Power Automate connects your apps and does stuff automatically when things happen. That's it. Microsoft markets it as this revolutionary business process platform, but really it's just IFTTT for Microsoft environments with some RPA bolted on.
Three Ways It Actually Works
Cloud Flows: Connects cloud apps together. Someone emails you an attachment? It can save it to OneDrive and notify your team in Teams. New row in Excel? Create a Planner task. It has over 1,000 connectors but honestly, 90% of people just use it for Microsoft 365 integration and maybe Salesforce. The trigger limitations will bite you - only 300 actions per flow in the free tier.
Desktop Flows: This is the RPA part that always breaks. It watches you click buttons on old desktop apps, then tries to repeat it. Works great in the demo, fails spectacularly when Windows updates or someone moves a button. I spent 3 hours last week debugging a desktop flow that stopped working because Chrome 118 updated and changed the login form slightly.
The UI element selectors are fragile as hell - one Windows 11 22H2 update broke thousands of flows across the platform.
Process Mining: Actually useful for finding out what the hell your business processes actually look like. Points at your systems and tells you "here's where people are wasting time."
Task Mining records desktop activity to identify automation opportunities. Most companies ignore this feature completely, even though it's included in Premium licenses and can identify bottlenecks that cost real money.
The AI Stuff
The AI Builder works okay for reading invoices and forms. Don't expect magic - you'll get 85-90% accuracy if you're lucky on document processing. The Copilot integration where you describe workflows in plain English is hit or miss. Sometimes it builds exactly what you want, sometimes it creates a Frankenstein workflow that barely works.
The prebuilt models for business card recognition and receipt processing work better than custom models, but expect to burn through AI Builder credits fast - each document costs 1-5 credits.
Pro tip: The AI document processing craps out on handwritten text and weird formats. Always test with your actual documents, not the perfect samples from Microsoft's demos. Confidence scores below 75% are basically useless.
Enterprise Features That Look Good on Paper
Power Automate has admin controls that look impressive in PowerPoint but are confusing as hell to actually configure. Data loss prevention policies sound great until you realize they block half the useful connectors your business actually needs. The Center of Excellence toolkit helps with governance but requires dedicated admin resources.
The on-premises gateway is a pain to set up but works once you get it running. Just pray your network team doesn't block ports 443 and 5671 outbound. The gateway installer is 150MB and needs .NET Framework 4.7.2 minimum - good luck if you're stuck on older Windows versions.
Version Reality Check: Microsoft pushes updates monthly, which means flows that worked last month might break this month. Updates just happen and you deal with the consequences - there's no version pinning. Last year's wave broke SharePoint list triggers for weeks, and the Copilot rollout introduced new bugs while fixing old ones. Check out deployment best practices if you want to minimize the chaos, and the community GitHub resources have real-world solutions to common problems.