The role of connectors in a Power Virtual Agents conversation

In Chapter 8, Integrating the Power Virtual Agent into Teams, we used an example where we questioned an HR chatbot about our remaining vacation time, and it was able to respond with the exact number of vacation days remaining for the user. We mentioned in passing that we used a Power Automate flow to achieve this.

An important aspect to understand is that Power Automate, just like most of the Power Platform, leverages a large set of connectors to tap into other external applications and perform various Create, Read, Update or Delete (CRUD) operations. The most common one with chatbots is, as expected, Read. We want our chatbot to return relevant information to the user it converses with, and to do that, the chatbot needs to read that information from various sources.

But let's make a distinction between static and dynamic data before we delve into how data is retrieved and introduced into a conversation.

Static...