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Power Automate cloud flows have been around for years and then Microsoft released Agent flows inside the Copilot Studio portal, and now it seems like we have two automation tools that look similar, but what makes agent flows different from Power Automate flows? 
Agent Flows vs Power Automate
Power Automate
Power Automate has been the tool for process automation inside the Power Platform for many years now, and many automation types can be designed and built:
- Digital Process Automation with Cloud flows
- Robotic Process Automate with Desktop flows
- Intelligent automation, combining Cloud flows, desktop flows and AI features (custom prompts, models)
Learn more about Power Automate in our blog dedicated to this topic.
Agent flows
Microsoft took everything that Power Automate cloud flows are and put it into Copilot Studio to enable agents to perform more deterministic, structured steps and logic. But agent flows come with a few more features that are not present in Power Automate:
- Human in the loop actions: request for information from a user and send advanced approvals
- Express mode: execute workflows faster when they run from Copilot Studio agent flows
- Agent flows use Copilot credits and are billed based on the number of actions that each flow executes.
- Code interpreter to perform complex operations
Summary of differences
| Power Automate Cloud Flows | Copilot Studio Agent Flows |
Primary purpose | Process automation and orchestration | Process automation within the scope of agents |
Licensing | Uses the license of the user who built it license or flow based licensed | Copilot credits comsompution |
Built in | Power Automate portal | Copilot Studio |
AI-native features | Can use AI builder features, connect to Microsoft Foundry and other external AI services | Built-in features and has the same capabilities of Cloud flows |
Sharing & collaboration | Allows for co-owners, run-only users, make copies of workwlow | Limited |
When to use agent flows vs traditional automation
Since agent flows are so similar to Power Automate workflows, it can difficult to know when to use which, some general decision points to go for Agent flows in Copilot Studio are:
- If you need to call deterministic automations from your agents
- If you plan to re-use automations across multiple agents
- If you are planning to use premium connectors but you don’t have a Power Automate premium license
- If you have Copilot Studio credits available in your environment
- If you want to use any of the capabilities that are available only in agent flows:
- Code interpreter
- Multi-stage / advanced approvals
- Request input from human
Learn more about agentic automation here.
How to design effective AI agent workflows
Agentic workflows work similarly to Power Automate workflows, so developing them follows a very similar process. Some good practices to follow when building any kind of workflow are:
- Diagnose the process and identify bottlenecks and potential improvements
- Always start by mapping your process
- Analyze data volume to avoid excessive consumption quota and credit usage
- Keep in mind environment separation for Dev, Test, and Prod
You can learn more about guidelines and best practices here.
Common Challenges in AI workflow design
Automating any process can come with challenges, regardless of AI being used or not. Some important considerations are:
- Legacy system integration: not all systems have a way to connect to them easily from workflows, sometimes robotic process automation (RPA) can be used as part of an orchestrated workflow to overcome this challenge.
- Unclear boundaries between agents and flows: knowing the right tool for the right business need is key, not all flows need to be built inside Copilot Studio and not all AI features need to be built inside Copilot Studio.
- Governance and sharing limitations in Agent Flows: since Agent flows are a fairly new tool, it’s still evolving and not all Power Automate features for enabling governance, monitoring and sharing are available.
- Capacity and cost management: since agent flows use Copilot credits, it’s always really important to analyze the volume of operations and the data that will be handled by this type of workflow, to avoid surprises at the end of the month if unnecessary quota is consumed.
Are you ready to discover the joy of automation?
Picking the right tool for each requirement is a key decision when designing and developing agentic automations that work in the real world. With our Microsoft Power Automate and Copilot Studio development services, we have helped clients in multiple industries transform their operations with agentic workflows.
