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Designing your own copilot using Copilot Studio

Exercise 03: Build and call Power Automate cloud flows from your copilot

Goals for this lab

After this lab you will be able to:

  • Understand the basics of Power Automate
  • Use Copilot Studio to request data from another data source using Power Automate in a basic use case (using the ServiceNow connector) and return the data in a conversational dialog with a customer or user

Fundamental Knowledge: Understanding Power Automate

Expand here for more details.

Power Automate is a cloud-based service that makes it practical and simple for line of business users to build workflows that automate time-consuming business tasks and processes across applications and services.

Power Automate is part of a powerful and adaptable business application platform that includes Power Apps, Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, and Office 365. This platform allows our customers, our partners, and our ISV partners to create purpose-built solutions for their own companies, their industry, for functional roles or even for specific geographies. Line-of-business users, who understand their business needs best, can now easily analyze, compose, and streamline data and processes. Professional developers can easily extend the automation, analytics and apps line-of-business to leverage Azure services like Functions, App Service, and Logic Apps. API connectors, gateways, and Microsoft Dataverse make it possible to get more value out of services or data already in use, either in the cloud or on-premises.

Here are a few examples of what you can do with Power Automate.

  • Automate business processes.

  • Send automatic reminders for past due tasks.

  • Move business data between systems on a schedule.

  • Connect to more than 1000 data sources or any publicly available API.

  • You can even automate tasks on your local computer like computing data in Excel.

Just think about time saved once you automate repetitive manual tasks simply by recording mouse clicks, keystrokes and copy paste steps from your desktop! Power Automate is all about automation.

Microsoft Copilot Studio connects easily with Power Automate, being able to pass the variables from user’s responses and retrieve data from several different data sources, perform complex operations on that data and return to Microsoft Copilot Studio to share that data with the user. Being able to operate on and retrieve data from almost any data source accessible via an API is one of the most valuable benefits of Copilot Studio.

Alternatively, Microsoft Copilot Studio can also directly the same connectors, HTTP requests, or custom connectors as in Power Automate, directly from a topic or from a plugin action.

As part of this Microsoft Copilot Studio lab, it will not include an extensive introduction to Power Automate but does cover a basic scenario of how you can retrieve data from an external data source and use it in the conversational experience of Copilot Studio. To learn more specifically about Power Automate, you can review the Microsoft Docs on Power Automate and also review the in a day material for Microsoft Power Apps, which includes Power Automate.

Build a basic Power Automate cloud flow

Connecting to data provides companies with some of the most benefits as it provides information and insight to users that is up to date and often the relevant for customer or user questions.

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

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