Power Automate vs. Copilot: Why Automation’s Future Lies Beyond Copilot Hype
This year has been dominated by Copilot announcements and the buzz around AI. It often feels like any innovation that doesn’t include the words “Copilot” or “AI” is put on pause. While Copilots certainly have exciting potential, they’re not the ultimate answer to every automation challenge. In my experience, Power Automate remains the unsung hero of business automation—reliable, versatile, and indispensable. In this article, I’ll explore why, despite all the hype, the future of automation is still firmly rooted in the power of tools like Power Automate.
Quick back story
My business partner, Nick Hance, and I created and manage a website called ConnectorReview.com. It’s a free community resource if you’re looking to learn which apps and services have a certified Power Automate connector from the use-case perspective. We started this website during Covid when we had some extra time on our hands. At the time, there were around 400 connectors we had to research and tag by use case. Since then, the connector count has soared to more than 1,200. All this to say, we keep a close eye on changes to connectors – a very close eye.
Another understand-Heidi’s-background piece to the puzzle: we have created five Microsoft-certified Power Automate connectors and looked closely at building pre-built agents that others could buy/use through Copilot Studio.
A bit of the secret sauce behind ConnectorReview.com
Every day in the wee hours of the morning, a script runs to check of any new updates to connector documentation on the official Microsoft Learn pages. This includes brand new connectors, removed connectors, new actions or triggers, removed actions or triggers and renamed items. Every. Single. Day. I can look back on any day and tell you how many items were updated and how many connectors were added. Here’s a sample for you – it shows a new connector, some brand-new actions, and some updated ones as well:
Within each line item, you can even dive deeper to see what was updated and when:
We probably have the biggest log of Microsoft-certified connector updates and changes that exists outside of Microsoft!
Connector history
Once upon a time, new connectors popped up at least once a week. New actions and new triggers were a daily occurrence.
Back when “Copilot Plug-Ins” were announced (Microsoft Learn now refers to them as “Copilot agents”), though, the speed of innovation slammed to a stagnant phase from which it has not yet recovered. Microsoft seems to be pouring everything into getting Copilot plug-in/agent connectors set up.
Now, new Power Automate connector deployment time has slowed. They come out in big batches. There has been a deployment freeze since late-November that will continue through early January 2025.
Despite this slower deployment schedule, I would hazard a guess that Power Automate has far more daily users than Copilot Agents extended with connector actions (but I have no access to verify or deny this).
My own experience: Focus on Power Automate or Pre-built Agents?
We investigated building a custom Copilot plug-in/pre-built agent using our connectors. But with lightning speed we ran into a big problem: dynamic schema is not supported for 3rd party connectors. Our connectors help automate form submissions – so in the trigger you must define which form you are triggering the flow for. Copilot and generative AI do not support this. It is, therefore, First party connectors (Dataverse, Forms, etc). But for some reason, not for others (yet).
We are not the only connector authors who use dynamic schema – and for now, Microsoft has limited their AI integration capabilities with agents.
But it’s OK. Do you know why? Because our customers aren’t building out Agents and custom copilots. (Yet?) Their form automations have transformed their business and they rely on flows to run large parts of those. Power Automate is the glue that makes everything work. Even Agents and Copilots! Everything runs on Power Automate.
So for now, and for the foreseeable future, that’s where we will continue to focus. And we will continue to support connectors and monitor new ones and updates to existing ones, sharing them with the community at ConnectorReview.com. Because I wholeheartedly believe Power Automate is the future for automation, not Copilots or Agents.
