Yes… AI is coming also in Azure Logic Apps Designer!
If you’re developing an Azure Logic Apps Standard workflow, in the designer editor you will start seeing a new Assistant action:
The workflow assistant (actually in public preview) is a chat interface to answer any questions about Azure Logic Apps, from directly within designer. You can also use it to describe existing workflow or prompt for specific answers in the context of your workflow. The chat interface provides access to Azure Logic Apps documentation and best practices without requiring you to navigate documentation or search online forums.
Let’s see an example. I’m creating the following Azure Logic Apps Standard workflow (the workflow importing complex EDI files I used in the demo at Directions EMEA in Lyon). I need to use the Blob Storage connector for reading a blob file from a container and I’m asking to the Assistant something like “How can I configure the Read Blob Contect action?“. This is the result:
It is driving me on configuring the actions parameters accordingly to the data I have in this workflow!
I can also ask for a general explanation of the workflow (imagine that I’m not the author of this workflow) and here it is:
The new workflow assistant for Azure Logic Apps Standard is useful to:
- Describe workflow
- Help on Connectors and actions.
- Provide responses that you can leverage to apply best practices, such as for error handling, testing, and other optimizations.
- Receive contextual responses based on your workflow opened in the designer.
The workflow assistant doesn’t collect, save, store, or share any personal or customer data in your Standard logic app workflows nor any information in your chat history. The workflow assistant relies on the workflow definition ( workflow JSON) to provide contextual responses. The workflow JSON is sanitized to ensure no customer data or secrets are passed as context. The workflow definition is only used to scope the responses and is not stored anywhere.
The workflow is powered by Azure Open AI Service, which use Azure Logic Apps documentation from reputable sources along with internet data that’s used to train GPT 3.5-Turbo. This content is processed into a vectorized format, which is then accessible through a backend system built on Azure App Service. Queries are triggered based on interactions with the workflow designer.
When you enter your question in the assistant’s chat box, the Azure Logic Apps backend performs preprocessing and forwards the results to a large language model in Azure Open AI Service. This model generates responses based on the current context in the form of the workflow definition’s JSON code and your prompt.
At the time of writing this post:
- The workflow assistant is only available in Azure Logic Apps Standard platform.
- It can be used only through Azure portal.
- It’s not available in Visual Studio Code designer.
- It supports only English for input prompts and responses. New languages will be added soon.
NOTE: Azure Logic Apps in the Consumption model don’t have the AI-based workflow Assistant at the moment.
Stefano Demiliani 