Plan and prepare for Power Automate in 2024 release wave 2

Important

The 2024 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2024 to March 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power Automate.

Overview

Power Automate provides a low-code experience to improve productivity of your organization by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, and creating intelligent automations based on generative AI. Power Automate provides 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 Power Platform.

2024 release wave 2 has investments across four major themes:

• Easier experiences to build, troubleshoot, and manage automations: Copilot in Power Automate allows more of your organization to apply the power of generative AI to build richer automations faster—for both automations that run in the cloud and on the desktop—and make it easier to manage your automation estate from a central location. 'Record with Copilot' is redefining robotic process automation in the age of AI.
• Ensuring scalability and privacy: Power Automate continues to simplify large-scale management, and bolster governance and privacy controls.
• Higher scale of process mining: Process intelligence capability in Power Automate is helping more organizations understand their business and look for ways to optimize how they get work done. With Microsoft 365 Graph based recommendations, it's never been easier to get started.
• New ways to automation: With AI flows, makers can rely on generative AI to understand a set of steps and dynamically reason over unstructured content. This helps customers rely on automation for more scenarios that currently require manual effort.

Investment areas

AI flows
AI flows leverage the simplicity of natural language and the power of rapidly evolving large language model (LLM) abilities to create more intelligent, flexible, and dynamic automation. Instead of building out rules-based processes from beginning to end, you work with AI to create an automation plan. When you execute the plan at runtime, the LLM considers all the resources available to it and dynamically selects the most appropriate actions to achieve the desired outcome.

Cloud flows
Cloud flows is a core automation capability in Power Automate that uses the latest in AI technology to allow customers to focus on what matters and automate the rest with natural language and low code. Cloud flows 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 created using Power Apps, when a data alert is triggered in Power BI, or to take an action in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Support for Intelligent Document Processing and embedding intelligence through built-in AI Builder capability.
• Mobile applications help customers receive notifications, perform approvals, and invoke and monitor automation runs on the go.

Copilot for Power Automate
Power Automate makes it possible for you to not just describe a flow to create, but also improve and iterate on your flows with AI-driven conversations. This next-generation AI-based copilot in Power Automate sits inside the flow designer and helps with every flow that’s being built or changed.

Desktop flows
Desktop flows is the robotic process automation (RPA) solution within Power Automate. Desktop flows provide automation for Windows desktop applications, services, and experiences for orchestration and deployment within Power Platform.

Process mining
Power Automate Process Mining empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their data and discover valuable insights that can accelerate their journey to operational excellence. Capabilities include:

• Use out-of-the-box templates for rapid deployment from data ingestion to pre-defined custom reports.
• Gain deep insights with powerful features including rework detector, root cause analysis, process compare, and custom metrics.
• Create views, publish them to create custom Power BI reports, and share them across the organization.
• Seamlessly integrate with Power Platform to turn insights into action.
• Discover possibilities for automation and solutions for workflows and 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:

Check out the release plan

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

Helpful links	Description
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Improve your understanding of how to license Power Automate.
Product documentation	Find documentation for Power Automate.
User community	Engage with Power Automate experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events	Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials	Get started with Power Automate.