@WonderLaura – Laura Rogers

If you’ve been following the Power Platform space, you know that Microsoft has been doubling down on AI-powered development tools. Their latest addition, the Power Apps Plan Designer, is honestly pretty impressive – and I think it’s going to change how we approach app development projects and requirements gathering. This is my post and associated video.

What Exactly Is Plan Designer?

Think of Plan Designer as your AI-powered project architect. Instead of starting with a blank canvas and figuring out all the architecture, logic and moving pieces yourself, you can now describe your entire project in a single prompt, and Copilot will generate a comprehensive development plan for you. It’s prominently featured right on the Power Apps homepage with a friendly “Let’s Make a Plan” interface.

The tool uses multiple AI agents working together – kind of like having a whole team of specialists collaborating on your project requirements. These agents each have their own specialty: requirements gathering, process mapping, data modeling, and solution architecture.

Getting Started: The Demo Experience

When I first tried Plan Designer, I hit a common snag – insufficient permissions. You might need to create a temporary power platform development environment to get started, and make sure preview features are enabled. It’s worth the setup, though.

The process is surprisingly straightforward. You paste a summary of your business requirements into the designer, describing your project’s objectives, necessary fields, and tables, or just high level concepts, whatever information you have gathered so far. For my demo video below, I used a customer onboarding project that needed to track customer locations and assign tasks to onboard each new customer.

One nice touch is that you can upload relevant files like screenshots to provide visual references. The system actually uses these to better understand what you’re trying to build. Take a look at the little + plus icon next to the Generate button in the screenshot above, that’s what you use to upload up to 3 images.

The Magic of Multi-Agent Collaboration

Here’s where things get really cool. Plan Designer employs several specialized agents that work together:

Requirements Agent: This one interprets your description to outline the business problem, define the plan’s purpose, and list user requirements. It identifies all the different roles involved – in my customer onboarding example, it figured out we’d need Customer Onboarding Specialists, Customer Service Managers, and Team Members.

Process Agent: This agent maps out your workflows, creating processes like Customer Onboarding, Data Entry and Setup, Onboarding Workflow, and Task Management and Review.

Data Agent: Probably my favorite part – this agent generates a complete data model with suggested database tables. If you’re new to project planning or requirements gathering, this is incredibly helpful.

Solution Agent: This ties everything together into a unified Power Platform solution.

Within the plan designer, you can also provide feedback to Copilot with thumbs up/down ratings for each section, and edit the generated roles, tables, and requirements to refine the plan. Remember that it’s helpful to do this part before clicking to have it generate the apps and flows.

User Stories and Role Management

The system automatically generates various user roles based on your project description, such as Customer Service Representatives, Managers, Team Members, Pricing Team Members, Data Management, Transportation Coordinators, Salespeople, and Trainers. This highlights the importance of user stories in requirements gathering.

You can edit these roles too. For instance, I added an “Executive” role with specific needs for viewing Power BI reports of task progress. Just remember to finalize role changes early in the process to avoid regenerating the entire table structure.

User Processes

The Plan Designer will provide you with a list of what it anticipates the users processes will be, when working with this app and data.

Data Modeling Made Visual

The data modeling interface reminds me of Microsoft Access, but obviously more modern and a cleaner interface. You can define table relationships visually, which makes it much easier to understand how your data connects.

One important note: currently, the system only supports Dataverse as the data source. SharePoint isn’t supported yet, which might be limiting for some projects. But even if you don’t have a Dataverse license, Plan Designer is still valuable for planning your data structure and learning from this interface before potentially implementing it in other databases like SQL or SharePoint.

Here is the data model that it generated for me:

When it shows you the details of the database tables, you can interact with Copilot some more to fine tune it, or manually add columns and relationships:

Technology Stack Generation

Once you’ve got your data model sorted, Plan Designer automatically suggests the technology stack for your solution. For my customer onboarding project, it recommended:

• Power BI for reporting
• Canvas App for the main interface
• Model-Driven App as an alternative
• Power Automate Flow for task assignments
• Onboarding Copilot Assistant Agent
• Onboarding Workflow Insights for executives to monitor bottlenecks

You can click “Add Technology” to include more components, giving you flexibility in your solution architecture.

Real App Generation

Here’s where it gets really impressive – Plan Designer doesn’t just create plans, it actually generates working apps. When I clicked “Create” on the Customer Onboarding Workspace, it spun up a complete canvas app using Dataverse as the database, generating all the necessary screens.

The generated app included:

• Welcome screen
• Corporate locations with sample data
• Bill-to locations with lookup to parent corporate locations
• Ship-to locations with corporate location lookups
• User ID information for different roles
• Workflow tasks with due dates
• Workflow dashboard

It also created a model-driven app alongside the canvas app, though in most cases, you’d probably pick one or the other.

Plan Designer – The Reality Check

Let me be honest – Plan Designer isn’t perfect. It’s new, so there are some clunky elements. The workflow-building part is probably the weakest component, and creating flows from overly broad prompts doesn’t work well. Complex prompts often lead to no flow suggestions at all.

But the diagrams and table interface are genuinely useful. Having workflows laid out visually makes discussions with business stakeholders much more productive for refining requirements.

Why the Plan Designer Matters

Plan Designer provides a solid structure for projects and helps you think through different user roles and experiences. It’s particularly valuable for identifying potential automation needs early in the process.

The tool essentially helps you gather requirements by creating diagrams and building initial app screens to visualize the process for the business. This approach leads to more specific ideas and better project direction.

Getting Started

If you want to try Plan Designer, you’ll need access to the Power Platform – there might be licensing implications for the different products it generates. There may be a trial available, and you might need to create a temporary dev environment.

The bottom line? Plan Designer represents a significant step forward in AI-assisted development. While it’s not going to replace good old-fashioned requirements gathering and business analysis, it’s an incredibly powerful tool for getting projects off the ground faster and more thoughtfully.

Give it a try – I think you’ll be impressed with what it can generate from just a simple project description.

Here is my video demonstration: