Plan and prepare for Power Automate in 2023 release wave 1
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new in Power Automate?. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.
Important
The 2023 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2023 to September 2023. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power Automate.
Overview
Microsoft Power Automate provides the tools that you can use to improve productivity in your organization by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Power Automate provides a better way to get things done across your organization through cloud flows and robotic process automation (RPA). It's deeply integrated with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and the rest of Microsoft Power Platform.
Power Automate is investing in several areas as a part of Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 around the following three themes:
Driving organization-wide low code adoption: Our focus is on making sure IT leaders in every organization are ready and resourced to broadly scale Power Platform across the entirety of their organizations.
Achieving experience excellence: We'll provide simpler, modern authoring experiences infused with intelligent assistance at every step. The experience will feel more like the rest of the Microsoft cloud, including seamless collaboration throughout a user's workday.
Enabling flagship solutions with high scale: Users are increasingly betting on Power Platform to drive critical business processes across the enterprise. The professional developers and fusion teams driving these flagship solutions have needs that extend beyond traditional no-code citizen development.
For official product documentation and training for Power Automate, go to:
Updates to Power Automate 2023 release wave 1
Investment areas
Desktop flows
Desktop flows is the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution within Power Automate. Desktop flows provides automation for Windows desktop applications, services, and experiences for orchestration and deployment within Power Platform. In 2023 release wave 1, we'll invest in desktop flows in the following ways:
- Drive adoption within large and small enterprises, delivering features that enable organizations to deploy their automations at scale.
- Provide citizen developers with delightful first run experiences with high ease of use and fast access to hosted resources so they can build or run their automations.
- Enable ISV integrations, opening new options for partners to build RPA solutions based on desktop flows decoupled from cloud flows.
Cloud flows
Cloud flows is a core automation capability in Power Automate that allows customers to focus on what matters and automate the rest. Cloud flows capabilities include:
- Integration with applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dynamics 365 suite of applications, and more.
- 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 Power Virtual Agents.
- Mobile applications that help customers receive notifications, perform approvals, and invoke and monitor automation runs on the go.
In 2023 release wave 1, we're focusing on making it easier to build and share automations and help organizations drive adoption with confidence through deeper governance and privacy controls.
Process advisor
Process advisor empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their data and discover valuable insights that can accelerate their journey to operational excellence. Process advisor includes both process mining and task mining capabilities.
Process mining: this tool uncovers inefficiencies in large-scale processes using event log data. It provides detailed process maps with performance metrics, revealing optimization opportunities in processes like accounts receivable and order-to-cash.
Task mining: this offers a granular view of desktop tasks within business operations. It monitors user actions, providing insights into task execution, identifying common errors, and highlighting automation opportunities.
In 2023 release wave 1, we're focusing on the following:
- Support larger scale, ensure rapid ingestion, download, and processing with incremental refresh, and support customers that utilize their existing ETL with bring your own Data Lake.
- Optimize user experiences across data ingestion, analysis, customization, and analytics. This includes proper versioning, auto-mapping, improved error resolution, and AI-driven visualizations in Power BI.
- Allow makers to generate actionable insights and initiate automation based on process mining business rules using Power Automate.
- Integrate process mining to offer built-in process improvement capabilities with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Finance & Operations for various use cases.
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 studio and helps with every flow that’s being built or changed.
Copilot in Power Automate allows open-ended and conversational experiences while authoring your flows. As you build, you’ll be able to ask questions and get assistance making improvements and changes. You won’t need any special knowledge of how Power Automate works. Just by using natural language, you’ll be able to build and enhance everything from a simple flow to a complex, robust enterprise-wide process.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Power Automate below:
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. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| 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. |