Most Excel users know the feeling: you’ve got a monthly report that takes hours to clean, refresh, and email… and you think, there has to be a better way.
For years, the “better way” inside the Microsoft ecosystem has been Power Automate. It’s part of the Power Platform, and it’s what connects your apps together. You can think of it as the glue between Excel, Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint.
You don’t need to know any real coding to use it. Power Automate is a low- or no-code tool that lets you drag and drop the steps of a process together in a clean, visual interface. If you’ve ever used Zapier or If This Then That, you’re already on the right track. You choose your triggers and actions, connect them, and Power Automate handles the rest. For example, you might set it up so that when a file updates, the latest version gets automatically emailed to your manager.
If you’ve never tried it, I walk through real examples in my LinkedIn Learning course on Power Automate for Excel, where you’ll see how simple it can be to automate everyday workbook tasks:
What about Agent Flows?
Microsoft’s next step in automation comes through Copilot Studio, the new home for creating and managing AI agents. And inside it, you’ll find something new called Agent Flows.
At first glance, the name sounds familiar… it is another kind of “flow,” after all. But the difference is in how they work.
While Power Automate flows run in the cloud to connect different systems, Agent Flows are designed to be called by AI agents themselves. That means your agent, a conversational assistant built in Copilot Studio, can actually run a flow as part of a larger process.
For example, imagine you tell your agent:
“Prepare the month-end report.”
Behind the scenes, that agent can call a sequence of Agent Flows that do things like:
- Open a workbook
- Duplicate last month’s tabs
- Clear old data and refresh queries
- Add a “Completed by” timestamp
Then, once the workbook is ready, the same process could hand off to Power Automate to send out notifications or archive the file to SharePoint.
It’s the same idea of automation, but with an AI-powered layer of coordination on top.
How agent flows and Power Automate work together
You don’t have to pick one over the other. In fact, the two tools are built to work together.
- Power Automate is the general-purpose workflow engine. It’s perfect for repetitive processes that involve multiple apps.
- Agent Flows bring AI into the picture. They’re predictable, reusable steps your Copilot Studio agents can call directly.
You can even have your agent call an existing Power Automate flow, thanks to Copilot Studio’s advanced flow features.
Here’s a quick way to think about it:
| Power Automate Flows | Agent Flows (Copilot Studio) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where they run | In the cloud | In Copilot Studio |
| Who runs them | You (or your org) | Your AI agent |
| Best for | Automating across apps | Running repeatable logic inside an agent’s process |
| Excel example | When a file is uploaded, email the report | When asked to prepare the report, copy and refresh sheets |
Why this matters for Excel and finance teams
Automation isn’t new to Excel users. Macros, VBA, Power Query, even dynamic arrays all helped people cut repetitive work. But Agent Flows and Power Automate are something bigger: they bring automation out of the workbook and into your broader workflow.
Your finance team can build an agent that actually runs a report, checks balances, and kicks off an approval flow… all from a chat window. Your monthly forecast process can go from hours of clicking to a few natural-language commands.
It’s still early days for Agent Flows, but the direction is clear: Excel automation is moving from the worksheet to the workflow.
Ready to explore what’s possible?
If your team spends hours repeating the same Excel tasks every month, things like copying tabs, refreshing queries, emailing reports… then this is the time to rethink how that work gets done.
I help organizations design Excel automation strategies that combine Copilot Studio, Agent Flows, and Power Automate in a way that fits their business.
You can drop me a line or book a discovery call to talk about how to bring these tools into your finance workflows and get ahead of the curve: