Microsoft Power Automate: An Introduction
Another big news for RPA community;
Microsoft rebranded flow as Power Automate with interesting Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) features in it, integrated the Power Platform more closely with Microsoft Teams, and debuted new prebuilt models for AI Builder. At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft officials announced their low-code/no-code Power Platform. Power Automate lets you use more AI features, analytics, and data visualization. Microsoft’s pitch for the Power Platform is that anyone at your company can be a developer.
Microsoft offers an example of an insurance claims processing company with clients filling out digital and paper forms and communicating through email. The claim is processed on the cloud while staff also maintain paper records and legacy applications. Power Automate could theoretically automate the whole thing: digitized data from scanned paper forms processed with AI, and legacy systems processed with RPA.
Power Automate to help automate repetitive, time-consuming and complex business processes. A public preview of the RPA capability, which is called UI Flows, is available now. (https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/)
Microsoft Power Automate comes with thousands of prebuilt templates for common business processes to automate tasks easily and quickly such as email, Office 365, notifications, RSS, blogs, excel, word or more interesting social media templates. Prebuilt templates can be downloaded from here. (https://flow.microsoft.com/template)
Let’s see some of the interesting facts about Power Automate-
1. Microsoft Flow launched out of preview in October 2016. It took 3 years to add RPA features in it.
2. Creating a UI flow is a point-and-click experience, though it does require some coding experience.
3. You can do both API-based automation and UI-based automation.
4. Power Automate has prebuilt connectors for more than 275 apps and services that do support API automation.
5. Power Automate enables us to automate windows based applications using recorders, orchestrate tasks across APIs, SAS providers, and databases.
6. Power virtual agents and AI builders let you create a chatbot that can be integrated with Teams, facebook messenger, and in your own application.
7. Power Automate’s AI models provide Keyphrase extraction, Language detection, Text recognition, Sentiment analysis, etc.
8. AI builder let Think form processing, object detection, and text and binary classification.
9. It has the Microsoft bot framework and cognitive technology integrated with it to develop chatbots seamlessly.
10. Thousands of pre-built templates to automate common business processes immediately.
This AI-Powered RPA platform may be a game-changer because of its end-to-end automation features. It’s AI models, integration with 275 Apps and API based automation makes it more powerful, easy to code and user-friendly.
Information source: Microsft
