What Microsoft can do for the Authority — and what it takes
Nine capabilities, each with the outcome it moves, the prerequisite it depends on, and an honest statement of whether this demonstration actually exercises it.
SharePoint, Teams, Outlook and OneDrive as the document spine
Contracts, drawings, committee papers and board packs live in one governed library with retention and sensitivity labels instead of shared drives and inboxes.
- Single version of every board paper
- Retention that survives staff turnover
- Search across engineering and legal documents
Grounded answers over the Authority's own documents
An executive can ask what changed in a contract, summarise a committee pack, or draft a briefing without opening twelve files. Answers stay inside the tenant's permissions.
- Hours saved per executive briefing
- Consistent answers across directorates
- Faster onboarding into unfamiliar files
Purpose-built agents with defined grounding and guardrails
A procurement agent answers threshold questions from the manual; a fleet agent explains condition alerts; a finance agent explains a variance. Each has an owner and an evaluation set.
- Fewer repeat questions to directorates
- Consistent policy interpretation
- Auditable agent answers
Power Apps and Power Automate for every approval and form
Requisitions, contract variations, capital requests and facilities jobs route to the right approver with thresholds, delegation and a complete audit trail.
- Cycle time measured, not estimated
- No approval without a trail
- Threshold breaches caught before award
One lakehouse feeding every executive number
Generation, fuel, hydrology, billing, procurement and HR data land in one estate with bronze, silver and gold layers, so a board number has one definition and one owner.
- One number per question
- Lineage from board pack to source
- Refresh measured in minutes, not weeks
Vision, OCR and anomaly detection on plant and document data
Thermal imaging, nameplate photographs, scanned test certificates and sensor series analysed without sending data outside the estate. Outputs are advisory only.
- Earlier warning on degrading units
- Certificates searchable, not filed
- Fewer manual inspection rounds
The factory where VRA's models and agents are built and evaluated
Model choice per use case, grounded evaluation against VRA questions, content safety, and a registry so no agent reaches a plant without passing a test set.
- Models chosen on evidence
- Regression caught before rollout
- One place to see what is in production
Read-only plant visibility, no control path
Passive taps on the plant network feed condition analytics in the IT estate. Nothing in this platform can issue a command to a plant; the boundary is the point of the design.
- Condition-based maintenance without touching control
- Single incident picture across IT and OT
- Evidence for insurers and regulators
Agents that carry a multi-step task to completion
The emerging pattern of agents that prepare a board pack, reconcile a subsidiary return, or assemble a commissioning file. Promising, but the capability and licensing position should be confirmed with Microsoft before it is promised to a directorate.
- Multi-step work delegated safely
- Human review where it matters
- Time returned to scarce specialists
What is real in this session
No capability is presented as more than it is
Approvals write to the app's own records; the assistant answers are generated by a model at the moment you ask.
Condition signals, refresh cadence, KPI values and agent evaluation scores are generated for the demonstration.
Installed capacity, plant list, subsidiaries, lake level and the regulatory boundary come from VRA's public record.
No Microsoft tenant, no Fabric capacity, no plant historian, no Dataverse environment is attached to this app.
What a tenant would change
The gap between this demonstration and a pilot
- Sign-in through the Authority's Entra ID tenant, with conditional access and role mapping.
- SharePoint and Teams connected as grounding so Copilot answers from real documents.
- Fabric capacity provisioned, with one gateway per source system and a stewardship model.
- Power Platform environments separated for development, test and production, with DLP policy.
- A read-only OT tap designed and approved jointly with plant operations and the OEM.
- Licence position agreed for Copilot, Fabric and Power Platform per directorate.