I appreciate your interest and comments on my short series. In the previous article, we explored Copilot in Power Automate experience. Today, we will examine Power Automate Desktop.
As this Copilot experience is currently only available in environments located in the United States, it might be less relevant depending on your tenant setup, but we can be sure this experience shortly becoming available in additional regions as well.
A message appears when we launch Copilot from the header bar in Power Automate Desktop. It says „Get all your questions answered about Desktop Flows in Power Automate by asking Copilot.„. Let’s ask for help with summarizing my last 10 emails received. As I mentioned before, Copilot for Microsoft 365 can assist me with this task. However, the response is different this time. It shows me a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish this task using Power Automate Desktop.
Next, I will test Copilot´s knowledge of the Connectors Framework by asking if Copilot can help me connect to my internal SAP system. As you can see from the response shown in the image above, we are given again a step-by-step guide here.
Next, we will open an existing flow in Power Automate Desktop and use the Copilot experience to help us with some common tasks. As shown in the image above, my first prompt is to create a flow that starts Excel. Unlike the Copilot experience in Power Automate cloud flow, I expect it to add an action to my flow instead of just giving me a suggestion.
However, I get another step-by-step guide on how to do this. So far, Copilot in Power Automate Desktop has not been very helpful in creating a flow for me. This is a significant contrast to the Power Automate cloud flows experience. Let’s see how we can use some advanced features that involve Bing Search. I repeat my question about licensing here and I get a detailed answer that explains the different licensing options.
Let’s review some actions after this check. Can Copilot help me add a new action to the current flow definition? The visual above shows that it cannot. There is one more thing I want to test. What happens if I try to add a file by dragging and dropping it?
Okay, this is not available at the moment. To wrap-up what I see Copilot in Power Automate Desktop experience being capable of, is:
- Get me information on possible solutions to solve a specific problem
- Help me with an understanding on licensing implication
This is a combination of Azure OpenAI and Bing Search features. I find it impressive that Copilot provides us with references for the answers – a major difference to other experiences. I suggest you look at the following material from Microsoft on better understanding this Copilot and creating content for our risk assessment documentation:
- FAQ for Generative Answers in Power Automate for desktop
- Responsible AI FAQs for Power Automate
- FAQ for Copilot data security and privacy in Microsoft Power Platform
That’s all for today, but we’re not done with the series yet. Can you guess what’s coming up next? Don’t miss the next episode where we’ll explore Power Pages Design Studio. Until then,…
The Power Platform Talks 