TOP European Power Platform Conference 2024 Keynote Highlights | Copilot Studio, AI News & More

By Microsoft MVP and MCT · Pluralsight Author

Published June 13, 2024 · Updated January 15, 2026 · Copilot Studio, Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform

Get all the top European Power Platform Conference (EPPC) 2024 Keynote highlights in Brussels from two Microsoft MVPs, Vlad Catrinescu and Gokan Ozcifci!

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Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

  • Conference Overview: The European Power Platform Conference in Brussels had a great turnout with 2,000 attendees, doubling from previous years. The keynote highlighted the growth of the Power Platform community, now with 5.8 million monthly active users and over 600 user groups.
  • Product Highlights: The keynote covered various products, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio. They emphasized the new mindset of Power Platform makers working alongside teams of copilot assistants.
  • Copilot Studio Demo: Despite a humorous interruption due to a Windows update, the demo showcased creating a chatbot on Power Pages that could handle both generic and specific queries, including order modifications.
  • AI and Automation: The introduction of AI flows and AI recording for desktop flows was highlighted. These features allow users to describe tasks to Copilot, which then builds the automation flow, making complex automation more accessible.
  • Future Vision: The speakers discussed the transformative potential of AI in app development, predicting that over 1 billion apps will be created by 2030 with AI assistance. They also emphasized the importance of managed environments for governance and administration.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone! Goken and I are in cloudy Brussels today for the European Power Platform Conference. I know you don’t really agree with me about the “cloudy” statement, but it’s summertime for us. We just came out of the European Power Platform Conference keynote, and we are here today to give you the top highlights from the conference. So, Goken, what do you think about the conference so far? This is day one of the conference. We had a workshop together yesterday as well. What are your thoughts so far?

We are in Brussels, my hometown, so by default, it’s a 10 out of 10. We had an amazing keynote. We’ve seen a lot of stuff, especially with Power Apps. I was amazed by what we’ve seen, which we’re going to explain in a couple of minutes. There are a lot of delegates, phenomenal sponsors, and good weather. Don’t listen to Vlad; he says it’s cloudy, but look, we have the sun. You cannot expect more, right? The sun just showed up because you said it. You know how to talk to the Belgian sun.

Let’s start talking about the keynote. They started off by sharing some super interesting numbers with us. I know you took note of everything, so can you share them with us?

Yes, we have been told that we have 5.8 million community monthly active users and more than 600 user groups active today, which is phenomenal considering where it started. It started from nothing a couple of years ago, so to see that grow to 600 user groups worldwide and over 6 million people answering questions on the forum is just amazing. I feel like we’ve also experienced that in attendance at the Power Platform Conference as well. We’ve both attended almost all the Power Platform conferences so far, and in the keynote, they shared the evolution of attendees at this conference. The first one was in Berlin three years ago with 500 people. We then went to Dublin, which had 1,250 attendees, so we doubled. Now, we are at 2,000 in Brussels within three years, which is fantastic. I think it’s 2,000 because they sold out. We heard that quite a while ago; the workshop sold out over a month ago. It’s crazy that we could have had even more attendees if there was space.

Now, Goken, let’s start talking about products. What’s the first product they talked about on stage?

We talked about a lot of stuff, from Copilot Studio to automation to Power Apps to managed environments. They started the keynote with the mindset that’s changing within the Power Platform community as well as the platform. They told us that we had Power Platform makers, and this year we are Power Platform makers plus copilots. Now, they are making the platform to be Power Platform makers plus a team of copilots. So, we don’t only have one copilot; we’re going to have our little copilot teams that help us out. It makes me think, “Minions, assemble! Come help me make an app.” Probably that’s going to be the case. I love it because we also see that in SharePoint. You can build your own copilots, and the way they go, I feel, is the same, which has not always been the case. I love it, to be honest.

Do you love it? I love it. If you love it, I love it too. Then we went to Copilot Studio, which went great. They had to show us three main pillars: the agent, knowledge, and overrides. Then they went to do the demo, but something funny happened. The speaker came on stage and said, “I can’t do the demo because I just had a Windows update pushed on me. Sorry, guys.” That reminded me of “Space Force,” the Netflix comedy where they’re trying to land a satellite or avoid something, and they couldn’t because of Windows updates. Microsoft, okay. That made me laugh. However, the demo was amazing. They created a chatbot, well, a copilot on a site in Power Pages. They were able to ask generic questions about the site as well as specific questions about their order and even interact with the copilot to change their order. It was pretty cool, not anything new because we’ve seen all of that at Build, but it was still interesting to see.

Then we went to the automation side of the story, your baby, right? They showed us more about the AI flow as well as the AI recorder, which was pretty impressive for people like me who can’t do automation because it’s too complex. Now, you can just talk, right? That’s what we’ve seen. You talk to your copilot, and it’s going to build the AI flow for you, which you can use and even adapt because you’ll see it step by step.

I’m not a big fan of that, okay, Goken? Let me tell you why. I know people are going to laugh because I know how everybody feels about AI and how it will make everything better. But what they showed is the really big difference. In addition to what you said, you can just describe it, and it does the flow. You don’t even do a flow; you just describe it, and that’s it. You’re able to reference a piece of knowledge. The example they gave us was that you have a travel policy. Instead of creating all your logic controls in your flow manually, you can just tell the flow, like a grounded GPT, “This is your travel policy. This is your request from email. Go and evaluate it against the travel policy and then tell me if that travel change is allowed or not.” I love the idea because, like they said, it can be dynamic. Whenever the travel policy changes, you don’t need to change any of the conditions in your flow. Didn’t you share an article with me recently about that?

