If you’ve spent the last few years building Power Automate flows, making Power Apps that people slowly came to rely on, or fixing a chatbot that keeps breaking, here’s some good news. You’re already most of the way to building AI agents. You just haven’t been calling them that.
I've basically kept a Power Platform diary on this blog for years now. And lately one word kept following me around: agents. Foundry this, Copilot Studio that, Claude the other. For a hot minute it felt like a whole new universe, like I'd have to forget everything I knew and reintroduce myself as An AI Person.
Reader, I did not. And neither will you.
From flows to agents: what actually changes
Here's the reframe that made it click for me.
A Power Automate flow is a recipe you write out by hand: when this happens, do that, then that, and if it's a Tuesday, do the other thing. It's wonderful, and it's completely deterministic. It does exactly what you told it and not one step more.
An agent is what you get when you stop spelling out every branch and hand some of the deciding to a model. You give it a goal, a few tools, and some knowledge, and it works out the steps itself.
Now look at what doesn't change. You're still thinking in triggers, connectors, data, and "what should actually happen when a customer asks for a refund." That business-process brain, knowing what good looks like, is the genuinely hard part, and you already have it. What's new is the plumbing underneath.
The happy surprise: that plumbing now lives right inside the stack you already know. Claude is generally available in Microsoft Foundry on Azure, so you build these agents with your existing Azure sign-in, billing, and governance. No new universe. Same Azure, new toy.
Meet Harbor Supply Co.
Every decent tutorial needs a guinea pig, so say hello to Harbor Supply Co. — our invented distributor for this series. They sell deeply unglamorous things (boxes, pallets, the occasional forklift), they've got a product catalog, a stack of orders, and a support inbox that is perpetually a little on fire.
We'll use Harbor for everything, cover to cover. Same company, same slightly chaotic data. That way each post stands on the one before it instead of starting from a blank slate, and you can follow the whole thing like a story rather than a few disconnected demos.
What we're building
Few posts, from now through the end of December. We start gentle: stand up a Foundry project, find Claude in the catalog, make our very first call to it. Then we climb.
By the end, Harbor will have a Copilot Studio agent that can actually do things: look up an order, answer from the real returns policy instead of cheerfully inventing one, and know when a question is over its head.
Along the way we'll get into the parts nobody warns you about. How to ground an agent so it stops guessing. How to let it take actions without handing it the keys to everything. When an agent is honestly overkill and a plain Power Automate flow was the right answer all along. And the questions your security team will ask the moment this gets anywhere near production.
I'll be building it in real time, which means you'll see the bits that don't work on the first try too. That's the fun part.
Where we start
First stop: setting up Microsoft Foundry and tracking down where Claude lives in the model catalog. Nothing to install today, just an Azure account and a little curiosity when you're ready to follow along.
If you've been quietly Power-Platform-curious about this whole agent thing but weren't sure where someone who isn't a card-carrying "AI Person" fits in, this series is aimed squarely at you. Follow along, build Harbor with me, and let's find out together.
Let's build. 😊
