Plan and prepare for Power Automate in 2024 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Power Automate gives you a low-code experience that helps your organization improve productivity by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. You can also create intelligent automations based on generative AI. Power Automate offers a better way to get things done across your organization through cloud flows, robotic process automation (RPA), and process mining. It's deeply integrated with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and the rest of Microsoft Power Platform.

The 2024 release wave 1 includes investments across three major themes:

• Easier experiences to build, troubleshoot, and manage automations: Copilot in Power Automate enables more people in your organization to use generative AI to build richer automations faster. It also makes it easier to manage your automation estate.

• Ensuring scalability and privacy: Power Automate simplifies large-scale management and strengthens governance and privacy controls.

• Democratization of process mining: With AI that recommends actionable insights, more out-of-the-box capabilities, and deep integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, process mining brings process insights to all citizen makers.

For official product documentation and training for Power Automate, see:

• Power Automate documentation
• Power Automate training on Microsoft Learn

Updates to Power Automate 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Cloud flows
Cloud flows are a core automation capability in Power Automate. They use the latest AI technology to help you focus on what matters by automating the rest with natural language and low code. Cloud flow capabilities include:

• Copilot-assisted experience to create and manage automations across applications such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Dynamics 365 suite.
• Integration with the rest of Microsoft Power Platform, including the ability to invoke workflows from an app you create with Power Apps, trigger a data alert in Power BI, or take action in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Support for intelligent document processing and embedding intelligence through the built-in AI Builder capability.
• Mobile applications that help you receive notifications, perform approvals, and invoke and monitor automation runs on the go.

Copilot for Power Automate
Power Automate enables you to use AI-driven conversations to describe a flow to create and improve and iterate on your flows. This next-generation AI-based copilot in Power Automate resides in the flow designer and helps with every flow you build or change.

Desktop flows
Desktop flows are the robotic process automation solution in Power Automate. With desktop flows, you get automation for Windows desktop applications, services, and experiences for orchestration and deployment within Power Platform.

Process mining
Power Automate Process Mining helps organizations unlock the potential of their data and discover insights that speed up their journey to operational excellence. Capabilities include:

• Use ready-to-use templates for fast deployment, from data ingestion to predefined custom reports.
• Get deep insights with features like rework detectors, root cause analysis, process comparison, and custom metrics.
• Create views, publish them to make custom Power BI reports, and share them across your organization.
• Integrate seamlessly with Power Platform to turn insights into action.
• Find automation possibilities and workflow solutions with task mining.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Power Automate below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Power Automate