What the heck is agent flow?

In April, Microsoft released a new feature for Copilot Studio with great fanfare, called agent flows.

An exciting new capability that transforms how businesses automate workflows with powerful, integrated AI actions

Sounds interesting. What exactly are these agent flows and what do they do? Let’s open Copilot Studio, where there is a dedicated section for flows.

You can start building an (Agent) flow from Copilot Studio (New agent flow).

In this case, as usual, you first describe what you want the flow to do, after which copilot creates the flow. Or at least the basis for it.

Another option is to go directly to the designer and build the flow from scratch yourself.

Finally, this is where the plot of the couplet becomes clear. Agent flow is a Power Automate cloud flow that has been brought into Copilot Studio.

Let’s try adding a few actions to favorites in Power Automate.

We notice that the same favorites are used when doing agent flow.

So it’s the exact same engine behind the scenes. The user interface has been tweaked a bit. I think the way agent flow offers to navigate between the flow’s basic information, designer, activity history, and analytics is better implemented than Power Automate’s.

The activity view is also better. Although by default only 7 days of execution history is shown. The maximum is the same 28 days as in Power Automate. Of course, because it is practically the same tool.

Where are agent flows stored?

The agent flow details do not tell you which solution it is located in.

This usually means that the flow is saved in the environment’s default solution. And that’s where it’s now.

We have an agent located in our solution. What happens when we create a new agent flow inside it?

Like this.

One might assume that the new agent flow would be located in the same solution as the actual agent.

But no.

This one is also saved in the default solution.

Created agent flows are also visible within Power Automate. And from there they naturally open for editing in the Power Automate flow editor.

What’s the point in all this?

At this point, someone might wonder what the hell the idea is of ​​embedding the same old tool with a new name inside Copilot Studio. What is Microsoft after here?

I think the explanation is quite simple. Copilot Studio is seen as the most central tool of the Power Platform in the future. It will be used by a huge number of new developers (and citizen developers) who have never heard of Power Automate, let alone Power Apps. For them, Copilot Studio is being built as a whole, which contains everything they need in itself.

Flows will continue to be a central part of solutions created with Copilot Studio.

Features: Power Automate vs. agent flow

In connection with agent flow, Microsoft also announced a new action that complements the widely used approvals feature. This is of course the advanced approvals feature. It allows, for example, the building of approval chains using a visual editor. It makes it easier to build certain approval scenarios.

The feature is only available in agent flow. It will be interesting to see if the features start to be more divided between Power Automate and agent flow. Or will new features be added only to agent flow in the future and Power Automate will be slowly let die.

Licensing model

I saved the last bit of the sweet spot. So agent flows are (of course) priced differently than traditional Power Automate flows. Agent flows are always run on the Copilot Studio plan.

For agent flow, we can forget about “free” services when the flow only contains standard connectors. We can also forget about user and flow-specific licenses.

Agent flow costs are always based on consumption. It doesn’t matter who performs the flow and whether the actions are standard or premium. The cost is based on the actions performed. 100 actions performed cost 13 messages.

The price of a message in the Pay-as-You-Go model is $0.01. The price of one completed action is then $0.0013.

If you have purchased the Copilot Studio message package (25,000 messages/month, $200/month), the price per message is $0.008. The price per completed action is then $0.00104.

It is worth noting that users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license do not receive any benefit. The tasks they run cost the same as those of unlicensed users.

My old post about optimizing Power Platform requests is now more relevant than ever.

Cost optimization

Copilot Studio’s message-based pricing brings a new dimension to automation design. Agent flows contain the same triggers and actions as Power Automate, allowing us to build automations that have nothing to do with agents, but are charged for in Copilot Studio messages.

In terms of flows, we have the following licensing options in practice:

• User M365 license (only standard features in flow)
• Per-user Power Automate Premium license (14€/month, everyone who benefits from the flow should have this)
• Flow-specific Power Automate Process license (€140.40/month)
• Pay-As-You-Go model ($0.60 per flow execution. Note: entire flow execution, not individual action)
• Agent flow and Copilot Studio capacity ($0.0013 or $0.00104 per action)
• Implemented with Azure Logic Apps (standard function execution: €0.000110, premium function execution: €0.000879). Note: Logic Apps and Power Automate do not include all the same connectors.

Simple?