How Agents, Copilot and Power Platform Are Changing the Way Businesses Work

On Day 2 of Community Summit, attendees once more made their way to Delta Ballroom at the Gaylord Nashville for the Agent & Copilot + Power Platform (Cowork) General Session. Dewain Robinson, VP of AI Analysis & Training, Dynamic Communities, moderated the program. The session opened with Robinson bounding onto the stage fresh from the pickleball court at the Exhibit Hall. Racket in hand, he readied attendees to step onto the session’s “court” – the world of Power Platform and AI.

Shedding the Fear of Agents with Power Platform

The session started with Microsoft’s perspective, given by Leon Welicki, Vice President & GM, Power Platform, Microsoft. Welicki introduced customer videos showing how Power Platform had helped organizations like Wegmans and G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers consolidate applications and reduce maintenance demands. Merck & Co. reported that one solution saved more than 18,000 hours annually.

Welicki noted that these stories of Power Platform implementation and success can be found in Keeping It Real with Power Platform, a video series featuring makers around the world solving real business problems.

Welicki then showed how AI could extend those capabilities through four demonstrations: building with agents, working with agents, bringing Copilot into apps, and bringing apps into Copilot. He discussed the concept of humans and agents working together in hybrid teams, asserting that in the AI era, humans must “lose the fear of using agents.”

He closed by declaring that the most important thing attendees could do was start. Rather than waiting for a perfect solution or setup, he encouraged them to begin with a problem and a way to measure improvement. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” he said. “It only has to be better.”

‘Connectivity Is Mission Critical’

Next up was Chris Jones, VP, Ecosystems and Partner Alliances, T-Mobile for Business in a Fireside Chat with Dewain Robinson. The two reflected on the theme of connectivity. Robinson discussed working with CopiIot while driving and how technology in the form of drones is now being used as part of his son’s football training. Nowadays, we’re always connected, expecting a high performance from all devices in all places.

Jones saw connectivity as a guiding light for T-Mobile, sharing the company’s efforts to strengthen its network so it worked just as well in major urban hubs as it did in the spaces in between those hubs. T-Mobile for Business services are “the foundation” of it all. As it integrates AI into its technologies, Jones empasized, maintaining connectivity is paramount.

Building with AI, Working with Work IQ

Shane Young, Chief AI Officer, TMC Global, has spent years showing people how to build apps and workflows in Power Apps Studio and Power Automate. He started his presentation by acknowledging that it was a little unusual to now be encouraging a different approach: “Instead of building apps and workflows and all the fun things that we do by … jumping in the studio, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, we’re going to go in, and we’re going to say, ‘Hey, here’s my prompt. Here’s the thing that I want to build. Build it for me.’”

Next, Young demonstrated a Power Platform solution he said he had built using a single prompt in the GitHub Copilot app. The solution included a document-upload app, SharePoint file storage, Dataverse tables and security, and a Power Automate flow. He assured attendees that AI was “not here to replace us. It’s here to augment us.”

Young then passed the baton to James Oleinik, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft. Oleinik showcased Work IQ, which he described as “the single intelligence layer that connects the work across the organization.” He outlined Microsoft’s new investments in bringing business applications into Work IQ and demonstrated how Copilot and agents could combine workplace information with business records to identify and address blockers in a retail-store rollout.

The Human Side of AI Adoption

Then Robinson moderated a discussion on human change management with Rob Dendtler, Technical Support Lead, Customer Service & Support at Microsoft; Jennifer Papillion, Chief Product Officer at Prime Health Services; and Chris Warlick, Head of Engineering, South at Check Point Software, offering advice on how to best utilize the information. Dendtler spoke about an “aha moment” he had when Robinson told him to stop focusing on getting answers from AI and to ask it for the outcomes he wanted. He also said it helped him to think of AI as “enthusiastic interns.”

Papillion described a similar shift during an AI Spark event at Prime Health Services. “It wasn’t that you needed this product or this tool. It was what are we trying to solve for?” she said. Since then, her team has used AI to develop more thorough product specifications from discovery calls, transcripts, emails, and documents, helping surface questions and assumptions earlier in the development process.

Final Thoughts

The growing range of AI tools can be overwhelming, but the session offered a practical starting point: identify what you want to accomplish, then explore how the technology can help. From building apps to improving business processes, the demonstrations showed that AI can be useful—and even fun. As Robinson reminded attendees, “The answer is in the what, not the how,” making a clear understanding of the desired outcome a starting point for putting these technologies to work.