TOP Highlights from 3 MPPC 2023 Keynotes

By Microsoft MVP and MCT · Pluralsight Author

Published October 5, 2023 · Updated January 15, 2026 · Microsoft 365, Power Platform

Couldn’t make it to the Microsoft Power Platform Conference 2023? You’re in luck! The 3 keynotes were full of notable announcements and news! Join me and Gokan as we recap, discuss the essential parts, and highlight additional information you don’t want to miss!

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Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

  • Keynote Highlights: The Microsoft Power Platform conference featured three keynotes, each focusing on different products and emphasizing the role of AI and Copilot in enhancing productivity.
  • Power Platform Keynote: Charles Lamanna discussed the growth of the Power Platform community, with over 5.2 million monthly active users and 480 user groups. He also highlighted the integration of AI in Power Apps, Power Pages, and Power Automate.
  • GitHub Keynote: Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, demonstrated the capabilities of GitHub Copilot by building a snake game live on stage, showcasing how AI can significantly speed up development processes.
  • Microsoft 365 Keynote: Summit Chohan from the Microsoft 365 team discussed the integration of Copilot within the Office suite, providing insights into user adoption and the upcoming general availability of M365 Copilot on November 1st.
  • Future of AI: The speakers emphasized the potential of AI to transform workflows and productivity, with a focus on Copilot assisting users rather than replacing them, and the anticipation of future advancements like autopilot features.

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

Video Transcript

Hello everyone! We are here at the Microsoft Power Platform conference. My name is Juan Capernesco, and I’m with my good friend Goken. How are you doing, Goken?

Bonjour everyone! I’m doing very well, Vlad. How about you?

I’m doing great, a bit tired. This is the end of the first day of the conference, and it was quite a packed day. Goken, what happened today?

We had three amazing keynotes, lightning sessions, sessions of 25 minutes, and a bunch of friends and connections we made. We exchanged ideas. If I had one word to describe the event, the first-ever event, it would be amazing.

Awesome! And there are over 6,000 attendees here at the event, not to mention over 500 speakers, sponsors, and more. But the topic of our video today is to talk about the highlights of the keynote. Goken, you did mention it. There are not only one but three keynotes that happened today, and they’re all on different products with different presenters. But if there was one theme that linked them all together, what was it, Goken?

Can I express myself in three words? Of course, AI or Copilot in Microsoft Works, but AI for everything else.

So, Goken, let’s talk about the first keynote. Who was the presenter of the first keynote?

I think Charles. I think everybody knows him. So, superhero, the first keynote was all about the Power Platform, and the main presenter was Charles Lamanna, CVP at Microsoft and one of the people in charge of the Power Platform ever since it started. I think before it even had the name of the Power Platform, Charles was there on the team. The way that the keynote started was really a very interesting video, a very inspiring video on the fact that the artificial intelligence revolution is today. It’s not something that we’re just starting to talk about, something that will affect people in five to ten years. It’s something that is happening today. The most innovative companies are using it today, and if you’re not looking into it, you’re falling behind as an organization.

That’s what they aimed to say in their keynotes. They always talk about next-gen AI. It’s not something brand new. As Vlad mentioned, people are already using it, and now Microsoft is working on the next-generation AI toolset with all of those new announcements. So, after the video, Goken, what’s the first thing that Charles covered?

Well, he said that he was a numbers man, and then he said that he wanted to share some insights about numbers, about the usage, about how many user groups we had, and how many more connected users we had, and all those numbers we never received before, which was phenomenal for understanding how the adoption was going very well with the Power Platform. Do you have some numbers?

I do, but first, you mentioned a really important word: the community. The community was one of the first topics that was covered. I think both of you come from the SharePoint community, the best community in tech, and it’s great to see that the Power Platform is starting to have its own community and getting close, not yet there, but growing to where the SharePoint and Microsoft 365 communities are. One of the first things that Charles did was to thank the community, thank all the people doing the monthly calls, answer the forums, and put the numbers because, as you said, Charles is a numbers man. There are now over 5.2 million monthly active users on the Power Platform community, and there are over 480 user groups. So, if there was a user group meeting every day, there would still be days when we would have two of them at the same time. That’s an important reminder for all of you. Make sure to go check the Power Platform community, check all the user groups out there, and check if there is one in your area that you can join because it’s amazing to be able to connect with like-minded people year-round in your location.

