With Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, anyone in your organization can automate desktop or web-based applications. Last December, we released several enhancements to help you further scale your robotic process automation (RPA), including real-time monitoring of desktop flow queues.

Desktop flow queues enable you to easily scale your RPA solutions across one or multiple machines in your business. With priority management and sophisticated workload distribution and balancing, Power Automate provides the tools you need to scale your desktop flows and monitor them all in one centralized location.

Setting the priority of a desktop flow

Properly setting the priority of your desktop flows will help ensure that they are run in the order in which they are needed.

In the Desktop flows actions, you will find a Priority field under the advanced options. A desktop flow can have one of two priorities: High or Normal. When scheduled at the same time, desktop flows with a priority of High will run before those with a priority of Normal. By default, all desktop flows are set with a priority of Normal.

Leveraging the power of dynamic content, you can automatically determine the priority of a desktop flow with your own business logic, such as using the importance of e-mails you receive.

Monitor your desktop flow queue

As the volume of your desktop automation grows, the number of requested desktop flow runs can outpace the throughput possible by your allocated machines. Therefore, it is important to understand how your desktop flows will be executed, to ensure they are running in an optimal manner for your business needs.

Under the Monitor section of Power Automate, the Desktop flow queues page gives you a summary of the desktop flows that are currently running or that are queued to be run across all your devices.

Viewing a specific run queue will list the desktop flows requested for that machine or cluster in the order in which they will be executed.

Desktop flows are executed based on the time in which they were requested and on their defined priority. The position of a desktop flow in the run queue can be changed at any time, either by updating its priority or moving it the top of the list. This would override its original priority just for those specific runs.

Let us know what you think

Do you have any questions or feedback regarding desktop flows and Power Automate Desktop? We’d love to hear them! Visit the Microsoft Power Automate Community to connect with peers, share ideas, and learn from experts.

Additional resources

• Learn more about desktop flow queues
• Learn more about desktop flows and Power Automate Desktop

The post Desktop flow queues now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Expense reports can be a very cumbersome and time-consuming task. Between all the manual data entry, approval workflows, and auditing, there are many pain points across the end-to-end process. With the AI Builder receipt processing prebuilt model, you can minimize those pain points and increase the productivity of your employees, delivering real value back to your business.

Receipt processing lets you read and save key information from common sales receipts, like those used in restaurants, gas stations, retail, and more. Using this information, you can automatically pre-populate expense reports simply by scanning photos of your receipts. And when you automate the process at a large scale, there is the potential to save you and your business valuable time and money.

The prebuilt model uses state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) to extract both printed and handwritten text from receipts. You can retrieve valuable information such as the merchant details, transaction date and time, list of purchased items, tax, and totals.

No training or prior configuration is required to use this prebuilt model. Start processing receipts right away in your apps and flows using the new canvas app component and AI Builder flow action.

Learn more about Receipt processing.

The post Process receipts with AI Builder appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Last spring, we announced AI Builder with five powerful AI scenarios. Later that year, two were made generally available and four additional scenarios were added.

This spring, the list of generally available models will grow to include:

• Form processing – Read and save information from standard documents.
• Key phrase extraction – Extract the key talking points from text.
• Language detection – Identify the language being used in text.
• Object detection – Recognize and count things in images.
• Sentiment analysis – Analyze positive/negative sentiment in text.
• Text recognition – Automatically process text from images.

Generally available products and services are considered production-ready.

By moving out of preview, these models will become premium. You will need an AI Builder license or an active trial to continue using them.

For additional resources on AI Builder, visit Power Apps and learn how your users can make their apps AI enabled, or go to Power Automate and learn how your users make their workflow solutions better with AI. Please visit our pricing pages to learn more about the AI Builder capacity add-on for your apps and workflows. Visit our Licensing page for more information on licenses and trials.

The post AI Builder models becoming generally available in April appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.