Advancing automation with new AI capabilities in Power Automate

The Power Automate team is committed to empowering you with the most reliable, innovative, and value-driven automation solution available. At the heart of everything we do is our core development principles: harmonious automation, trustworthy and reliable solutions, continuous process excellence, and measurable customer value. These principles guide our vision to blend the strengths of AI with human ingenuity, ensuring that every step you take in automation is supported by a solution you can trust.

Today, at the Power Platform Community Conference, we are thrilled to unveil a new set of AI capabilities in Power Automate that bring this vision to life in fresh and powerful ways. Whether you’re building automation from descriptions or leveraging AI-driven decision-making in your flows, our latest features are designed to help you achieve more with less effort. All the while, they maintain the highest standards of security, transparency, and process optimization.

Read on to learn about the new AI features in Power Automate. Plus, the new enhancements to the designer experience in the cloud flows experience designed to supercharge your automation journey.

Record with Copilot in Power Automate Desktop – now in public preview!

We’re excited to announce the availability of ‘Record with Copilot’ in public preview! You can now create a desktop flow just by sharing your screen and describing the task you want to automate. It’s as if you were teaching it to someone else. For example, you can simply show and explain a process where you need to transfer data between two systems. Copilot will then analyze the recording to suggest an automation by harnessing advanced multimodal AI models. It’s a quick and intuitive way to kickstart your automation.

Learn more about getting started with Record with Copilot

Create desktop flows from a description – now in public preview!

You can now build a desktop flow just by typing out what you want to automate. Whether you’re starting from scratch or adding to an existing flow, you can simply describe your task in Copilot. And it will help you build it step-by-step. For example, you can ask Copilot to automate reading and writing content to an Excel file and then send the file in an email with just a simple natural language command.

Learn more on how to create desktop flows with Copilot using descriptions.

Introducing generative actions!

Generative actions, previously known as AI flows, are coming inline to cloud flows. Generative actions allow you to create AI orchestrated action within your automation. This powerful capability allows you to add AI-powered steps to your cloud flows, letting AI reason through unstructured content and decide the best course of action for complex tasks. For example, with generative actions you can automate conditional approvals based on the content of incoming emails and company policies. You can now create, edit, test and run generative actions all from within the cloud flow designer.

Generative actions is now in the Early Access Program. Sign up here.

New enhancements in the cloud flows designer

We’re continually improving the cloud flows designer month after month based on your feedback!

Aside from full copy/paste support of actions between/within flows, you can now expand two actions panes simultaneously, making it easier to copy/compare values.

People picker in email/Approvals/Teams actions lets you pick people from the dropdown as you start typing their name or email address for efficiency. In addition, you can now navigate directly to an action (and connector) definition from a ‘Learn more’ link on an action in the designer canvas using a link if you need extra help configuring the action.

Plus, the new Copilot expression assistant (private preview) helps you build the right expression just by describing the expression you want to build, and by referencing the dynamic data in the flow by its name.  If you are interested in trying out the new experience, please sign up here.  

We can’t wait to see the amazing automations you create with these new capabilities! Share your feedback in the Power Automate Community Forum or email us at [email protected]. And, if you’re attending the Power Platform Community Conference this week, drop by one of our sessions to meet the Power Automate product team!