AI Builder

Overview

About AI Builder

Microsoft Power Automate is a SaaS workflow automation platform developed by Microsoft and part of the Microsoft Power Platform, alongside Power Apps and Power BI. The service became generally available as Microsoft Flow on November 1, 2016, and was rebranded to Power Automate on November 4, 2019. Building in Power Automate centers on flows: automated flows triggered by events in connected services, instant flows started manually from a button, scheduled flows that run at set times, and business process flows that guide users through defined steps. Cloud flows connect apps and data through more than 1,400 prebuilt connectors, including Microsoft 365 services such as Excel, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, as well as Dynamics 365, SAP, and Salesforce, with support for custom connectors. Desktop flows add robotic process automation for legacy and UI-based Windows applications, running in attended or unattended mode, and a Copilot assistant can create and edit flows from natural-language descriptions. Power Automate serves a broad range of users, from individuals automating everyday tasks across Microsoft 365 apps to enterprises running governed, large-scale automation across cloud and in-house systems. Built-in task and process mining helps organizations discover and prioritize automation opportunities, with dashboards to examine business processes. Microsoft has expanded the platform through acquisitions: Softomotive in 2020, which brought the WinAutomation and ProcessRobot RPA tools, and Minit in 2022, which strengthened its process mining capabilities. The platform also offers hosted RPA infrastructure with Microsoft-managed virtual machines and automatic scaling for unattended automation. Pricing follows a freemium model with a free tier for basic automation, a per-user premium subscription, and per-process plans for unattended bots, including a hosted-process option on Microsoft-managed machines; process mining is available as an add-on.