Overview
Microsoft Power Platform lets you build working apps, automate real processes, and stand up AI assistants with little or no traditional code. That power is easy to misuse, though: it is just as easy to build a tangle of apps and flows nobody can maintain. This course teaches you to build things that work and last.
This is a hands-on, practitioner course. It follows the order the platform actually rewards. We start with the landscape, the handful of building blocks and where AI fits, so you can choose the right tool for a problem instead of forcing everything into one. Then we lay the foundation everyone skips, the data, because apps and flows are only as good as the data beneath them. From there we build up one layer at a time: a working app, an automated flow, then AI added on top, and finally a custom Copilot agent, closing with how to share and govern what you have built. Rather than survey every connector and feature, we build one real solution end to end, and we treat governance and guardrails as part of building, not paperwork afterward.
Who Should Attend
- Business analysts and citizen developers who want to build without heavy coding
- IT professionals supporting or governing Power Platform in their organization
- Team leads who want to automate processes and add AI to everyday work
Prerequisites
- Comfortable with everyday business tools such as Excel and Outlook
- No traditional coding experience required
- Access to a Power Platform environment for the hands-on labs
What You'll Be Able to Do
- Choose the right Power Platform building block for a given problem instead of forcing one tool
- Model data in Dataverse and connect it to an existing system
- Build a working Power Apps app over your own data
- Automate a routine business process with a Power Automate flow
- Add an AI capability to an app or flow with AI Builder and Copilot
- Build a Copilot Studio agent grounded in your data, and publish it to a test audience responsibly
Course Outline
Day one: foundations and building blocks
- The Power Platform Landscape
- The building blocks: Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, and Dataverse
- Where AI fits: AI Builder and Copilot across the platform
- Choosing the right tool for a given problem
- Lab: tour a working solution and identify its parts
- Data First: Dataverse and Connectors
- Why apps and flows start with the data
- Modeling data in Dataverse and connecting to existing systems
- Lab: set up a small data model and connect a data source
- Building an App with Power Apps
- Canvas and model-driven apps, and when to use each
- Screens, forms, and simple logic without code
- Lab: build a working app over your data
Day two: automation, AI, and going live
- Automating Work with Power Automate
- Triggers, actions, and how a flow fits together
- Connecting steps across different systems
- Lab: automate a routine process with a flow
- Adding AI: AI Builder and Copilot
- Prebuilt AI for documents, text, and predictions with AI Builder
- Copilot features inside apps and flows
- Lab: add an AI capability to your app or flow
- Custom Agents with Copilot Studio, and Going Live Responsibly
- Building a Copilot Studio agent grounded in your data
- Sharing, environments, and the basics of governance
- Guardrails: what citizen-built AI apps should and should not do
- Lab: build a simple Copilot Studio agent and publish it to a test audience
Extended Version
The three-day version keeps the same gradient and adds room to build for real use:
- Deeper Dataverse modeling and security roles
- Application lifecycle management: solutions, environments, and deployment
- More of Copilot Studio: topics, actions, and knowledge sources
- A capstone that builds an app, a flow, and an agent for a realistic business scenario