At Microsoft Ignite (October 2022), Microsoft introduced a new feature coming to Power Automate: “You describe it, AI builds it”. This feature aims to make flow building even easier, by allowing you to simply type a description of a flow you want to build, and the flow will be automatically generated for you.
You can find this feature under the Create area of https://make.powerautomate.com/
At the time of writing this post, the feature has not been rolled out everywhere yet. So to try this out, you need to be working in an environment set to United States region. See here for how to do this, however you may not have the required permissions. If not, you can create a new Office 365 trial first.
If you’re looking to get some inspiration, you can refresh the example flows to pick the one you want to try out.
After going through the steps, such as confirming the connections to the apps used, you’ll be taken to the flow editor. Your actions will be added, and you can work through to add or update each step.
What works
Some of the limitations described in this post may no longer apply depending on the time you are reading it. This is a preview feature, and is likely to be improved by Microsoft overtime.
These are some examples of things I’ve typed in that provided accurate flow suggestions:
- Notify me when a blog is posted
- Create a Planner task when an important email is received – in this case, it will correctly have the trigger action set to only look at emails with Importance set to High.
- Notify me when I get Gmail
- Send teams message when Dynamics account created- you will need to specify the Dynamics/Dataverse table Accounts at the next step, it wont populate it automatically.
- Create a Dataverse record when email received
- Send an email for every row in a spreadsheet
- When a form is submitted, add the details to Power BI
The feature does not yet work for every connector. Below are a list of examples of connectors I found that it does work for:
- Approvals
- Planner
- SharePoint (Lists, Files)
- Outlook
- Microsoft Forms
- Other Office 365 apps- Excel Online, OneDrive
- Gmail
- Google Sheets
- Dataverse/Dynamics 365
- AI Builder (such as sentiment detection. It will use the Dataverse action “Predict”, and does not automatically work for all AI Builder models)
- Word Online
- Power BI
- Customer Voice
- Azure AD
- Mailchimp
- SQL Server
- YouTube
- Salesforce
The list above is not extensive.
Tips
To use this feature successfully, it helps to already be aware of the types of triggers and actions available in Power Automate. Beginners to Power Automate can benefit from the example flows that are recommended. However, if you want to build something more unique, it helps if you are familiar with the types of steps that should be included in the flow- to ensure that the AI generates all the actions you need for the flow to work.
For example, in one of my tests I used “populate a word template when form submitted“. This will create a flow, but won’t contain all the steps you need. The AI will generate the steps below. However, if you want to use the form responses to populate the Word template, you will need to add the additional Microsoft Forms action- Get response details.
You will need to be more specific in your description by typing something like “Populate a word template with response from Microsoft forms“. This works, but also seems to add in some unnecessary steps to the flow- such as the Get my profile action at the end.
Overall, Describe it to design it is a powerful and impressive feature, and significantly cuts down the time you typically would be spending creating flows from scratch.
Rishona Elijah 