AI is changing how organizations build software, and we’re turning a decade of low-code leadership into leadership of the next wave of AI-centric business software.
In this evolving market, we’re proud that Microsoft has been named a Leader in two analyst evaluations, each with its own market definition and assessment criteria: the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for AI-Augmented Low-Code Application Platforms and The Forrester Wave™: AppGen And Low-Code Platforms, Q4 2026.
Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in this Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ eight consecutive times.¹ Forrester noted how Microsoft “excels in AI reliability, management, and governance and [software development lifecycle] SDLC support.”²
Microsoft has long been building platforms that put software creation in the hands of the people closest to the work, while giving IT the controls to operate that software at scale. We are extending that foundation into a new era of intelligent business software through Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and shared enterprise data and governance capabilities.
Spectrum of creation on an evolved platform
As software development evolves, organizations need more ways to build solutions, from natural language and visual tools to traditional code. Gartner and Forrester both examine this convergence of intelligent creation and established development practices in their respective evaluations.
Microsoft is advancing this full spectrum of creation through two complementary approaches, built on shared foundations of enterprise data, connectivity, and governance:
- Evolving Power Platform—an efficient, predictable, and AI-ready platform for business. Deterministic low-code helps organizations protect and extend existing investments on a mature, reliable, cost-efficient platform. Combining visual development and AI-powered capabilities helps build new solutions faster and bring existing apps into the agentic era.
- Expanding what’s possible with Copilot Studio. An AI-native approach brings agents, workflows, and apps together in one studio, enabling organizations to tackle complex business challenges that traditional applications and automation haven’t been able to address effectively.
We believe our continued investments in maker productivity, enterprise governance, and new ways to solve business problems are reflected in our recognition as a Leader in both reports. And we’re thrilled to see customers leveraging the combined strengths of Power Platform and Copilot Studio to drive their business transformation. For example, EY’s finance team pairs a Power Apps app with a Copilot Studio agent in its PowerPost solution, cutting general-ledger lead times by 95% and Network Rail achieves 10x faster development cycles with plans in Power Apps and generative pages, and boasts a rapidly growing number of AI-powered agents built with Copilot Studio.
I’m a big believer of leading by example and our AI support agent is just one more example of how we’re using Copilot Studio and Power Platform to build effective solutions that help us monitor, govern and drive adoption at huge scale.
James Connelly, Power Platform Lead, Network Rail3
Power Platform: Efficient, reliable, and better every month
Organizations run critical processes at enterprise scale on Power Platform, choosing it for highly cost-efficient, reliable solutions. Their apps and automations run with confidence on a mature platform that keeps getting better every month and now works with AI and agents, so the value of what they’ve already built keeps growing.
The strength of our platform is seen in numbers: Power Apps daily active users grew 20% year over year, showing that apps are becoming essential to everyday work, customers are using more applications across more business scenarios and AI usage in Power Apps more than doubled.4
Better experiences, faster delivery, and stronger resilience: Makers and users can build and benefit from better UX with generally available modern controls and theming. Built-in monitoring helps teams pinpoint slow-loading screens and data requests and take action to improve performance. Power Apps and Power Automate are backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA, and production environments in Azure availability zones fail over automatically within a region, targeting recovery in under five minutes with near-zero data loss.
Existing apps just work with Copilot and agents: With Business Applications in Work IQ, the business understanding built into Power Apps and Dynamics 365 becomes context that Copilot and agents can reuse, and governed actions update records within each user’s access rights. Through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, app functionality can become reusable tools for agents, bringing the business rules and permissions with them.
Apps people rely on daily bring Copilot and agents to business work: Microsoft Copilot is available in model-driven apps and in preview in canvas apps. Business and productivity context is available to people right where they work. App skills help with data entry, exploration, visualization, and summarization. Makers can also author canvas apps with agents and keep refining them in a familiar studio, while generative pages bring natural language creation to model-driven apps.
These advances open new possibilities without requiring organizations to start over, extending the value of their existing Power Platform solutions, skills, and investments.
