AI Builder credits end: Power Automate moves to Copilot Credits

If your invoices, receipts or forms run through a Power Automate flow, check your licensing this week. As of today, November 1, 2026, Microsoft AI Builder credits start to go away. AI Builder capacity add-ons reach end of life, and new or renewed premium licenses no longer come with free AI Builder credits. The AI steps in your flows keep working, but they now bill Copilot Credits, and Microsoft says there is no single exchange rate.

What actually happened

Microsoft stopped selling AI Builder capacity add-ons to new customers on November 1, 2025. Per Message Center notice MC1526652, published October 26, the add-ons reach end of life today. You can no longer renew them or buy more.

The free credits that came with premium licenses also stop. According to Microsoft Learn, those were 500 credits with Power Apps Premium, 250 with Power Apps per app, and 5,000 with Power Automate Premium. MC1526652 says new or renewed licenses no longer include them. Credits you already have stay usable until your current contract term ends. So your real deadline is your renewal date, not today.

AI Builder features are not retired. When a flow runs out of AI Builder credits, it uses Copilot Credits. If it has neither, the run is blocked, and Learn lists the errors as EntitlementNotAvailable or QuotaExceeded. Microsoft's own words in MC1526652: consumption rates differ by capability and "there is no single conversion ratio." It also tells admins not to assume the same number of Copilot Credits will cover current usage.

Why it matters for your business

A silent cost change is a silent outage. The failure mode is a flow that stops reading invoices in the middle of month-end close, because the credit pool ran dry and no one bought Copilot Credits. Nothing errors until it does.

Measure before you buy. Microsoft points admins to two places: the AI Builder report under Licensing > Capacity add-ons in the Power Platform admin center, and Automation Center > Monitor > AI Builder activity in Power Automate. Get your real per-month volume per capability, then price it against the Copilot rate table.

Turn off add-on auto-renewal. MC1526652 tells admins to disable automatic renewal of AI Builder add-ons in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or to ask their partner to do it.

Re-run the build-vs-buy math. A receipt step costs 32 AI Builder credits per receipt on Microsoft's own example. When the meter changes, a document-extraction step on a model API you control may cost less. Price it before you renew.

Sources: Microsoft Learn: AI Builder credit management, Microsoft 365 Message Center MC1526652.