Built by makers: Five years of Power Platform Community Conference

Something happens when you put thousands of makers in one place.

You could hear it in the questions asked in sessions. You could see it when engineers pulled up a chair next to customers to work through a problem. You could see it in the people who arrived at the fifth annual Power Platform Community Conference (PPCC) with an idea and left with something that worked.

More than 9,000 people filled the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for five days of learning, building, and connecting. The scale of the conference has changed since 2022, but what makes the community special has not.

Register for Maker Con 2027 in Chicago

A first-time maker can sit next to a Microsoft MVP. Customers can work directly with the engineers building the products they use. People come ready to share what they know and help one another build. That spirit matters because technology can make the most impact when people use it to solve problems together.

Start with the process

Every innovation we celebrated this week started with a maker. A maker is someone who understands a problem, sees what could be better and decides to do something about it. Today, that includes IT pros, developers, longtime Microsoft Power Platform builders, and people building with AI for the first time.

At Asurion, an IT team embedded a Microsoft Copilot Studio agent into its invoice capture process and touchless processing rose from under 20% to more than 70%.

NHS Scotland built a solution on Power Platform that helped clinicians move 25% to 35% of patients out of the multidisciplinary meeting process and into more routine care pathways. That gives doctors more time for complex cases.

The NFL built an AI-powered Game Ops Dashboard with Copilot Studio and Power Platform that has helped save its team 8 to 12 hours a week in data entry and reporting.

These teams aren’t outliers. More than two million makers are active every month, creating and running more than four million apps. And that momentum continues to grow; daily active users of Microsoft Power Apps increased 20% over the past year, while AI usage in Power Apps more than doubled. Makers are automating more work behind the scenes too, with flow runs growing 20%. And in Copilot Studio, where makers can now build apps alongside their agents, app usage more than tripled.

Those growth numbers point to something broader. Makers are using their talent and these capabilities to rebuild processes that matter to an organization. By connecting apps, automation, and agents, makers are changing how work is getting done.

Innovation on the main stage

Before PPCC, my colleague Ryan Cunningham challenged every attendee to bring one process that matters.

When Ryan and Charles Lamanna opened the conference, their message was clear: there’s never been a better time to be a maker. AI is expanding who can build and what they can build. Microsoft Copilot is changing how work gets done, and every new way of working needs makers to shape it.

It begins with the work in front of them. A maker can take a broken process, describe the outcome they want and bring together apps, automation and agents to get there.

In the end, it’s about improving the entire process. What starts with solving one pain point can change how an entire team or organization gets work done.

I saw that all week on the show floor. People were following through on Ryan’s challenge, working with peers, experts and Microsoft engineers to figure out what to build next.

From an idea to a working business process

PPCC gave makers the opportunity to get hands-on with capabilities across Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Power Platform. Just as important, it gave them access to the people building those capabilities.

Makers don’t have to start over. We continue to invest in the core of Power Platform, from modern Power Apps controls to the Microsoft Power Automate improvements and quality-of-life features this community asked for. Through Work IQ, the apps, flows, and sites customers have already built become available to agents in Copilot, so the work makers have done becomes part of what comes next.

That connected approach also extends to Dynamics 365. Many customers are using Dynamics 365 alongside Copilot Studio and Cowork to bring business data, agents, apps, and workflows together around the processes their teams rely on every day.

Across these experiences, three themes stood out in how makers can turn ideas into complete, connected business processes:

1. Build the experience around the process

The people closest to the work can create apps in Copilot Cowork and in Copilot Studio, where apps are now in public preview. Makers can describe what they need, like an employee onboarding app, in natural language and refine a working app alongside the agents and workflows supporting the process. This gives teams a more direct path from understanding the problem to testing a solution.

In Power Apps, the canvas authoring agent plugin and app-builder skill for model-driven apps help makers move from an idea to a working experience using natural language. And there are no cliffs: when a solution becomes business-critical, a developer can take it over in the tools they already use, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot and the Copilot CLI, without rebuilding it.

