New ways to add intelligence to your Power Apps

Companies like yours are using AI Builder to automate tasks, increase productivity, and gain insights about their business. At Ignite we unveiled new features for AI Builder, which dramatically increase the ways you can use AI in Power Apps, making it easier than ever to add more kinds of intelligence to your business solutions.

1. Use AI in your apps with Power Fx (Preview). Using Power Fx, makers can now use any AI model on any control in canvas apps.
2. Bring Your own AI model (GA). Companies can leverage existing investments in data science. Any AI model, built with any language, framework, or tooling, can now be used in Power Platform via AI Builder.
3. Image classification with Lobe (Preview). Domain experts can train image classification models on their computers with Lobe and upload those models to AI Builder to be used in Power Platform.
4. AI Builder starter capacity is now included in select Power Apps and Power Automate license plans.

Let’s walk through these in more detail.

Use AI in your apps with Power Fx

Until now, the only way you could use AI in your canvas app was through our five AI Builder controls. This worked, but the controls were limited in the ways you could customize them, and only supported five of our sixteen AI model types.

Now we are making it easier than ever to add intelligence to your Power Apps directly through Power Fx. This gives you access to all the pre-trained and custom AI models, and can be used with any control within your app.

Let me show how you can use AI with Power Fx with an example app I made to report car damage claims with a picture and description.

First, add the AI model you’d like to use as a data source to your app. For this example, I’m adding the model ‘Car Damage Classifier’ that I trained with Lobe.

Figure 1:  Add an AI model as a data source

Once the AI model has been added as a data source to your app, select any control and call the AI model through Power Fx to make a prediction. In this example, I’ve uploaded a car image for the AI model to classify the type of damage.

'Model Name'.Predict(Image).Prediction

Figure 2: Use AI through Power Fx 

Once you’ve set up your model and Power Fx you can test it out. In my example app, I can add an image to my app and it will predict what type of car damage the image contains.

Figure 3: See real-time predictions in canvas apps

Using AI models through Power Fx will be available in preview in all regions later this month. Learn more here.

Bring your own AI model

When we first built AI Builder, we designed it to empower citizen developers to leverage AI without needing data science or machine learning experience. But over time, and after talking with customers, we’ve learned that companies who have data scientists or machine learning engineers could not easily enable citizen developers to leverage their custom AI models in the Power Platform.

Now, anyone can bring their own custom AI models into AI Builder – enabling you to build solutions around your company’s investments in AI. You can build custom models using any developer tool chain and deploy your models to any cloud service, like Azure. All you need to do is register your model with AI Builder, and it can be used alongside any other pre-trained or custom models.

Figure 4: You can now bring your own model to AI Builder

We’re excited to see what business solutions you will build around your own AI models. Bring your own model is now generally available. Learn more here. 

NOTE: Generally available products and services are considered production ready.  By moving out of preview, these capabilities will become premium. You will need an AI Builder license or an active trial to continue using them. 

Image classification with Lobe

There is an ever-growing list of tools to build custom machine learning models. We strive to make these tools easier to use with AI Builder – starting with Lobe.

Lobe is an easy-to-use app from Microsoft that helps you build image classification models. It is free to use and trains models on your own computer. All you need to do is add and label images and Lobe will automatically train a custom machine learning model for you. And now you can easily upload your model from Lobe directly to AI Builder to use in Power Apps and Power Automate.

Figure 5: Use Lobe to train models and upload to AI Builder

Using Lobe with Power Platform will be available in preview in select regions starting next week.

AI Builder starter capacity

We want to make it easy for everyone to get started with AI Builder, a premium service in the Power Platform. Today, you can try out all the AI Builder capabilities with a free trial, but adding AI to apps and flows requires purchasing AI Builder credits.

To help make it easier to get started, we have added 250 credits for Power Apps per App license and 500 credits for Power Apps User license. These credits are visible in the Power Platform Admin Center.

Today, it must be assigned to an environment before it can be used. In December, this process will become totally seamless. All non-assigned credits will be consumable on any environment without any admin action required.

This means you can more easily start adding intelligence to your solutions today.

Learn more and share your feedback

We can’t wait to see how you add intelligence to your business solutions. Over time, we will share more blog posts about these new features and capabilities for AI Builder. Make sure to watch our Ignite session for AI Builder and read about more updates for AI Builder for Power Automate here.

We are always working to improve AI Builder to meet your needs. Please  share your feedback with us in the AI Builder forum or email us directly at aihelpen@microsoft.com.