Talking about numbers, to keep talking about them, you mentioned numbers around the adoption of the Power Platform. The first number we got, a really small one, was 30 million monthly active users for the Power Platform. Goken, were we about there last year at the Power Platform conference?

If I remember correctly, one year ago, it was 20 million.

Yes, so that’s quite a huge growth, 10 million monthly active users in just one year. Another really interesting number, which again, I was hoping would be bigger just because of our competition, but Power Automate is at 10 million monthly active users. Again, a really huge number, but I don’t know why, maybe because I love Power Automate, I thought if anybody was using the Power Platform, they would be using Power Automate. But I guess there’s still work I have to do with evangelizing and teaching people on Power Automate so that next year, the numbers are closer together.

Charles also mentioned that when they released Microsoft Flow like it was even called Microsoft Flow, they had 10,000 activities per month. So, still, it’s a phenomenal number to see in a couple of years from 10,000 going up to millions. It’s impressive to see.

Impressive. We gotta keep with the numbers theme. So, the keynote plan was pretty easy, right? Five announcements, four around AI, which all had four live demos, and one around a topic that’s very close to my heart, which is skilling. But before we talk about the demos, something I want to really mention is that we had a clear vision of Microsoft’s AI goal, which is not the way you call it autopilot where AI takes over, but it’s really people working side by side with AI. The goal of it is right now, of course, the Power Platform is fairly easy, right? Even me and you, when we did SharePoint, we were setting up BI tools for other people to do reports, but we were never really able to go into reporting services and things like that to create reports. That was experts doing it in the field. But now, even me and you, who have no formal training in data analysis, can go in and create awesome Power BI reports. So, it’s a lot easier than it was before, but how can we use AI to really enable anyone who can use PowerPoint or Word to be able to create those? This is where Copilot fits in. How do we take people from any industry with no technical knowledge and enable them to create awesome flows and reports? Also, I think one of the highlights was the different careers in the audience. It was not only technical. We had marketing people, HR people, people that used to be videographers that wanted to switch to becoming IT professionals, so all kinds of audiences. So cool.

But okay, let’s start talking about the demos and the announcements. The first one, is Goken.

Well, it has to do with Power Apps, and Power Apps is a bit of your favourite child of the gang, so I’ll let you cover it.

Yeah, we start with Power Apps, and we’ve seen three demos. I’m going to talk about the first two. They always use a big client, and they showed us that for Power Apps, they’ve been using Toyota Total Cars. With Copilot, you’ll get the new ability to upload Excel spreadsheets within your Power App, and then that will create a Dataverse table for you, and all the data will be transformed from your Excel spreadsheet to the database table. Again, a lot of people are using Excel mainly for storing data as a database, which is wrong. We all know SharePoint List is the best database out there. There you go. That will help bring a lot of those contents into your database, which is way better than only a software sheet somewhere on your local drive.

Then we move to the second demo, which was the ability to embed the Copilot control into your app. That means that any end user would be interacting with data without even going outside the app. So, you will get the new control Copilot where you can talk to your app and interact with your data backstage. That, for me, was crazy awesome because as much as we can plan an app, we can talk to users, we can plan everything, there’s always something that we didn’t think about. Just by having that component in there for every other scenario where a user can use natural language, I mean, what was the setup? It was only two steps to set it up, right?

Less than three steps, I guess. That was just adding your control, configuring it by adding websites because they also added the external websites where they can actually go outside and check for information and then bring that data into your app. So, that’s something that we could use every day where you can actually go and search for data internally as well as externally. That was really mind-blowing as a demo.

There’s a third part to the demo, and that’s your second baby.

There we go, Power Virtual Agents. All this experience that we just talked about, being able to customize how the Copilot component works in the app, we can customize it with Power Virtual Agents. It can be connected not only to the data in the app, but we could also say, “Hey, if there’s stuff that’s not there, go check this website, go connect to other topics.” Having that is really awesome. So, that was the demo. Goken, what was the announcement related to that demo?

Yes, so at the end of the demo, they clearly said public preview for Power Apps Copilot, and that was like a huge applause that we received. Finally, we can test all of those phenomenal new announcements in our tenants. It might take a few days, maybe even a few weeks until you see it, but it’s now in public preview.