This week I am spending every day at the TechCon365 conference in Atlanta, and will be recapping what I learn each day here. Today was technically a pre-con day where I attended an all-day workshop; the main conference starts on Wednesday. I am grateful that I have the opportunity to go to these extra days this year.
Copilot, Copilot, and More Copilot
The workshop I attended all day today was focused on all the ways you can use Microsoft’s Copilots in the Power Platform applications. Besides learning methods of working with Copilot in that suite of tools, I generally learned about the suite of tools itself. I have only personally worked with Power Automate in the past, and the workshop covered Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Automate Desktop, and Power Pages, so I saw a lot of new applications today.
As you are probably aware, Microsoft has shoved Copilots in your face from every direction in their fleet of technologies, and the Power Platform is no exception. Microsoft wants us to believe that the Copilot in every application will someday soon make it so that manually coding simple tools and applications will be a thing of the past, but the workshop today with live demos argues otherwise.
While we did see good examples of how Copilot can help you quickly perform simple and repetitive tasks, we also saw a lot of negative examples of how the tool falls short of replacing your brain, which is good news for developers everywhere.
Room for Growth
The best part of today’s workshop is that the speaker gave us a realistic look at what these tools can do instead of hiding the shortfalls of the Copilot tools behind perfect prompts. In my experience, a lot of seminars showing new technology will have scripts for their demos which make the tools look flawless, despite the tools being less than helpful when a normal person uses them in normal contexts.
Today demonstrated that Copilot doesn’t quite fully understand natural language when it comes to receiving technical directions, and when it does understand, it doesn’t always have the power to execute what has been requested. Copilot seems to be good at making simple changes like setting the background colors of different widgets on a Power App screen or Power Pages website. It isn’t as good at understanding and executing detailed changes to flows in Power Automate. And then if you want to use the Plan Designer in Power Apps to create an entire application and agent environment with a few keystrokes as promised, you will be a bit disappointed when you still need to manually click “Create” for all the new planned resources. Maybe one day the Copilot AI will do all the work of developing for you, but that day has not yet arrived.
Summary
Today I learned much more than I expected from the first workshop of the conference, and I loved it. The speaker was engaging enough to make the 8 hour day go by relatively quickly, and I saw so many new possibilities of using the Power Platform tools. My main takeaway from the class is that AI will not be taking our tech jobs anytime soon since they can’t even do work that I consider fairly simple. If they can’t do Power Apps well, they certainly won’t be doing complicated ETLs anytime soon. But to hedge my bets for the future, I will still be making an effort to learn how to prompt my way through new development when I can.
