Introducing Plan Designer: A Copilot-First Tool for Streamlined Business Solutions
Microsoft recently unveiled the new “Plan Designer” as a part of its 2025 Wave 1 feature releases. Plan Designer is a Copilot-first development tool that can be used to create business solutions. It allows you to describe the business process in natural language and include images, such as process flows, and will create a Power Platform solution to fit the business process – including Dataverse tables, canvas apps, model-driven apps, and Power Automate flow suggestions.
The designer helps walk you through the process of identifying the following:
- The problem you’re trying to solve
- The purpose of this solution
- The user roles involved
- User stories to outline specific needs
- The data tables that will be used
- The user experience to ensure the solution meets expectations
Using a visual diagram, you can interact with the designer and either accept suggestions/changes or provide feedback. The interaction is then saved to the generated solution as a plan.
Who Can Benefit from Plan Designer?
Plan Designer can be helpful to new Power Platform developers as well as seasoned experts. As a consulting firm, we can leverage this tool to reduce the time spent creating demos. By gathering initial client information, we can quickly produce a draft solution that helps the client visualize possible outcomes without committing extensive resources to development. This allows us to focus more on the finer details of the business process and customize the solution to better meet the client’s needs — ultimately saving them time and money.
New Power Platform developers can also benefit from Plan Designer as it can guide them through the process of identifying what they need to create a solution instead of diving straight into creating a solution without a full understanding.
The Power of Copilot
Developers who use Copilot to assist in building their apps are 65% more satisfied with their experience. In addition, they have a success rate 60% higher than those who don’t use Copilot to assist. Power Platform alone has allowed developers to see a 50% reduction in development time – combining Power Platform with Copilot just increases its impact.
Getting Started with Plan Designer: Step-by-Step Guide
1. Navigate to make.powerapps.com.
2. Ensure that the “Try the new Power Apps experience” toggle in the top right corner is turned on.
3. Enter your prompt using the chat input. For this example, we will be creating an inventory management system.
4. Plan Designer first starts by attempting to identify the required user roles for this process. For this example, it guessed that two roles, Team Member and Inventory Manager, will be required.
5. If these are all the user roles needed and the bulleted items reflect all known abilities those user roles will require, you can hit the “Add these roles” button.
6. If these are not accurate, you can hit “Edit” and provide the Plan Designer with feedback. For this example, we will be adding a new user role – an Admin.
7. Once you are satisfied with the user roles, Plan Designer will then begin to identify and create the data tables required for the process. To see the details of the tables including columns and how they relate to each other, select “Show details” in the visual diagram.
8. Similar to the user roles, we can either select “Add these tables” to add them to the solution as is or select “Edit” to provide feedback and make any changes.
9. Once the tables have been added, Plan Designer then begins to identify the User Experiences required for this process – this includes apps and suggested Power Automate workflows.
10. For this solution, Plan Designer suggests three separate apps. I want my solution to be all within the same app, so I will provide that feedback to Plan Designer. Plan Designer then generates one app instead.
11. Once you are satisfied with the suggested User experiences, select “Add these user experiences.”
12. To add the app(s) to your solution, select the + sign next to the title. You will first be prompted to save the tables in order to build the app. Select “Save tables”, give your solution a name in the dialog window, and select “Save.”
13. Plan Designer will then begin saving the tables. Once the tables have been saved, you can then hit the + sign by the user experiences again. The app will open in a new window. You can make updates to the app at this time or just save and publish it to the solution.
14. Once you are done generating your plan, hit the save button in the top right corner and exit the plan.
15. To make edits to this solution, you can interact with Plan Designer again or make the updates manually. The plan is saved to the solution itself and can be re-opened if needed. You can see below that the solution contains the plan, the app, and the five tables.
Current Limitations
- Navigation is a bit clunky at this time, particularly with the Back button taking you back to the All section instead of last location
- No inline editing for user roles and user stories – changes must be made through prompting Copilot
- Power Automate flows are not automatically generated – the plan designer suggests Power Automate flows and can provide an outline/starting point, but the user will still need to customize and configure it
Ready to Accelerate Your Power Platform Journey?
Plan Designer is transforming the way business solutions get built—making the process faster, smarter, and more collaborative. Whether you’re a seasoned Power Platform developer or just getting started, this Copilot-first tool streamlines development and sets you up for success.
At Compass 365, we specialize in helping organizations maximize the value of their Microsoft investments. Contact us today to discuss how Compass 365 can elevate and expedite your Power Platform solutions. Let’s build smarter, together.
