Recently the high-tech Giant renamed Microsoft Flow as Power Automate, added robotic process automation (RPA) features to Power Automate and launched Power Virtual Agents. Furthermore, Microsoft also beefed up Power BI’s security, integrated the Power Platform more closely with Microsoft Teams, and debuted new prebuilt models for AI Builder.
Microsoft’s Power Platform is a business tool that lets anyone analyze, act, and automate across their organization. That means more AI features, analytics, and data visualization.
The new RPA capability in Power Automate is called UI flows, so that would have been confusing. UI flows in Power Automate is now in public preview. Creating a UI flow is a point-and-click experience, though it does require some coding experience. The RPA feature turns manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don’t support API automation.
Automating and scaling business processes is not so easy — Power Automate is Microsoft’s attempt to offer API-based automation and UI-based automation in one tool.
“You’ll actually be able to use Power Automate to not only automate and orchestrate tasks across APIs, SaaS providers, and databases but also to actually do a UI-based recording on Windows desktop and have that run as part of your normal automation. This is really Interesting for our customers and is the number one request from them. It allows them to go integrate with legacy systems that don’t have APIs. In the past, the only way to get an API to a legacy system was by asking IT or developers to build it. But they will actually be able to go record what they do as part of their day-to-day job in that Win32 application, in the browser, or on their PC. So that new RPA capability is a really transformative element — we’re expanding what can be automated with Power Automate.”
Charles Lamanna, CVP at Microsoft
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