Exercise - Build a basic Power Automate flow in Microsoft Copilot Studio

  • 12 minutes

It’s highly beneficial for companies to connect to their data because they can provide users with up-to-date information and insights that are often relevant for customer or user questions.

In this exercise, you go through the process of creating a new topic, adding a Power Automate action to retrieve information from an external service, and displaying that data back to the user.

Task: Create a new topic

Your first task is to create a new topic by following these steps:

  1. Open the Microsoft Copilot Studio authoring canvas and navigate to the User 1 Contoso Customer Copilot you created previously. Select the Topics page from the navigation menu to the left of the screen.

  2. Then select the New Topic drop down at the top of the page and choose the From Blank option. Enter Check Weather as the name of your topic.

  3. Enter simple trigger phrases that a user might ask, such as What is the weather and What is the temperature today, until you have at least five trigger phrases. Select the Edit button within the node to open a pane to the right of the screen where you can add the trigger phrases.

    Screenshot of adding trigger phrases to the node about the weather.

  4. Create a new Question node below the trigger phrase node and then enter text, such as: Of course, I can share the weather with you! Can you tell me the name of the region where you want to know the weather?

    Screenshot of adding a question node about the weather.

  5. For these modules, you store the User's entire response; however, you could also use the Country or region entity so that you can use slot filling to detect the country/region from the user's response to the question.

    Tip

    You could detect or estimate the user's region from another topic or time zone area system variable.

  6. Rename the variable to Region. To do so, select the name of the variable within the node. Within a pane that appears to the right of the screen, you can change the name. The node should then appear as it does in the following screenshot.

    Screenshot of adding the identify value and changing the variable name.

  7. Within the top right corner of the screen, select the Save button to ensure that your work is saved.

Task: Create your Power Automate flow

Next, you create your Power Automate flow by following these steps:

  1. Select the Add node button below the question node to add a new node to the topic. Select Call an action > Create a flow, as shown in the following screenshot. Power Automate opens in a new browser window and includes the scaffolding pre and post actions for a new Power Automate flow to interact with Microsoft Copilot Studio, as shown in the second screenshot.

    Screenshot of using the Call an action property.

    Screenshot of scaffolding of the Power Automate flow that was automatically created.

    Examine the preceding screenshot to note the scaffolding that occurs when you create a new Power Automate flow by using Microsoft Copilot Studio. Two nodes are automatically created. The first node is the input that the flow expects from Microsoft Copilot Studio. You don't need to set inputs within this action; however, a common input would be a user utterance or variable, such as the country/region specified in the example. The second node is the output that a maker can return to Microsoft Copilot Studio after the flow retrieves or completes the operations within the automation.

    Important

    Make sure that you keep the Microsoft Copilot Studio pre and post actions at the top and bottom of your Power Automate flow to ensure that the data can be passed to and from Power Automate from Microsoft Copilot Studio.

  2. In the new flow window that opens, select the Add an input within the first scaffolded action. Then, select Text.

    Screenshot of Adding a text input.

  3. Within the first column, enter Region (leaving the second column empty).

  4. Then, select the Insert new step button below the When Power Virtual Agents calls a flow card to add a new action.

    Screenshot of adding a new step into the flow.

  5. Select the Add an action option from the menu.

  6. Enter weather in the search bar and then select Get current weather by MSN Weather.

    Screenshot of Choose an operation, showing search results for weather.

  7. A new node appears, where you can enter the location and units. When you select into the Location field, as shown in the following screenshot, the Dynamic content option displays.

    Screenshot of selecting the Dynamic content function.

    Dynamic content is real-time data, and in this scenario, the region data would be the data passed from Microsoft Copilot Studio that you set up at the beginning of the topic and requested from your user. From the Dynamic content drop-down menu, select Region and then keep units as Imperial.

    You're sending the Region data from the user to the weather service from MSN Weather. The flow will get this data and make it available for you to return to the user in Microsoft Copilot Studio in the next steps.

    Screenshot of passing Dynamic content into the Get current weather action.

  8. Select the Return value(s) to Power Virtual Agents node at the end of the flow, then select Add an output > Number. Place your cursor in the Enter a value to respond text box. The Dynamic content panel opens from the result of the Get current weather API action in the previous step. Select Temperature from dynamic data to add it to the response text box. Then, enter Temperature in the Name field.

    Screenshot of using the Temperature dynamic content.

    You built an API request to the MSN Weather service where you entered the Region from Microsoft Copilot Studio. The MSN Weather service retrieves the data for the region, and when you have that data (almost instantly), you can return it to Microsoft Copilot Studio and the user.

  9. The flow is almost complete. You need to rename it before you can move on to best practices so that administrators and users can more easily find it in Microsoft Copilot Studio. Select the template title and rename it to Get Temperature, as shown in the following screenshot.

    Screenshot of renaming and saving the flow.

  10. Select Save on the flow in Power Automate to ensure that it saves. Wait a moment until the green banner appears, indicating success.

You completed your work in Power Automate. Next, you switch to Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Task: Connect a Power Automate flow with Microsoft Copilot Studio

In this task, you connect a Power Automate flow with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

  1. Open your existing topic in Microsoft Copilot Studio, titled Check Weather, and return to the bottom of your flow, as shown in the following screenshot. Select Call an action. Your new Power Automate flow displays in the list. From the list, select Get Temperature.

    Screenshot of selecting the Get Temperature flow.

    Note

    If the flow does not show up, save the Check Weather topic and refresh the page.

  2. When you select the Get Temperature flow, a new Action node is created automatically. If the flow requires an input, it requests that you select the value. Because the flow that you created in the previous steps has the input of Region, you need to add this input into the Power Automate action by selecting the variable that the value is stored in from the user, which is Region, from the previous steps in the lab.

  3. Select Enter or select a value and then select the Region variable that you created in previous steps of this lab. This value is now connected to the Power Automate flow and displays the result from Power Automate into the Temperature variable.

    Screenshot of mapping the Microsoft Copilot Studio variable to the flow.

    Now, you can display the output by using the variable in a Message node. However, if you're following along with the Contoso Coffee sample data provided in the previous labs, you can continue with the steps to make it relevant for the Contoso Coffee scenario.

  4. Add a Condition node so that you can check if the Temperature variable is greater than 75. If so, then a specific message displays. Otherwise, with all other conditions, you display a different message. Add two message nodes for both sides of the conditional statement.

  5. For the true branch, if the Temperature is greater than 75, add the following text within the Message node:

    For {Topic.Region} the temperature is {Topic.Temperature} and that is getting warm! Consider cooling off with one of our cold brew coffees.

    The braces { } are variables that display dynamic data. To enter variables into the node, use the {X} button on the Message node and then select a variable from the list, as shown in the following screenshot.

    Screenshot of the dynamic data variable window.

  6. For the All other conditions branch, add the following text within the message node: The temperature for {Topic.Region} is {Topic.Temperature}. Where the braces { } are variables that display dynamic data.

    Screenshot of conditions with messages for each.

  7. To end the conversation, select the Add node button below the condition. Select Topic management and then choose End conversation.

    Screenshot of selecting the End of conversation node.

  8. Save your topic using the button found in the top right corner of the screen and then use the testing panel to test the flow. Determine if the response is as expected, as shown in the following screenshot.

    Screenshot of the completed flow with test.

You successfully created a Power Automate flow and a new topic in Microsoft Copilot Studio that used the flow to provide real-time data from an external service to the user.