Last week, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Microsoft Power Platform Community Conference (PPCC) in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is my 4th straight year attending (I've been there since the beginning) and it's pretty amazing to see how it's grown into the largest maker conference in the world.
This time around, there were around 7,400 attendees crosscutting every corner of the Power Platform ecosystem, from professional developers and solution architects to business analysts, automation specialists, and everyday makers who’ve turned curiosity into capability. It’s one of the few conferences where you can see a software engineer, a finance manager, and a field technician swapping app ideas over coffee, all speaking a shared language of innovation.
As Power Platform approaches its 10th anniversary, it’s pretty remarkable to reflect back on how far it’s come. What began as a few low-code tools has matured into a unified platform for building apps, automating processes, and unlocking insights from data. With more than 56 million active users and one of the most passionate communities in tech, its growth shows no signs of slowing down.
Still, this year’s conference felt like more than just another milestone — it felt like an inflection point. Indeed, much of Charles Lamanna's keynote explored the very nature of what low code is and how it must evolve in the age of AI. The times they are a-changin' and it’s clear that the foundation being laid today will shape the future of Power Platform for years to come. In the sections that follow, I’ll highlight some of the announcements and moments that stood out most from this year’s event.
Keynote Review: Power Platform is Reborn
Charles Lamanna, President, Business & Industry Copilot at Microsoft, really set the tone for the entire conference at the opening keynote when he popped up the slide shown in Figure 1 below. While certainly controversial, I found this bold proclamation to be extremely refreshing as it directly addressed a very large elephant in the room within the low-code space: does the rise of AI-powered development tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code make low-code development obsolete?
Figure 1: The Elephant in the Room with Low-Code Development
Throughout the remainder of the keynote, Charles and others presented a glimpse of a world where these technologies come together in new and exciting ways. What emerged was a clear message that the Power Platform isn’t standing still. Instead, it’s expanding and evolving to meet the diverse needs of business analysts, citizen makers, and professional developers alike. Each of these groups plays a critical role in the enterprise innovation cycle, and Microsoft is working to make sure the platform continues to meet them where they are.
With the infusion of AI, the Power Platform is becoming so much more than a set of low-code development tools — it’s turning into a creative partner. Business users can describe what they want to build in natural language, while pro developers can move faster by offloading boilerplate tasks and focusing on the complex logic that truly differentiates their solutions. AI is being woven throughout the experience, enriching developer workflows, automating tedious setup steps, and helping everyone take advantage of the core foundations that make the Power Platform so powerful: things like Dataverse, connectors, platform governance, and security.
Charles closed the keynote by declaring that the Power Platform is being reborn before our very eyes. In my mind, this is just the next evolution within the broader story of software engineering where smart developers are continually searching for and discovering new and more powerful abstractions to build on top of. Whether we're working visual drag-and-drop style tools or prompting an agent with natural language, the underlying goal remains the same: to rapidly build solutions that have a transformative impact on the business. In other words, the rise of AI doesn't spell the end of low-code development — it’s just the next chapter in its evolution.
The Future of Power Apps is...Beautiful?
One area of the Power Platform that has received a huge AI-powered glow up is Power Apps. While Power Apps have unlocked unprecedented velocity when it comes to the development of web and mobile apps, the knock on them has been that they're kind of...plain. That's not to say you can't spruce them up with some custom CSS or PCF controls, but it hasn't been easy.
Now, with the rise of generative pages and code apps, makers have access to AI-powered tools to create delightful user experiences built on top of popular web development frameworks such as React and Vue. Although it's early days, there were plenty of demos at the conference showing how customers like State Farm and Lumen are building beautiful app experiences that match the look-and-feel of commercial grade SaaS solutions, etc.
Figure 2: Lumen's Outage Center App Reimagined with Generative Pages
Here at Bowdark, we had one of our React developers pilot the developer experience and he was blown away by how easy it was to bootstrap his app while seamlessly tying into Entra ID for authentication and Dataverse for data and API management. It's a highly productive framework which blends the best parts of Power Platform with best-in-class web design and AI-powered code generation.
While some of these tools are naturally geared towards professional developer types, Microsoft is doing its best to bring these new app development experiences to citizen makers, too. To this end, Microsoft introduced its new App Builder agent for makers who want to get in on the action. See Figure 3 below to get a glimpse of what this agent-powered development experience looks like.
Figure 3: Working with the new App Builder Agent
Automation Nirvana with Copilot Studio, Agents, & Power Automate
Over the course of the past 12 months or so, we've seen the lines between workflow development in Power Automate and agent development in Copilot Studio continue to blur. These concepts were very much on display during the keynotes as several demos highlighted the ways that Microsoft is streamlining these development experiences to simplify automation development.
While there are many moving parts at work in modern agents, these harmonized development experiences are making it easier for makers of all ability levels to weave together agent and/or workflow experiences on top of a growing set of foundational building blocks including:
Standard and custom connectors to a variety of cloud and on-premises business systems
Computer-Using Agents (CUA)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
Data agents from Microsoft Fabric
AI models built using AI Builder, Azure AI Foundry, or elsewhere
Knowledge sources from SharePoint repositories, databases, business systems like SAP, and so forth
LLMs and reasoning models including GPT models from OpenAI, Claude, and others
Reusable workflows developed using Power Automate
Whether we're building traditional workflows or autonomous agents, the development experience is largely the same and strongly supported with AI prompts to weave all these disparate components together into a cohesive process flow.
On a semi-related note, Microsoft announced the release of its new Workflows agent. As you can see in Figure 4 below, this agent makes workflow development even more approachable to citizen maker or analyst types that have a strong understanding of a business process, but probably don't spend much time building MCP servers in their free time.
Figure 4: Working with the new Workflows Agent
From an adoption/success perspective, this increased level of cohesion is key since Microsoft has found that:
Adoption rates for automation solutions increase by 60-80% when embedded in existing app/process flows.
Users get increasingly frustrated with standalone automation solutions that may require special processing before/after they're completed. This disconnect has been shown to lead to a 75% drop-off in usage over time.
Figure 5: Lessons Learned from Adoption Rates of Automation Solutions in the Field
Closing Thoughts
Walking away from this year’s conference, I couldn’t help but feel that we’re entering a new chapter—not just for Power Platform, but for software development as a whole. AI isn’t replacing low-code; it’s redefining what’s possible. The lines between professional developers, business analysts, and citizen makers continue to blur, and that’s a good thing. Each brings unique strengths to the table, and when those strengths converge on a shared platform, innovation happens faster and with greater impact.
The message from Microsoft was clear: the future of building lies in collaboration between humans and AI, and across roles and disciplines. Whether you’re prompting an agent, writing code, or designing an app with a drag-and-drop canvas, the goal is the same: to build solutions that matter.