Microsoft Copilot Studio: AI-native solution building
Some business challenges have remained stubbornly manual because they don’t fit neatly into traditional applications or automation. They require interpreting changing information, coordinating across systems and teams, and making decisions that can’t always be anticipated. Building on the trusted foundations of Power Platform, Copilot Studio brings agents, workflows, and apps together in one studio to build intelligent solutions for these complex business challenges.
Agents bring reasoning and autonomy to work that once required constant human coordination. Rather than following fixed scripts, Copilot Studio agents can plan steps, select tools, adapt as they go, and collaborate with people and other agents. With computer use, they can even operate websites and desktop applications without APIs.
New capabilities announced in October 2026 extend that autonomy into persistent, proactive work. As Microsoft Copilot evolves into a more personalized, proactive assistant for individuals, Copilot Studio now brings similar intelligence and initiative to shared business processes. Agent accounts give agents their own organizational identities and approved credentials, business process memory helps them carry context across recurring tasks, and triggers enable them to initiate work in response to events or schedules.
But complex business processes often need more than agents alone. Workflows handle predictable, repeatable steps, while agents apply reasoning where judgment and flexibility are needed. Apps in Copilot Studio and Copilot Cowork, now in public preview, let makers create tailored experiences using natural language alongside the agents and workflows that support them.
Consider supplier onboarding: an agent could interpret unfamiliar submissions, identify missing or inconsistent information, and independently follow up with suppliers; a workflow could route required approvals; and an app could give managers a place to review exceptions and make decisions. Rather than automating isolated tasks, organizations can use Copilot Studio’s new capabilities to rethink entire business processes and tackle challenges that once resisted automation.
Build differently, govern consistently
As organizations expand how they build and use software, governance must scale with them. Across Power Platform and Copilot Studio, the Power Platform admin center gives administrators a centralized inventory of apps, flows, and agents, including who owns them and where they run.
That visibility is just the starting point. Power Platform connectors and MCP connect solutions to enterprise data, knowledge, and tools, while managed environments and advanced connector policies help administrators govern those connections. This includes individual connector actions and MCP servers. Pipelines support controlled deployment with pre-production guardrails, and administrators can manage capacity and consumption along the way.
Managed Environments has greatly simplified and improved our ability to govern Power Platform at scale. It’s the best way to manage at a global level.
Giada Binelli, Hyperautomation Tribe Lead, HEINEKEN5
As agents take on more responsibility, organizations need additional ways to evaluate and govern them. Built-in evaluations help makers assess agent quality, while Microsoft Entra Agent ID and Microsoft Agent 365 support identity, security, and governance at scale. For generated apps, Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, now in public preview, provides managed hosting and lifecycle capabilities, including those built with compatible third-party tools.
Read the reports
We believe Microsoft’s recognition as a Leader in these reports reflects how our longstanding vision for low-code development is shaping the next generation of business software: empowering more people to solve business problems while giving IT the control to operate confidently.
Learn why Microsoft was named a Leader: Read the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for AI-Augmented Low-Code Application Platforms and The Forrester Wave™: AppGen And Low-Code Platforms, Q4 2026.
And join us at Microsoft Ignite on November 17–20, 2026, in San Francisco and online, to see what’s next for apps, automation, and agents.
¹ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for AI-Augmented Low-Code Application Platforms, 28 September 2026, Adrian Leow, Kyle Davis, Mukul Saha, Nitish Tyagi.
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.
² The Forrester Wave™: AppGen And Low-Code Platforms, Q4 2026, Forrester Research, Inc., October 22, 2026.
Forrester and The Forrester Wave are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.
This graphic was published by Forrester Research, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Forrester document is available upon request from Microsoft.
3 As published in Network Rail empowers over 2,500 makers to build innovative business solutions with Power Platform and Copilot Studio
4 Internal Microsoft telemetry
5 As published in HEINEKEN uses Power Platform and Copilot Studio to streamline operations and harness the potential of AI
