Microsoft announces the public preview of its Power Virtual Agents tool, a new no-code tool for building chatbots
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
The public preview slots Power Virtual Agents into a no-code lineage Microsoft has been building since it released the PowerApps preview in 2016 and an Azure bot-as-a-Service built on the Bot Framework later that year — both attempts to move bot and app development from professional developers to business users.
What changed by late 2019 is packaging: instead of exposing the Bot Framework to citizen developers, Microsoft now sells chatbot building as a self-service tool alongside its Power Platform apps. The throughline pays off years later when Copilot Studio turns this same no-code layer into the customization surface for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
First-order effects
- Business teams without engineering resources can build and deploy chatbots directly, bypassing the developer-centric Bot Framework workflow Microsoft had offered since its 2016 Azure bot service.
Second-order effects
- Embedding the tool in the Power Platform sets up the Power Virtual Agents app inside Teams announced a year later, pulling chatbot creation into the collaboration surface where non-developers already work and pressuring rival chatbot vendors on ease of deployment.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds through to Copilot assistants building sites in Power Pages and Copilot Studio itself: Microsoft's citizen-developer tooling keeps getting re-founded on each new AI wave — bots, then low-code apps, then LLM-based copilots — so the no-code layer becomes the durable product while the underlying technology churns underneath it.
The trend: Microsoft is steadily converting chatbot and agent building from a developer discipline into a no-code business-user capability, a line that runs from the 2016 Bot Framework services through Power Virtual Agents to Copilot Studio.