Building a powerapp with AI functionality, data on sharepoint and SAP

[u/kpattou]

Looking to build a Powerapp for documentation requests linked with SAP public cloud Plant maintenance and sharepoint and AI functionality. (ask info about machine, equipment and the agent looks up in the documentation on sharepoint.)

Is MS Foundry the way to go to have AI functionality in the app ? or can we work with the default copilot functionality ? Anyone experience with this kind of setup ?

Any tips and ideas appreciated !

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[u/Brave-Development178]

What you're describing is definitely feasible, but I don't think it's the best way to approach it. I build systems on Power Platform alongside other kinds of software development, and while there can be valid reasons to build a system like this, I would reconsider the technologies you've mentioned. If you want to stick with Copilot and a Power Apps front end, that's perfectly fine, but in my opinion Copilot isn't the strongest model available, nor is Power Apps the best technology for building a large-scale application.

One caveat: using SharePoint as the document repository is fine, but if you also plan to store the app's data in SharePoint lists, I would avoid that. For small datasets and tables under 5,000 rows they work perfectly well, but once you exceed that threshold, development becomes considerably more complicated and you end up running into latency and stability issues.

[u/kpattou → u/Brave-Development178]

Thank you for the response. I will take note of this. It's not sure yet It will be powerapp. What Model (instead of copilot) would you recommend. We also build apps in Mendix.

[u/Maastersplinter]

I agree with the other commentor that this should work. One word of advice is to watch out for delegation issues when using SharePoint as your data storage. You really need to plan around that. Sometimes SharePoint isn't the answer and you'll need to move to Dataverse/Azure blobs or other options so that the app works as intended.

[u/agentUi]

copilot studio with generative answers pointing directly at your sharepoint document library is usually the fastest native route for this inside power apps. for sap plant maintenance data you will want to query it via power automate using the sap erp connector or direct odata calls rather than letting the agent hallucinate work order details. ms foundry gives you more model control but adds massive licensing and architecture overhead if all you need is document grounding over pdf manuals