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Copilot Agent Skills for Power Automate

What are Copilot agent skills?

Agent skills are instruction files that teach GitHub Copilot how to perform specific tasks. When you install a skill, Copilot gains the knowledge to use Flow Studio MCP for debugging, building, operating, monitoring, and governing Power Automate flows. You describe what you want in plain English, and Copilot follows the skill's step-by-step recipes to get it right.

The five skills

Flow Studio provides five skills, each focused on a different workflow:

Skill What it teaches Copilot You would use it when
power-automate-mcp How to connect to and operate flows — list, read, trigger, resubmit, cancel, inspect connections Any Power Automate task — this is the foundation skill
power-automate-debug A step-by-step diagnostic process for finding and fixing flow failures A flow is broken and you want Copilot to find the root cause and fix it
power-automate-build How to construct valid flow definitions with the right action patterns, triggers, and connection references You want Copilot to create a new flow or modify an existing one
power-automate-monitoring How to read aggregated flow health, failure rates, and tenant-wide inventory from the Flow Studio cached store — fast, no PA API rate-limit pressure You need a tenant-wide health overview, want to find failing flows, check maker activity, or inventory environments and Power Apps. Requires a Flow Studio for Teams or MCP Pro+ subscription.
power-automate-governance How to classify flows by business impact, detect orphans, audit connectors, manage notification rules, and write governance metadata at scale You're running CoE-style governance — tagging flows, assigning ownership, computing archive scores, offboarding makers, generating compliance reports. Requires a Flow Studio for Teams or MCP Pro+ subscription.

The power-automate-mcp skill is the foundation — install it first. The other four skills extend it with specialized knowledge: debug and build for individual makers fixing or creating flows, monitoring and governance for CoE / admin workflows operating across the whole tenant. Monitoring and governance require a Flow Studio for Teams or MCP Pro+ subscription.

Installation
  1. Go to the Flow Studio MCP Skills repository on GitHub
  2. Copy the skill folder(s) you want from skills/ in the repo into your project’s .github/skills/ directory. The folder names are: power-automate-mcp/ (foundation), power-automate-debug/ (diagnostics), power-automate-build/ (flow creation), power-automate-monitoring/ (health and inventory, Pro+), and power-automate-governance/ (classification and compliance, Pro+)
  3. Configure the Flow Studio MCP server in VS Code if you haven’t already — see Getting Started with Flow Studio MCP

Each skill folder contains a SKILL.md file (the instructions Copilot reads) and a references/ folder with supporting documents.

To update skills to the latest version, re-copy the folders from the repository. The skills repo is regularly updated with improved prompts and new capabilities.

Other ways to install

The manual copy method above works for any agent. If you use VS Code or Claude Code, there are faster options:

Method What you get How to install
VS Code Extension MCP server connection + all three skills, auto-registered with Copilot Chat. API key stored in OS keychain. Multi-tenant support. Open VS Code → Extensions → search "Flow Studio MCP" → Install
Claude Code Plugin All three skills bundled. Add MCP server separately via CLI. git clone https://github.com/ninihen1/power-automate-mcp-skills.git
claude --plugin-dir ./power-automate-mcp-skills
Manual copy (any agent) Skill folders in your project. Works with any MCP-compatible agent. Copy from GitHub into .github/skills/ (see above)
Where to find them

The skills are distributed in two places:

Note that on awesome-copilot the skill folder names are prefixed (flowstudio-power-automate-mcp, etc.) to namespace them in the shared directory. In the canonical Flow Studio MCP Skills repo the folder names are unprefixed (power-automate-mcp, etc.) — both contain the same SKILL.md content.

The underlying SKILL.md files follow the agentskills.io specification — an open standard for distributing agent skills. Any MCP-compatible agent can read them, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, Claude, Codex, and custom agents that support the Model Context Protocol.

Troubleshooting
  • Copilot doesn’t use the skills — Ensure the skill folders are in .github/skills/ at the root of your workspace, and that the workspace is open in VS Code. Skills are workspace-scoped.
  • Copilot can’t connect to MCP — Check that the MCP server icon appears in the VS Code status bar. If not, verify your .vscode/mcp.json config file.
  • Skills seem outdated — Re-copy the latest version from the skills repository.
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