Power Platform Plan Designer: you describe, Power Apps builds

Power Apps is a platform within Microsoft Power Platform that enables you to quickly and easily build business applications without in-depth coding knowledge. You can create forms, dashboards, mobile apps, or workflows that streamline your processes, such as time tracking, inspection reports, approval flows, or internal notification systems.

With each release wave, Microsoft introduces new features, smart enhancements, and innovations across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. In our blog on the Power Platform 2025 Release Wave 1, you can read all about the latest developments. One of the highlights? The introduction of Plan Designer in Power Apps.

Once you activate the new Power Apps experience, the preview of Plan Designer becomes available. This gives you an intelligent assistant: you simply describe a business challenge in your own words, for example, “I want an approval flow for purchase requests” or “I want an app to track work hours”. Generative AI instantly proposes a concrete, working solution. Plan Designer builds that solution with the tools of Power Apps – fully tailored to your request, without you having to configure anything yourself.

From Low Code to No code: a logical evolution

Low Code and Citizen Development have been established concepts within the Power Platform for years. With the rise and rapid growth of generative AI, think Copilot and ChatGPT, it was only a matter of time before these worlds would converge.

What started with AI prompting in tools like Power Automate and Power Apps has now evolved into a complete AI-driven experience: Plan Designer connects the dots and builds your solution end-to-end.

Until now, some basic knowledge was still required to create such an app. With the new Plan Designer feature in Power Apps, Microsoft takes a major step toward No Code. Thanks to generative AI, anyone – from finance to logistics – can describe a challenge, and Power Apps will automatically propose a working app, complete with data models and automations. No technical expertise required, just a clear goal.

We put it to the test with a business case

There’s only one way to truly experience how powerful this new feature is, and that’s by testing it yourself. There are plenty of common scenarios that many organizations face on a daily basis, such as registering participants for an event, tracking company assets, or creating a task overview for the technical department. We chose a business case focused on expense reporting by employees.

As input, we provided: “Employees need to create their different types of expenses. The manager needs to approve or reject these expenses. If the expense is approved, a notification needs to be sent to the HR manager.”

Step by step, Plan Designer built a solution for us:

Step 1: Mapping stakeholders

The system first automatically identifies the roles involved. Microsoft suggests a set of stakeholders – which you can immediately add or fine-tune to match your organization.

Step 2: Adding the necessary data

Next, Plan Designer suggests a few Dataverse tables for tracking expenses. You can adjust these if needed, but this already provides a solid foundation.

Step 3: Creating the required user experiences

As the final step, Microsoft’s generative AI brings together the Power Platform to create all the necessary components. In this case, that included 3 Power Apps and 2 Power Automate flows.

From the screenshot above, it’s clear that each stakeholder gets their own app for entering, approving, or tracking expenses. The flows handle notifications for approving expenses or informing the HR manager.

And that’s it. With just one brief input description, we received a working solution. You can immediately activate it or customize it in your own Power Platform environment.

Business Boost in the making: promising, but still in preview

Plan Designer is still in preview, which means not everything works flawlessly yet. For example, we were not able to generate Power Automate flows at this stage. However, what is already available looks very promising. The generated app is well-built and even included support for offline use via Dataverse tables.

It’s hard to predict when Plan Designer will be mature enough for more complex business cases. But even now, it offers very useful tools. The real power lies not only in the generated app, but in how the entire thought process is guided. As a user, you are naturally taken on a journey as a Solution Architect—without needing to be one yourself.

Canvas App Created by Plan Designer

Why should you consider Plan Designer within your organization?

With Plan Designer, you empower employees to improve processes themselves and turn ideas into digital solutions without lengthy IT projects. Plus, you lower the barrier for innovation: even colleagues without a technical background can now contribute to digital progress. This makes your organization or team less dependent on IT, speeds up solution delivery, and ensures better alignment with real-world needs because solutions come directly from the workplace. You work more efficiently, smarter, and with greater support.

Curious what Plan Designer could mean for your organization?
Contact us to explore how Power Apps can drive innovation in your business.