Quite often the only way to figure out how things work in the Power Platform is by merely fumbling around and trying stuff. When you add the unpredictable LLM-based services into the mix, it’s a wild ride. It also makes it challenging at times to write about any of it in a structured and logical way.

This could be one reason videos are such a popular format for online content sharing these days. So, I decided to follow along and just switch on the camera and start recording, to show you what I had learned about Microsoft 365 Copilot scheduled prompts:

Here are the topics that I talk about in the 12min video:

Let’s now drill into how Copilot scheduled prompts relate to what I’ve been writing about in this newsletter.

It may not feel like such a glamorous feature. In short, if you’ve explored Tasks in ChatGPT, a feature launched in January by OpenAI, then scheduled prompts will feel familiar. The name Microsoft has chosen here is (for once) more descriptive: these really are the same thing as prompts, but they are scheduled to run at a specific time in a recurring manner. Note: only up to 15 runs (ever) are currently supported.

Scheduled prompts are behind the full Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing gate. The feature itself is quite basic and you won’t find too much excitement or hype from the documentation page. So, why did I spend any time covering it?

The reasons for my interest are about A) how this feature has been “reimagined” already, B) the ways it leverages Power Platform resources, and C) the possible connections to the future of Power Automate. Who knows, maybe even D) the coming Microsoft 365 Agent product offering (expected to be announced at Ignite 2025).

First, about that “reimagining” part. Back at around Ignite 2024, Microsoft announced Copilot Actions. Then, they rolled it out in preview at around the start of 2025. And by May 2025, Copilot Actions were already removed from the product.

You blink for a moment and a keynote level feature already becomes deprecated. Welcome to “business at the speed of AI”…

What ended up happening is that the standalone functionality of Copilot Actions was folded into Copilot scheduled prompts. The left navigation bar item for Actions got removed, but since MS has been redesigning the Office/M365/Copilot UI almost on a weekly basis, who even remembers it anymore?

In the latest UI related change announced in M365 Message Center, the Workflows app in Microsoft Teams will soon start showing these scheduled prompts, too:

I’ve written about the ways through which the modern LLM-based AI assistants are failing to live up to the job title of a virtual assistant. Because they mainly talk but cannot perform real tasks on their own yet.

Scheduled prompts is yet another area where Copilot says it will do something, and then just not do anything at all. This is an example of a suggestion that Copilot (even with GPT-5) may give you after a prompt:

Well, you can talk with Copilot all you want. It will make bigger and better promises of what it can do. Which is the problem with the way every AI chatbot is trained to end the response with a call-to-action of “would you like me to predict even more tokens, Sir?”

Did you already guess what happens? Exactly. No scheduled prompt is ever created, no matter how much you chat with the helpful AI assistant. Copilot cannot create scheduled prompts for itself. It only thinks it can. Which is far worse than just giving a straight up error message “could not complete operation”. But LLMs don’t do that. They cannot say “no”, so they choose to lie.

That’s the end-user UX, and it is what it is. Next, let’s look at the Power Platform side of what goes on here.