Microsoft to add Blockchain to PowerApps and Microsoft Flow

In a recent blog posted on Microsoft website, James Philips, Corporate Vice President business Applications group announced AI and Blockchain enhancements to Power BI, PowerApps portals and Microsoft Flow.  The announcement was made at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS) in Atlanta. MBAS. AI Builder, the no-code AI capability will be on the Power Platform supporting PowerApps and Flow.

AI Builder enables everyone to leverage AI and machine learning to make their apps and automations more intelligent. It takes common AI scenarios and provides point-and-click solutions for app makers to solve everyday tasks like forms processing, object detection, and text and binary classification. PowerApps already enables employees to easily create applications for your business. AI Builder now provides a way for app makers—professional and citizen developers alike—to add AI capabilities to those apps. 

According to Philips, the potential uses for AI Builder span industries and scenarios for banking, hospitality, manufacturing, and more. For example, an organization may want to improve customer service so they can use AI to analyze customer feedback responses, map them into categories, and generate an AI model to classify and respond to customer feedback as it’s received. “With AI Builder, we were able to easily build an AI model to help automatically identify and track our products using the object detection model. For our field worker, it’s now as simple as taking a photo and letting AI builder do the rest.” – Eric McKinney, Enterprise Business Systems Manager at G&J Pepsi. 

In addition Microsoft will be leveraging Blockchain in PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Blockchain can bring trust and transparency to business processes that span multiple business partners. Using blockchain is easier than ever with the ability to write low-code applications using the Power Platform and Azure Blockchain Service.

Applications built on blockchain using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow can easily create attestable workflows that bring together data from every point in the business process across the value chain. For mobile clients, PowerApps enables developers to effortlessly capture all of the information from the phone’s sensors (barcodes, photos, GPS coordinates, etc.) and send it to a smart contract on a blockchain. Using connectors for popular enterprise blockchains in Microsoft Flow, you can easily integrate blockchain with popular SaaS, legacy enterprise systems, web and messaging services, and different types of data technologies.