Are you excited about what’s been happening with Power Automate cloud flows lately? No? Me neither. While I’ve recently had the opportunity to build some flows for brand new scenarios that I haven’t previously encountered, my overarching sentiment about the toolkit has been pretty much the same as five years ago. Meh.
We’re still forced to endure the bugs and limitations of the new flow editor, often needing to revert to the legacy experience that wasn’t enjoyable either. There are some new telemetry visualizations available in the platform, yet it remains hard for me to truly trust that my flows would be reliably doing what I told them to.
It’s almost as if Microsoft wasn’t investing all that much in the API-based Power Automate anymore. I have very little experience on the RPA side, so I won’t comment on desktop flows here. But for API automation, there’s reason enough to speculate about the future direction. Which is what I love to do in this newsletter anyway, so let’s get to it!
Error: roadmap not found
Usually when Microsoft is preparing to launch new things for existing products, they like to do demo videos and animations of features before they are even built into a working preview environment. So, what’s up and coming for flows then?
This is the 2025 Release Wave 2 highlights video for Power Automate:
The features presented in it are:
Power Automate desktop flows: static analysis via Flow Checker.
Power Automate cloud flows: savings quantification and process map.
From those links you’ll see how all three have been delivered as part of 2025 Release Wave 1 already. It is therefore factually incorrect to say that “in this video, discover the exciting new features coming to Power Automate in 2025 release wave 2.” But that’s how product marketing handles the situation. They have to show something that looks good on video.
As for the actual wave 2 items, this is the entire plan currently for Power Automate:
Not a whole lot to look forward to. We need to keep in mind, however, that the official release plan announcements are becoming increasingly irrelevant as Microsoft has largely given up on the semiannual release wave model introduced during the era when James Phillips was leading the Business Applications group. Revisit my earlier newsletter issue for a deeper dive:
In the past, when the release plan was showing up empty for certain products, it was quite a reliable indicator that there were either changes ahead for the offering or that the product was on the chopping block. Sometimes MS will refuse to publicly announce that it has given up on a product, like with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Yet the lack of a roadmap allows customers and partners to read between the lines that the end is near.
For Power Automate, it’s not quite as simple as that, though. Especially when it comes to cloud flows.
Agents or automations?
Nothing is going to remove the need for the connectors and logic that is today used via Power Automate cloud flows. That technology must remain operational and be further developed to serve the exponentially growing need for new automated actions that the future virtual workers are expected to carry out.
The question is rather this: what elements will fit into the highest-level picture of what Microsoft wants customers to pursue? As of right now, here’s a fresh illustration of how MS is pitching the three core components for AI success:

What AI Success looks like through the eyes of Microsoft: apps, agents, interfaces.
Apps are still there, despite the frequent claims of them dying away. Copilot, the beloved big brother of Clippy, is the interface that will bring AI to everyone. Finally, agents are the hottest thing that must perform the most magic in this success team to unlock ROI from AI.
Where does the automation layer fit here? Well, it’s not in the Top 3. Just like we don’t have Dataverse listed either, that doesn’t mean there’s no need for it. But it does give the signal of which elements will be pushed to the front line for users to see, and which ones are going to serve in the back end of the digital factory.
Agent Flows are what makes Copilot Studio agents able to do something more than just chat. Without such flows, today’s AI is too often like an assistant without hands. They are also needed for triggering autonomous agents when an event happens (email received etc.). Now, the technology behind Agent Flows is the good ol’ cloud flows. Your Agent Flows will show up in the Power Automate maker portal and show as being linked to the Copilot Studio plan for licensing purposes, as shown in this video by Reza Dorrani:
Previously when Microsoft Teams was the hottest thing (before the Copilot era), we already saw how cloud flows were repackaged into the Workflows app in Teams. We also have the ability to create flows from within the canvas app editor, in a modal dialog. Power Automate is therefore no stranger to being presented as a feature of another (bigger) product.
Is it possible that agents will gain skills to do things on their own without calling Power Automate flows? It looks like this is already happening. 15x MVP Peter Charquero Kestenholz shared the below image on LinkedIn that showed how enabling code interpreter in Copilot Studio now allows agents to directly write into a Dataverse table:
There is no law dictating that every cross-application data operation in the Microsoft productivity and business cloud apps would have to go via cloud flows. Let’s remember that Power Automate itself is also “just” a layer on top of Azure Logic Apps. Meant to be a citizen friendly experience for building automated business logic - yet often ending up being not user friendly enough to build flows without ending up in code-land with all sorts of OData filter queries and HTTP calls that make you question the point of it all.
Sure, it is powerful when people without programming skills get to call REST APIs from their Power Platform solutions. But can Power Automate ever become better at supporting real-life scenarios? When flow makers need to constantly check on the right way to populate lookups, filter data, work with JSON objects etc. - that’s not a particularly good product experience. It’s more like an IDE that forces business folks to work in VS Code style - without any of the freedom that comes with working on the code directly.
GenAI is already doing app UI creation via the Generative Pages preview feature that spits out nice looking React + TypeScript apps based on your prompts. How’s AI doing on the Power Automate side? Based on my experiments, it sucks. You totally should not let Copilot touch any of your cloud flows that you don’t want to get irreversibly broke.
Automation logic should obviously be easier for LLMs to manage than something which requires a visible UI. When I build flows, I chat with AI a lot, but it is not the AI from Microsoft. Instead, I need to jump between ChatGPT and the flow editor, asking AI for tips on how to do something via the Power Automate GUI which ultimately gets turned into Logic Apps code anyway.
It feels pointless, and it is. I believe Microsoft is fully aware of the predicament in which the cloud flows find themselves in. Whatever the solution will be, though, is most likely going to be delivered as capabilities related to agents and interfaces. One of the top 3 concepts for AI Success. Maybe the Microsoft 365 Agent product initiative will also play a part in reimagining what process automation consists of in the MS cloud tomorrow.
The parity that never arrived
A phrase that I will always associate with Power Automate is “parity will arrive in the fullness of time”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can see the former Power Automate leader Stephen Siciliano + Ryan Cunningham discuss in a fun lil’ video. Back in my MVP days I created a motivational poster of the phrase with Canva and shared it in an internal MVP chat. That then turned into a T-shirt design which was launched while visiting Redmond in the 2019 MVP Summit. Here’s my former colleague Antti Pajunen wearing the shirt with pride when we were opening up the FF office to business in 2020:

“Welcome to the land of parity!”
I will now put on my CRM hat for a moment and reminisce about the technology which most Power Platform low-code makers will have never touched: XRM workflows.
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