Power Automate drops Copilot flow building on 30 November

What Microsoft has announced

Microsoft has published two Power Automate retirement notices within three days of each other. MC1537406 was published on 3 November 2026 and retires "Describe it to design it", the feature that builds a new cloud flow from a plain-language description. MC1540258 followed on 5 November and ends support for Copilot in the designer for cloud flows and agent flows. Both features stop on 30 November 2026. The same date appears on Microsoft's own list of upcoming Power Platform deprecations.

Flows that already exist won't be deleted, moved or altered, and Microsoft says that includes flows Copilot originally built or edited. Makers can still create, edit, test and run flows in the visual designer. They can also start from templates and troubleshoot with the expression editor, the flow checker and run history. MWPro's write-up of MC1540258 scores the notice 54 out of 100, which it labels high impact. MWPro also rates the effect on users as moderate, because running automations carry on as before.

Makers who want to keep describing automations in everyday language now have two options from Microsoft. One is the Power Automate plugin inside an organisation-approved coding assistant such as GitHub Copilot CLI. The other is Copilot Studio connected through MCP, the Model Context Protocol that lets AI assistants call external tools.

Natural-language flow building moves to the command line

The Power Automate plugin README on GitHub lists GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code as its supported clients. Both are terminal-based coding agents. The plugin needs Node.js 18 or later and signs in through the user's local Azure CLI session, started with az login. It bundles a FlowAgent MCP server that can list, create, edit, publish, disable and delete flows, copy them between environments, resubmit or cancel runs, diagnose failures and work with desktop (RPA) flows.

The plugin therefore does much more than the designer Copilot did. The old assistant ran inside a browser tab with the same view of one flow as the maker. The plugin runs on a laptop and can reach every environment the signed-in account can reach. The README describes some protections. The plugin saves a local backup before every update or delete, and refuses to delete when no backup can be taken, unless the user deliberately skips that step. Restores come with a catch, though. A deleted flow comes back with a new ID, and a flow that sat inside a solution comes back outside it, unless an admin restores the original within 21 days. The plugin writes telemetry locally, prunes session logs after 14 days and doesn't prune its core log automatically. The README says nothing about licensing requirements and doesn't say whether the plugin is in preview or generally available.

What the change means for NZ businesses

In many New Zealand organisations, the people building Power Automate flows sit in finance, operations or HR and aren't developers. They used Copilot in the designer to get a working first draft of an approval flow or a SharePoint-to-Excel sync without learning expression syntax. Microsoft's replacement assumes a different kind of user, someone comfortable installing Node.js, running Azure CLI and giving instructions to an agent in a terminal. Few of the citizen developers we meet in mid-sized NZ firms work like that.

The retirement therefore leaves each organisation with a decision. Makers can learn the designer properly, which is slower to start but keeps everything inside the Power Automate interface that admins already govern. Or IT can approve a coding assistant and the plugin, which keeps natural-language building available but brings in new software, separate licences and another vendor handling prompts. GitHub Copilot and Claude Code are each sold separately with their own data handling terms. Approving either one for flow building is a procurement and privacy decision as much as a technical one. Firms that already hold customer or employee personal information in Microsoft 365 should look at where those prompts go before saying yes.

Governance matters here as well. When Copilot sat inside the designer, a maker could only change the flow open in front of them. A coding agent with an admin's az login session can publish and delete across environments, so the account it runs under matters a great deal. The restore behaviour in the README is a good reason to keep important flows inside solutions and under version control before anyone points an agent at them.

The timing is tight for NZ teams. Microsoft's notices give a date without a time or a time zone, and 30 November 2026 falls on a Monday. We'd plan as if both features are unavailable from that Monday morning in New Zealand, which leaves about three working weeks from the date of this post. MC1540258 asks admins to tell Power Automate and Copilot Studio users about the change, and many makers won't have seen a message centre post.

The notices also fit a wider pattern. Microsoft is moving AI features out of individual product screens and towards agents and MCP connections that span several products. Organisations that built habits around one embedded assistant should expect that kind of change again, and their automation plans should treat AI building aids as features Microsoft can take away.

Practical next steps

• Find out who relies on the features. Ask the makers in each department whether they build or edit flows with Copilot prompts or Describe it to design it, and list the business processes those people look after.
• Tell makers this week. Send the notice Microsoft asks admins to pass on, and explain that existing flows keep running.
• Decide on the plugin before 30 November. If you approve GitHub Copilot CLI or Claude Code, do it through your normal software and privacy review, and write down which accounts and environments the plugin may use.
• Pilot outside production. Run the plugin first in a development environment with a non-admin account, because it can publish and delete flows.
• Move important flows into solutions and source control. The plugin's restore behaviour makes this worth doing whichever path you choose.
• Train makers on the designer. A short session on expressions, the flow checker and run history covers most of what makers used Copilot for.
• Check your Copilot Studio licences. If you already pay for Copilot Studio, the MCP route may cover natural-language building without adding a new coding tool.

If you'd like help sorting out your flow inventory or approval rules, our process and automation team works with NZ and Australian organisations on Power Platform governance. Decisions about which AI assistants staff may use belong in your wider AI adoption and governance policy.