With all the buzz around Microsoft Build this week, it’s hard to stay grounded in the reality when the possibilities seem endless. CoPilot is an incredible assistance tool for the Power Platform, but with great Power comes great responsibility!
In this blog we will explore how CoPilot can be leveraged to accelerate maker enablement and what IT can do to ensure our makers are learning in a safe environment.
First, let’s look at Maker Enablement with CoPilot. We can easily use CoPilot to help us create apps, flows, chatbots and even websites. With CoPilot for Power Apps, we can describe an app and have AI create the tables and even the basics of the app for us:
In just a few moments, CoPilot will suggest a table schema for us and we can ask it to make changes:
Once I click on Create App, the tables will be created for me in Dataverse:
My initial thoughts were “Great, this is amazing – I can create entire table schemas in over half the time it would normally take me”. Then, my Governance brain kicked in and I immediately started to realise how much of a headache this could be if not managed properly.
CoPilot is an amazing tool that will accelerate Maker Enablement and can assist with basic queries, but if not managed correctly, it will cause entity sprawl. I noticed that CoPilot does not check for existing entities when it makes a suggestion. At time of writing, it also cannot create relationships between entities. I have been testing CoPilot I my own environment and it has already created duplicate entities:
I’m just one person using this environment, but if we have multiple makers in here making multiple things, I can imagine the confusion and clutter this will cause. I believe there is a way to create a happy balance where CoPilot can be useful and IT Admins don’t have to worry about clutter and confusion.
Only enable CoPilot on your Maker Playground environments.
To turn CoPilot on or off for an environment, go to the Power Platform Admin Center and select the environment you wish to modify. Here you can update the settings for CoPilot:
I recommend keeping CoPilot on for your Maker Playground Environments, especially if you are in the early days of adoption. It will help your makers train and build solutions while also providing a way for them to get support if they get stuck.
Run audits on your data where CoPilot has been turned on
This one is a little tricky – I forsee people trying out CoPilot and creating a lot of redundant apps and entities. The Center of Excellence starter kit has some built in tools to help you identify these apps. I recommend reviewing the inactivity flow and using this as a base to start from. At the time of writing, I could not find an easy way to identify when an entity was created by CoPilot. It does use the default publisher when creating tables, so that could be a way to identify them. Otherwise, I hope to see some functionality in the future that will help us prevent sprawl.
Data Policies are more important than ever.
CoPilot is going to unveil functionality to makers much faster than if they had to discover it for themselves. This means that a significant amount of thought needs to go into your Data Policies, now. As an example, with CoPilot for Power Automate, I can ask it to create a flow for me based on a sentence:
The first question I’m going to get here is “why would anyone do this?”. Stranger things have happened. If a maker were to enable this flow after some basic configuration, depending on where the flow was created, you could see production data being tweeted out, which we do not want!
The answer to this terrifying dilemma is to implement Data Policies! This ensures that makers are creating automations in line with your organisation’s policies. You can learn more about Data Policies here.
Hopefully this has given you some food for thought around Governance and CoPilot. It’s an incredible tool that can be used for good, if the correct guardrails are put in place. What are your thoughts on CoPilot so far? Do you have any Governance tips to share? I’d love to hear them!
Mx Em D'Arcy 