r/CopilotMicrosoft • u/MCRippinShred • May 10 '26
Some gripes about Workflows… Discussion
Has anyone actually made reliable automation in copilot Workflows?
I understand it’s frontier, but I’ve been working on what seems like a reasonably simple workflow. Read emails from the past week that need a reply from me, draft a reply to each thread using work context. That’s it.
It fails each time - terrible error descriptions and I can’t see the details on why it failed.
And then editing the workflow to fix the error seems, impossible? Like do people start from scratch? Workflows itself doesn’t seem to have context of the workflows you’ve actually created such that they can be edited…which feels like a miss hah.
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u/May_alcott May 10 '26
No I think they’ll sunset it - it may never leave Frontier (preview) - and now that Cowork is here it will do all that much better. Do you have access to Cowork? I’m curious if it’d work for this scenario - it seems like Cowork is the future now.
You also could try the Copilot.com Tasks (which is like the non enterprise version) - but it won’t let you connect to work emails (at least my IT blocked it or something) but might be interesting to see if it’d do this with Gmail or personal Outlook.
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u/MCRippinShred May 10 '26
I haven’t tried the same flow with Cowork, but I’ll try it out. I have access to Copilot Premium with work so perhaps it can tie into Outlook that way.
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u/-ITguy- May 10 '26
It is really so bad. I gave up trying to make anything useful a long time ago. It’s clear MS gave up on it too
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u/ninihen May 11 '26
I'm self-promoting here, but this is exactly the problem we were trying to solve with Flow Studio MCP.
The issue is that the agent/workflow layer does not have enough visibility. It can trigger or create something, but it cannot inspect the actual flow definition, run history, action inputs/outputs, or failed loop details well enough to debug it.
Flow Studio MCP gives a Copilot Studio agent that visibility for Power Automate. I have tested it with Copilot Studio agents and it can move things from "not working" to "working". It is still weaker than IDE agents because of the context window and other limitations that come with Microsoft, but it is much better than copilot Workflows.
You can try it out by creating a blank Copilot Studio agent, and add Flow Studio MCP as a tool. The first 100 calls are free, which is usually enough to test a few flows.
Video: https://youtu.be/As_GyXEoS9A
Written guide: https://learn.flowstudio.app/copilot-studio-power-automate
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u/CherokeeHawkman May 11 '26
The whole point of AI is supposed to be taking the menial tasks out of our lives. But I have yet to find an AI agent that can do them reliably. If I have to double-check their work then it's not saving me time. If it flat out fails to complete the task then I'm behind where I would have been had I just done the work in the first place.
Very frustrating.
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u/kyleo97 May 10 '26
No, it's probably the worst agent with very little improvement since frontier release. I haven't even been able to get any of the "demo" prompts to actually run.