Microsoft Power Automate to add UI flows in April with two pricing options

Microsoft revealed its UI flows tool for Power Automate in late 2019, hailing it as the capability that woulud re-define the cloud service as a robotic process automation (RPA) solution.

Today, Microsoft CVP Charles Lamanna announced that UI flows would reach general availability on April 2. The date is in line with previous guidance for the first half of 2020. 

"Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organizations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation," he wrote.

With UI flows aim to bring legacy applications into automated scenarios, and by doing so is "[c]ompleting the low-code automation portfolio" alongside the pre-built AI models and tools of AI Builder and the 300-plus connectors to Power Automate for other systems and APIs.

As part of the rollout of UI flows to provide RPA capabilities, Microsoft is updating its licensing for Power Automate to account for two types of flows that use UI flows for RPA: attended and unattended. The difference comes down to whether the UI flow is running on a person's workstation and requires human input.