ChatGPT, What? Say that again.

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT current days, it is over all the place. And believe me our Artificial Intelligence friend will keep on going and play a central role in our day-to-day lives. Here is ChatGPT again ;)...

In one of my previous blog posts I talked about the Chat GPT AI functionalities build in the creation of PowerAutomate flows. Helping us designing our automation workflows as a first step.

Please find the link here to this previous Blog post: Blog | PowerofThePlatform.

In this blogpost we will dive in one of the PowerAutomate workflows being created by ChatGPT and we will have a look at the expressions being build by the same AI engine.

Imagine having following workflow where incoming emails are the trigger and where we have an apply to each action which will get the attachments from the email. In a next step a new file will be created on SharePoint where dynamic data is being used for the File Name and File Content fields.

Ok quite straight forward workflow. Let us now use ChatGPT in building up our expressions. Lets say we want to build up our FileName based on a part of the creation date from the incoming email.

Clicking in the File Name field will open the expressions and possibility to format our data based on ChatGPT. To activate the ChatGPT we will use the Format data by examples functionality.

We will base our data on one of the fields of the incoming email. In this example our source field is the Receive Time (of type ateTime).

Provide some example how the data is currently stored and enter this in the Example value for Received Time field. Also enter your desired output. This helps us in building our expression based on natural language instead of complex definitions.

As a next step ChatGPT will suggest an expression that you can copy or apply into your PowerAutomate workflow. In my example following expression is being used:

formatDateTime(parseDateTime(triggerOutputs()?['body/receivedDateTime']), 'M/d/yyyy', 'en-US'). Not that easy when you have to think it out by yourself right?

We've clicked on apply and the expression was added into our workflow action step.

Will this ChatGPT build up entire and complex workflows? I don't think so, not at this point of time. I believe that it can help us in our first steps as a Citizen Developer in building up maturity within PowerAutomate and PowerApps.

Certainly have it a try and embrace our ChatGPT friend ;).

Happy PowerPlatform

Frank Vanhamel

MS PowerPlatform Evangelist