Run a generative action in Power Automate

Recently the Run a generative action was added to Power Automate. To make this action work is not as easy as you might hope.

Run a generative action

After my earlier post about the Run a prompt in this post I’m looking at the other AI action available in Power Automate

The Run a generative action can be added in both the new and classic cloud flow designer. But in this post I will use the new UI (how long will I still call this new and old?) as it is a bit easier in this case.

When we add the action to a flow we are adding a whole Child flow that does whatever we need it to do. One of the limitations however is that the generative action will only take text parameters as input and there is no output possible. Event though the action will offer the output parameters to us. We will have a look at this later in this post.

To get to the following flow is now our aim!

To get a successful action can be a real challenge with the limitation of this action. Even with the official documentation, it was quite a challenge to get this one to work.

Adding the Run a generative action

Add the action and then click on the New generative action.

This will get us to the next step where we can enter our instructions:

My example will use the following instructions:

Create an item in a SharePoint list for each document in a Document library. Set the Title of the item to the Title of the documentsMy example 

Noticed that I’m going to use SharePoint. This action however does support other data sources as well. The following data sources are supported and potentially that makes this action suitable for integrations between these applications.

• SharePoint
• Office 365 Outlook
• OneDrive for work or school
• Planner
• Microsoft Teams
• Notifications
• Office 365 Users
• Approvals
• Excel online for Business

Now we get the suggestions of the input and output properties. Noticed that you have to confirm each of the properties. Any suggested properties that appear in the Output will need to be removed.

In my example I should have now something that looks like this:

Then click the add and we can use the action.

Configuring the Run a generative action

The action will now offer the 4 parameters that we accepted in our flow designer.

And when we run our flow our list is updated.

Warning!

The action described in this flow is in preview. That means do not use it in production yet!

Debugging the action

So what is happening inside that action? To find out what is happening in the Run a generative action we need to look at the See full run details that appears in the Run results.

This is not the easiest to review, but we can now see how our initial prompt was received within the Thought process and as we scroll down we can find the rest of the flow.

We can now for example find that there are some create item actions in our generative action. And we have the opportunity to clean up the flow by selecting the actions that we want or don’t want.