
Beyond providing additional intelligence and automation features, the Power Platform brings your whole company together, breaking down silos to ensure that everyone understands the projects, capabilities, and activities that matter most.
You can purchase the entire Power Platform or pick the applications that fit your business. There are four Power Platform applications at your disposal: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.
Power BI
Power BI focuses on your company’s data and the insights you draw from it. You can pull data from your other Microsoft solutions, as well as third-party software, spreadsheets, and websites, to paint a full picture of where your business stands. From there, you can gather disparate data in one place and create quick, powerful visualizations that will help you grow your business.
Power Apps
If you can’t find a software solution to perform a specific task for your industry or company type, you might be able to build a module in Power Apps to fulfill that need. All you need to create your app is a data source and a plan for what you want that app to do. The Power Apps Studio offers easy-to-navigate menus and drag-and-drop customization to streamline the app creation process without limiting your options.
Power Automate
Power Automate allows you to create a series of cause-and-effect triggers and actions across Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools, ranging from Dynamics 365 Sales to Google Drive to Twitter. Automation is crucial for growing businesses that must dedicate time towards value-adding, scalable activities. Power Automate handles the easy stuff such as sending templated emails when leads fill out web forms or moving files between folders as they pass through project steps. Ultimately, Power Automate will save time and eliminate human error for menial tasks.
Power Virtual Agents
Using Power Virtual Agents, you can create chatbots with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, no software development experience required. These virtual agents are customizable so that you can cater to the questions and concerns your customers may have. The chatbot may be the initial point of contact for a variety of customer questions, so you can add keywords for different circumstances to help your chatbots understand the flow of conversation and when to pass customers to a human agent. You can always modify the bot based on how helpful it is to your customers.
What Types of Business Would Benefit from the Power Platform?
The variety of tools available through the Power Platform make it a useful addition for all kinds of organizations. For instance, Power Virtual Agents might be a good tool for customer-centric organizations, while businesses in specialized industries like food distribution may want Power Apps and its easy-to-build modules.
Ultimately, you may not need every Power Platform tool depending on the other software in your environment. The Power Platform syncs with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) solutions to improve productivity and visibility for sales, marketing, customer service, and operations teams. As such, the Power Platform is built for mid-sized organizations hoping to facilitate growth and add value to the business.
See Power BI In Action
Check out one of the most popular Power Platform applications in our demo center!