Actions in Copilot Studio

After yesterday’s post about Activities in Copilot Studio, today I’m looking at Actions in Copilot Studio. The terminology here is confusing for Power Automate users.

Activities vs Actions in Copilot Studio

Yesterday I mentioned that Activities are like actions in Power Automate. One of the options in the activities menu that I didn’t get to yesterday is the Add an Action. The Add an action is even closer to the Actions in Power Automate.

This is where actions can be added. Please note that this is still in preview. So expect some pains, and a lot of posts on SharePains.com.

Now it might feel natural to scroll down the list of action, but there isn’t any more than you can see in that list. Or maybe…

Using the search in the above dialogue, you can find SharePoint action and any other connection that we are familiar with.

And as I search for SMS I can find all those connectors that offer SMS services. Remember that post that I wrote a few years back? The SMS offerings in the Power Platform have increased a lot.

In the above list of action you can see that there are a lot of connectors available within Copilot Studio. It would be helpful to have a full overview of all connectors. At this moment in time I have found that Power Automate connectors list to be helpful to get an overview of all available connectors.

Actions in Copilot Studio

Now, how can we use these actions in Copilot Studio.

I’m going to start with a simple example. Using the List root folder action. From the SharePoint connector.

It is important to use Environment variables. With the Environment variable for the site, we can now list the root folder contents of the SharePoint Site. Notice that Copilot Studio displays the internal name of the environment variable.

Then each action will generate output parameters. ListRootFolder will contain the output that we can then use. In this case I’ll display it as a message.

But as we now test the agent, we will see that we get the json output from the actions rather than an object.

For more about variables please have a look at Variables in Copilot Studio.

Taking a property from json tables

To use a single property we can use Power FX to query the data in the json tables. I will write a full post about querying json this at a later stage. As there is a lot more about this. Also Power FX in Copilot deserves a dedicated post in my Copilot Studio User Guide. But a quick preview of this all is shown below.

So, in the above expression we take the first records of the table and then we select the DisplayName.

When we test the agent this will result in the following output.

Connectors available in Copilot

Are the connectors in Copilot the same as the connectors in Power Automate and Power Apps? The answer is a bit of a yes and now.

In Power Automate/Apps we find a few different types of connectors.

• Virtual Connectors
• Unblockable connectors
• Other connectors.

Most of the Copilot connectors you will recognise the non virtual connectors. Virtual Connectors are the ones like Controls, HTTP and Data operations. These don’t have API end points like other connectors.

Next steps

If you are just getting started with Copilot then have a look at my other posts about Copilot Studio. This is a growing part of SharePains.com, so revisiting every now and then is a good idea.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com