Solved: How to trigger a Power Automate Desktop Flow from Copilot

How to trigger a Power Automate Desktop Flow from Copilot

A few weeks ago, I met Kyle at the #PowerPlatform conference.

Kyle is a Desktop Engineer at Florida Virtual School. His main area of focus is onboarding the laptops, configuring them, securing them, etc. Like every IT support department, he receives a tons of emails / support tickets / phone calls each time a user has a problem with their laptop and it's not always easy to find time to assist everyone. 💻

When I asked him what he was doing with the Power Platform he started explaining the most amazing use case: automatically fixing user's laptops using Power Automate Desktop Flows directly triggered from a Copilot! ✨

His idea was to create a custom Copilot to help teachers and students solve their most common issues by guiding them using a natural language. So far it was a very standard use case for #CopilotStudio

Then he told me: "some of the users don't know how to do some of the technical stuff, but I do - so I created a bunch of Power Automate Desktop Flows that I deployed on every laptop, and they can be triggered on-demand from Copilot". My brain went "WAIT. WHAT?" 🤯

Yes - #Copilot is guiding users to resolution and if a user doesn't know how to do some of the technical steps, then he/she can trigger the appropriate #PowerAutomateDesktop flow by simply clicking a button in Copilot!

For me that was a big AHA moment - of course you can do that! It is so obvious that I never thought about it!

So here we go! Let me show you how you can trigger Power Automate Desktop from Copilot, Kyle's style...