Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

Automation existed before AI arrived.

24 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, Speaker A notes that many processes have been automatable for a long time using existing tools, but the recent hype around AI has led people to recognize and invest in automating them with AI-powered solutions. Speaker B adds that while Copilot Studio introduces a probabilistic, multi‑stage autonomous agent layer, it still relies on a deterministic workflow foundation similar to Power Automate. The exchange highlights the shift in perception of automation—from traditional deterministic tools to AI‑augmented, probabilistic agents—while emphasizing the ongoing effort to build skills and code components for automation.

Chapters

people are working hard to investing time in building skills and using the code components of each one to automate things. You're absolutely right. These things were all automatable for a long, long time using other tools, but now people know that they're automatable with AI. Funny, right? Like, I may not have even been the best way to do it.
Well, especially if you've looked at— I'm not a Copilot Studio expert at all, but that is the proper programmer side where you're dealing with like multi-stage autonomous agents. But there is a deterministic layer to it, which is basically Power Automate with other bells and So part of Copilot Studio, you've got this probabilistic agentic layer, then you've got all these workflows, which is pretty much Power Automate.