2. Keep the work moving

Many business processes aren’t simple. They don’t begin or end in a single interaction. Think about managing a team budget. It plays out over weeks of requests, check-ins and approvals, and every new conversation can mean re-explaining the same context.

Agent accounts and business process memory in Copilot Studio let teams delegate shared processes like this to agents that can act as themselves in Microsoft 365, run on triggers and remember past interactions, with people in control of what’s remembered. They also run on the new Microsoft Copilot harness, built for more complex, longer-running work.

Instead of starting from scratch, the work keeps moving. People step in for the decisions and approvals that matter.

3. Scale with control

As apps and agents become part of business processes, teams need to understand how they behave, how they’re governed and what they cost.

Expanded evaluations, the Review panel and hooks in Copilot Studio give makers more visibility and control as they test and govern agents.

Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime lets organizations build anywhere, host on Microsoft and govern with enterprise controls, whether people are building in Cowork, Code or Copilot Studio.

With Microsoft Agent 365, admins can see every app and agent across their organization, set action-level connector policies and apply spending controls by user and by asset.

Together, these capabilities help teams move from building an isolated app or agent to running a complete process with the governance and visibility to support it.

This broader approach is what helps turn advances in AI into real business value. As Jason Andersen of Moor Insights & Strategy puts it, “We have to get to the next unlock, which is that power is in the next platform, not in the model. The platform is the key to keeping this all contained and actually being able to deliver real business value.”

A community that builds together

Not everything that makes PPCC special happens in a session or workshop. Our promise was simple: come for the learning, stay for the community.

The week began with 150 makers joining the Feel the Power build-a-thon. Women in Power brought attendees together across four events focused on connection, leadership, and career growth. About 100 industry leaders joined our Executive Experience, customers and partners met directly with engineering leaders, and 50 partners kicked off the week together at Partner Pre-Day.

For the rest of the week, people found plenty of reasons to connect and plenty of room to play.

The Community Lounge and the First-Timers Coffee Hour became a home base for community members to learn from one another. Ask-a-Pro stations connected makers with experts. Lightning Talks gave community experts and Microsoft speakers a place to share practical ideas.

The Microsoft booth turned into a community park, complete with experts, games, a Wishing Tree, lots of swag, and a few four-legged friends at the Puppy Park.

At the Maker’s Market, attendees shot hoops on the Maker’s Court, became the claw in the human claw machine and earned Maker Tokens to exchange for exclusive event swag. Even the 1,000 rubber ducks hidden across campus had a purpose: every duck returned supported the MGM Resorts Foundation, which provides grants to local nonprofits in Southern Nevada and other communities.

And on Wednesday night, the community came together once more as Pitbull took the stage for the attendee celebration.

What happens next matters most

Every year I leave PPCC thinking the same thing: this community does not wait to be told what’s possible.

I saw that same mindset everywhere this year. Thousands of people arrived in Las Vegas with different experiences and ideas. But they all came for the same reason: find something that could work better, figure out what’s possible and go build it.

If you’re ready to keep going:

• Register for Maker Con 2027: Join us for the next chapter of this community at the newly renamed Maker Con in Chicago November 2-4, 2027.
• Stay connected: Join the new Microsoft Maker Community to connect with builders across Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and Copilot; get product updates and expert insights and share what you’re learning with fellow makers.
• Keep building: Learn by doing with Copilot Studio Agent Academy, the Copilot Acceleration Team (CAT) hub, and free Power Platform training, whether you’re creating your first solution or working toward certification.
• Get the expert take: Register for the Master Series session, Strategic Insights from the Power Platform Community Conference, on November 10, 2026.
• See what’s next: Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2026, November 17-20, 2026, in San Francisco and online.
• Join us next year: I can’t wait to see you at the conference next year in Chicago. We hope to see you there.

To every attendee, speaker, MVP, volunteer, partner, engineer, and community member who made this week possible: thank you.

Five years in, PPCC keeps getting bigger. But its real strength is this community of builders behind it.

There has never been a better time to be a maker, and we’re only just getting started. I can’t wait to see what you build next.

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