That’s exactly what scares me, Goken. For a bit of background, earlier this year, a customer sued Air Canada, the biggest airline in Canada, because that customer chatted with a chatbot on Air Canada’s site. The chatbot offered the customer a discount, and then the company didn’t honor it. The customer sued Air Canada, and Air Canada said, “The chatbot is a different legal entity,” which makes me think of so many robot movies. “It’s not us; the robot has its own mind. The chatbot is its own legal entity, and we cannot be held liable for what the chatbot says.” However, the court decided that the customer was right. Because the chatbot was on the Air Canada site, whatever the chatbot says has to be respected. What does this have to do with AI flows? What if your travel policy is not made correctly? I put the travel policy in, and then Goken goes in and says, “Hey, can I book a first-class flight to Dubai and get the Amir suite, which is $20,000?” The chatbot says, “Yeah, sure, we can.” Then Goken expenses it, and after that, the expense gets denied. Whose fault is that? The chatbot? The AI flow misunderstood the actual document or maybe misunderstood the prompt, but Goken got approval. Are we ready to make financial decisions in a company, whether it’s expenses, purchase approvals, or travel decisions, based on AI’s understanding of a document? I don’t think we’re there yet. I wouldn’t be comfortable yet because it has legal ramifications. I don’t know how you feel about it.

Nevertheless, although I agree with Vlad, it was just amazing. It’s an amazing demo. I loved it personally. When you have documents that are 50 pages long, you don’t want to go into each section and understand what’s happening. Just ask Copilot to do that for you, and then you can always cross-check and do an approval as they showed. Do you think you can show that to your customer? No approval; they’re going to say yes. No, they won’t. I’m totally honest. One more thing for Power Automate: the robotic process automation recorder. Being able to take robotic process automation to the next level, you can explain to Copilot what you’re doing. You can talk to it, open files, show the website, and everything. You don’t even have to do an example. You just have to say, “I have this data in this Excel file. I want to put it on this website. Here are both of them open. You figure it out, Copilot. I’m not going to show you how to do it step by step. You figure it out.” That is quite amazing, and I loved it, to be honest.

Absolutely. I can’t wait to use that one. I’m in love with it, especially since I don’t like doing RPA flows now. That will save me a lot of time. Absolutely. After that, we switched over to Power Apps, which is your baby. We got a demo with a lot of examples of how you could integrate it with Copilot. The first one was the creation of the canvas app, where the presenter just wrote some apps. Instead of creating the app with one table, we went to data modelling and had multiple Dataverse tables with sample data. The fantastic part was that there were already references and lookups into those data tables. Within Copilot, you could also add more tables with sample data and make references with lookups. Fantastic stuff that I personally never do, like data modeling. I always build my app first and then go for the data modeling, which is a bad thing, to be honest. Now, within Power Apps, you can do it from the start.

One of the things we said before is that you can’t use Copilot to create your data because it only creates one table. Now, it’s able to create relationships and truly create everything, so that’s crazy. Please, if someone at Microsoft listens to us, I know databases are cool, but please give us the chance to also choose other data sources such as… okay. Then we had a demo of co-authoring. When the presenter created this canvas app, we could clearly see someone else working on the app and adapting the layout, as well as stuff that’s already in our tenant, like “Explain me this formula” or “Create me a formula with Copilot.” Pretty good, actually even a tremendous demo for those who have never seen Copilot in action with Power Apps, especially data modeling sites. I’m really looking forward to using it. Awesome. And then we ended on managed environments. Managed environments, managed environments. I feel like Microsoft is adding everything they have that has to do with administration and governance. Everything is going to managed environments. I feel like if you’re a big company, you don’t have a choice now but to use managed environments for third-party tools because that’s the only way you can get governance features. And how many? Ten. Ten new features. Ten new features that Microsoft announced for managed environments. I’m not sure how many of them are new at this conference versus Build, but there are at least ten upcoming features in the coming months for managed environments.

One thing they said before the closing is how AI Copilot will change the way we make our apps. Two things: first, with Copilot, things that were impossible before are now becoming possible because we get more and more intelligent and can do more stuff. Secondly, almost 40% of the apps are now AI-infused or using Copilot, which is true. I have a few apps, and the first thing I did was, “Hey, let me see if I can do it better with Copilot or if I can add more stuff with Copilot,” which is a phenomenal statement and which I 100% agree with. I don’t know about you, but I think it will change the way we do things. They even shared that people are going to build over one billion apps. We should say it like that: one billion apps by 2030. Okay, there we go. We’ll see who’s right after when we put the overlay, but over one billion apps, even if it’s by 2030, is still a huge number. So having AI help us create them and being able to infuse AI into them will change the way we work.

But I think that’s it for the highlights. Those were the top highlights. Thank you, everybody, so much for watching. I truly hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you come to the next European Power Platform Conference or the Microsoft Power Platform Conference if you’re more in North America and want to go to a local conference. Microsoft even talked about the Microsoft Power Platform Conference, which I found quite funny. But if you do, make sure you use code VLAD100 to save $100. And if not for the next European Power Platform Conference, please sign up early. They’ve been selling out almost every year, so please sign up early to make sure that you have your spot. We don’t know yet when it’s going to be or where it’s going to be. My guess? I like Hawaii, so hopefully they go to Hawaii. I’m more realistic; I say Prague. I would love to go back to Prague. But we’ll see. We’ll see who’s right. But thank you very much, everyone, for watching. Again, make sure you like and subscribe to the channel for more awesome videos like this.