On 25 October 2022 I represented cVation at Microsoft’s Power Platform Partner Day in Denmark. The session ran under the FY23 “Do more with less” banner: how Microsoft was pitching Power Platform to partners and customers as the answer to a digital backlog that was growing faster than the number of pro developers available to handle it.
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Power Platform Partner Day setup: more demand than developers
Microsoft opened with the macro pitch. Digital demand was surging. The supply of “technical” skills was not keeping up. The proposed response: let everyone in the organisation contribute to building software, and have IT multiply its capacity through fusion teams instead of trying to hire its way out.
Charles Lamanna (CVP, Business Applications and Platforms at Microsoft) framed the message in a short video the partner crew was meant to share with customers: aka.ms/futureofit.
Why Microsoft kept hammering Power Platform to BizApps partners
The numbers Microsoft showed from the 2022 Forrester TEI study explained the push:
- 42% of Dynamics 365 deals already included Power Platform.
- 96% of Business Applications partners had invested or were planning to invest in a Data & AI practice.
- Partners reported ERP+CRM attach rising from roughly 10% to 40% of new Dynamics 365 customers.
The full study is at aka.ms/BAPartnerTEI.
The OKRs Microsoft handed the partner channel
- O1 Fusion Teams Dev strategy: get business and IT co-designing.
- O2 Scale through Developer Velocity: modernise existing apps, build new ones on Azure + AI.
- O3 Augment the LoB ecosystem: surface insight and action on top of line-of-business data.
- O4 Rethink the digital workplace: orchestrate multiple tools so collaboration time stops eating focus time.
Two product demos worth flagging
Describe it to design it (Power Automate preview)
Type a sentence like “daily send my manager a Teams message” and Power Automate proposes a recurrence trigger plus the right actions. In October 2022 this was a preview pitched as the first step toward NL-to-flow authoring. It’s the direct ancestor of what later shipped as Copilot in Power Automate.
Format data by examples
The makers’ favourite: give Power Automate one example (“2022-10-12” should become “October 12”) and it writes the formatDateTime(parseDateTime(...)) expression for you. This killed a real friction point. Most flow authors I worked with at the time could write the trigger and the action but stalled on expression syntax.
Danish customer proof on the day
- Blue Water Shipping + cVation: moving wind-turbine logistics workflows onto cloud and Power Platform.
- Falck + Projectum: portfolio and project management built on the Projectum PPM stack (projectum.com/power-ppm).
Other things flagged in the deck
- The Automation Kit for Power Platform CoE teams: aka.ms/rpapnp.
- Dynamics 365 invoice capture using AI Builder.
- The then-new SAP integration story for Power Platform.
What stuck from Power Platform Partner Day three years later
Reading the deck back in 2026, two things hold up: the fusion-team framing, and the bet that AI assistance inside the makers’ tools is where productivity wins actually compound. The 2022 “Describe it to design it” preview was the beachhead. Copilot in Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio all followed from it.
Why Power Platform Partner Day FY23 mattered to a Danish ISV
At cVation in October 2022 we were already running Power Platform deliveries for customers in shipping, energy, and the public sector. Power Platform Partner Day FY23 confirmed three things we had been betting on. First, Microsoft would keep co-selling Power Platform alongside Dynamics 365 rather than treating it as a side product. Second, AI assistance would land inside the maker tools before it landed in the runtime, so makers would get productivity gains first and end users second. Third, the partner ecosystem would have to take the fusion-team conversation into customer rooms, because Microsoft’s field could only seed it.
Three years on, every one of those bets has played out: Copilot in Power Apps and Power Automate is general availability, Copilot Studio carries the agent story, and the 42% Power-Platform-with-Dynamics attach number from this Power Platform Partner Day deck looks conservative compared to what I see in the field today.
Related posts on this blog
- Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day (April 2023): the BizApps follow-up six months after this FY23 partner day.
- ITU Power Platform 2024: a guest lecture covering Copilot in Power Apps and AI Builder, both direct descendants of the Power Platform Partner Day FY23 roadmap.
- Heading to Seattle for Microsoft Build 2023: the developer-focused follow-on event.
Original deck on LinkedIn: Power Partner Day FY23.
