Slide deck and videos - Building AI into Power Platform solutions

This is a quick post to publish some resources I created recently covering considerations for using AI in the Power Platform. They are from a talk I gave at ESPC 2020 (the European SharePoint, Microsoft 365 and Azure Conference).

For many people getting into building Power Apps and Power Automate solutions, the obvious first choice is the "AI Builder" capability which comes as part of the platform, but as I've discussed elsewhere there are certainly options beyond that - each with different costs and capabilities. 

Topics covered include:

• What you can expect to pay for AI
• Different implementation approaches, specifically:
• Power Apps AI Builder
• Use of Azure Cognitive Services from code
• Use of Azure Cognitive Services in a Flow (Power Automate)
• A real world scenario - building an Incident Reporting Power App which uses AI to alert a human when a serious incident is detected

One area of focus is how Microsoft 365 technologies can easily be strung together to create high value solutions with minimal effort. The slide below depicts how Power Apps, SharePoint, Power Automate, Azure Cognitive Services and Teams each play their part in my demo scenario:

We can expand on how each technology is used as follows:

The slide deck hopefully has a few more useful slides too - it can be browsed or downloaded below.

Slide deck - Building AI into Power Platform solutions:

Chris O'Brien - Building AI into Power Platform solutions from Chris O'Brien

Demo videos

Demo 1 - In this video we take a part-built app and integrate with Power Automate to take the photo captured from the user's phone and store it in Microsoft 365/SharePoint:

Demo 2 - In this video we add AI to the application by integrating image recognition from Azure Cognitive Services. We do this using Power Automate in Microsoft 365, with no code required: