Microsoft 365 Copilot in Power Apps: Public Preview Walkthrough
Microsoft is bringing Power Apps directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the public preview gives a clear picture of where this is headed: your model-driven apps aren’t just something users open separately anymore they’re becoming something Copilot can surface, query, and even act on conversationally, from inside the flow of everyday Microsoft 365 work.
What’s actually in preview right now
The centerpiece of this preview is conversational access to model-driven app data through Grids and Forms, with Custom Tools support coming afterward. In practical terms: instead of a user opening an app, navigating to a view, filtering a grid, and manually reading through records, they can ask Copilot Chat a question and get an answer pulled directly from that app’s underlying Grids and Forms while still being able to jump into the actual app UI when they need the full context.
Microsoft frames this as bringing “app-powered UI experiences” into Microsoft 365 Copilot conversations, which is a meaningful distinction from just connecting Copilot to your data generically. The app’s existing structure its views, its forms, its business logic becomes something Copilot can respect and use, rather than Copilot having to reconstruct that understanding from raw Dataverse tables.
Why this matters more than it might first appear
Most organizations already invested heavily in building model-driven apps with carefully designed grids, forms, and business rules. The risk with generic AI chat layered on top of business data has always been that it bypasses all that carefully built structure a chatbot that ignores your validation rules and view logic is a governance headache waiting to happen.
This preview takes a different approach: Copilot chat inside apps has context of what a user is doing within the app itself, and the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot integration extends that same principle outward respecting the app’s existing forms and grids rather than working around them.
What to expect as this moves toward general availability
Based on the pattern Microsoft has followed with similar previews (Copilot in SharePoint followed a comparable path preview, then default-on rollout), expect:
● Custom Tools to expand what Copilot can *do* inside an app-powered conversation, not just what it can *show* likely enabling users to trigger actions (create a record, update a status) conversationally rather than only querying
● Governance and DLP policies to matter a lot here if your Power Platform environment has connector restrictions or data loss prevention policies in place, those need to extend cleanly to this new conversational surface, or you’ll create a policy gap
Admin visibility tooling (similar to the SharePoint Agent Access Insights heatmap Microsoft has been rolling out) to likely follow, since “what is Copilot doing with my app’s data” is exactly the kind of question admins will start asking
What makers should do now, during preview
1 Audit your forms and grids for AI-readiness. If your model-driven app’s forms have cryptic field names, missing descriptions, or inconsistent structure, Copilot’s conversational answers will inherit that mess. Clean, well-labeled forms translate directly into better conversational responses.
2 Review DLP policies against this new surface. Don’t assume your existing connector-level DLP automatically covers a conversational access pattern validate it explicitly once this rolls out to your tenant.
Identify a pilot app. Rather than waiting for GA and turning this on tenant-wide, pick one well-maintained app with a real business owner and test the conversational experience there first. You’ll learn more from one good pilot than from reading ten more articles about this feature (including this one).
My take
This is part of a consistent direction across Microsoft’s 2026 roadmap: apps, Copilot, and Dynamics are all being pulled into the same conversational fabric rather than staying as separate destinations users have to remember to visit. For makers, the actionable takeaway isn’t “wait and see” it’s “make sure the app you already built is clean enough that when Copilot starts talking about it, it says something useful.”
Source : Microsoft Power Platform Blog, Power Apps product updates.
