There has been lots of talk about Power Automate being replaced with Agent flows (even though they are just a different license and the same under the hood). The key benefit to the Agent flows was its pitch for all things AI, but did you know that Power Automate is getting the goodies too, in particular Generative Actions. So what are Generate Actions, well I'm glad you asked 😎
- What are they
- How to setup and use
- What they can do
- The future
1. What are they
So what are they, well I describe them as super prompts or AI flows, so yes the 'Generative' was for Generative AI.
Generative answers, like a prompt, are based on a prompt/instruction, but where the super comes from is the 2 extra features it has:
- Connections
- Knowledge Sources (named References)
That's right, you can give the gen actions (abbreviation time already 😎) can use connections/actions to do things. Like a MCP tool, but more controlled as you the developer gets to decide on the action/endpoints available.
You are currently limited by choice of connections we can use (10 Microsoft), but they are probably the most useful, and fingers crossed we will get more soon.
2. How to setup and use
The first thing we need is to ensure that the Generative Action connection is enabled in your Data policy (aka DLP policy).
Next you need to feed the AI machine, that's right gen actions are not free, they don't even use AI Builder credits 🥺, they use Copilot Studio Messages Credits (all makes sense night, right). So you need to make sure your environment has some allocated (though you can draw down on the Tenant pool, but you really shouldn't).
Now we are ready to do some actions, generative style, its a simple action so can be added like any other, but as Microsoft loves AI, its even in the quick add menu too.
Once added, you can either create a new action or use existing one you created earlier (environment specific).
When creating a new generative action we will be welcomed with a rather large prompt input box.
We then add out prompt/instruction we can then click generate.
Prompt
When a new email arrives in Outlook, use the “Team contacts” reference file to determine which team should handle the request.
For the contact to handle the request check to see which country they work in, if this does not match the senders country try a different contact from the same team until you find the closest matching country
If a valid contact is found:
Summarize the content of the email.
Forward the original email to the identified contact, including the summary in the body of the forwarded message.
If no appropriate team or contact is found:
Send an approval request to the approver.
Use the approver’s comments as the forwarding contact once approved.
Forward the original email to the identified contact, including the summary in the body of the forwarded message.
And the gen action will create its own AI workflow, and for the workflow it will suggest:
- Inputs
- Outputs
- Connectors
As you can see they make sense, but if you see any you don't want you can remove them.
You do need to confirm each input and output by clicking the ticks. You can also add your owns by clicking + at the top right.
Connectors are similar, it will suggest connections and required actions, and they are generally on the money (though sometimes likes the HTTP actions a little to much). You can also remove any connection and add others (no MCP... yet).
Erm why SharePoint good job I can delete it, and why no 365 User
Finally we have a knowledge sources, aka references. These are not as good as Copilot Studio as you can have live sources, here its only upload documents (and by uploaded I mean stored in OneDrive).
What's also cool is you can test and refine the action while building it.
After publishing it you will see all of the new inputs in the action.
And that's it, its ready to go.
3. What they can do
So as you can see by the example I did above, you can almost create mini flows within actions, if you convert it to a flow it would look something like this:
So in theory they can replicate any flow you would build (as long as uses currently available connections). But what is particularly cool is what I call "Role Based Automations", instead of the usual "Process Based Automations".
Process Based Automations are Power Automate and RPA tools bread and butter, you take a process with defined inputs and outputs and you automate it. Multiple Process eventually equal a role, but it requires a large investment.
Role Based Automation is when you take all of the inputs a particular role has and it generates the outputs. And yes I know for most roles this currently isn't possible, but in some limited cases (and more in the future), you can just about do it with Gen Actions, let me give example.
You have a tech support operator, they have Access to:
- Technical support docs
- Platform telemetry
- Callers details
- Escalation contacts
Now it's not a big leap to use a gen action to handle tech support requests, it would be able to:
- Use callers details to get what they are using
- Telemetry to get more details
- References to diagnose
- Second line support escalation when cant fix it
Pretty cool (and maybe scary)
4. The future
Gen Actions are still in preview, and my current experiences has been no surprise, inconsistent.
From the prompt/instruction creating different inputs/outputs/connections, to the actual run generating different outcomes on the same inputs. So I would say currently its not ready for critical outcomes without a Human in the Loop validation. But I thinks Microsoft's future sees them overcoming this, with a more deterministic outcome. And in that future this would be the replacement for Power Automate, no more dragging and dropping, and no more Copilot making a mess of adding actions. You give it a detail prompt, validate inputs, outputs, connections, then add references and its done.
But as I said the technology isn't quite there for important processes, and additionally standard AI gripe is still there, cost.
While AI is charged per run and is expensive, the benefits are not worth it. Yes you can save a couple of hours development, but that will be seriously out weighed if the automation runs for any length of time.
Top comments (3)
Why not pull Copilot credits from the tenant pool? Are custom agents used very heavily at your org?
Good writeup, by the way. I still haven't found an "ah-hah!" scenario for generative actions, but in fairness I haven't played with it enough yet. This makes me want to revisit it.
2 reasons, one I may want to use them 😉, but second is the big one, I don't want people getting use to free credits. Because when they do and we run out , someone has to pay (I suspect that's why Microsoft does it).
Thank you, I would say it's still not 100% ready, but I think it soon will
Good!