RH.
← The Adoption Feed

Sunday, 16 August 2026

A national Power Platform DLP change disabled NHS.net Connect flows overnight

NHSmail Support, 2026-08-14

A planned change to NHS.net Connect's Power Platform DLP policies went in on the evening of 13 August. Flow owners received automated emails telling them their Power Automate flow had been disabled. All were re-enabled immediately, but Microsoft sends no confirmation of that, so owners saw only the failure notice.

Takeaway

Check your production flows are running rather than trusting the all-clear. A national DLP edit can stop your automation estate without warning.

support.nhs.net

Adoption practice

Defra reports an 11-fold rise in developers using AI, and 85-96% acting on a suggestion

UKAuthority, 2026-08-14

Defra's software development profession went from 780 AI interactions a month in October 2025 to over 10,000, with active users up 11-fold. In most months 85-96% of active users acted on a suggestion, not just opened the tool.

Takeaway

Adopt the metric, acted-on-a-suggestion rather than licences assigned. It is the only Copilot number that survives a finance director's questions.

ukauthority.com

Tooling

Microsoft 365 Copilot

ServiceNow connectors now honour ServiceNow roles, which means they did not before

Microsoft, GA, in the 11 August release notes

The ServiceNow Knowledge and Catalog connectors now evaluate access using a user's assigned ServiceNow roles; previously permissions came from user criteria alone. GA, and it needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

Takeaway

If you index ServiceNow into Copilot, re-run your oversharing check. Anything role-restricted was previously exposed to everyone the user criteria allowed.

learn.microsoft.com

Copilot connectors now run content and identity crawls in parallel

Microsoft, GA, in the 11 August release notes

Content and identity crawls used to run in sequence, delaying when newly ingested external content became answerable; they now run in parallel. GA, and it applies to Copilot connectors rather than SharePoint content.

Takeaway

If your complaints are about SharePoint freshness this changes nothing. It only shortens the lag on connected external systems.

learn.microsoft.com

Planner Agent drops into basic group plans, so every Copilot licence now reaches it

Microsoft, GA, in the 11 August release notes

The Planner Agent was confined to premium Planner plans. It now works in all group-based plans, including basic ones, for anyone holding a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. No extra purchase.

Takeaway

A project-planning agent just appeared for every Copilot user. Decide whether you brief people on it or field the questions later.

learn.microsoft.com

Copilot Studio & Power Platform

The GitHub Copilot harness charges credits from the moment you start building

Microsoft Learn, GA, 2026-08-03

Copilot Studio's newest harness bills consumption from the first build action, not from publish. Creating a solution in natural language, previewing, testing and generating evaluations all draw credits. The standard harness still bills only after publish.

Takeaway

Cap credits per environment before makers start experimenting. On this harness a prototype you throw away has still cost you money.

learn.microsoft.com

Copilot Studio agents only run in designated NHS.net Connect environments

NHSmail Support, 2026-07-01

Agents created or published in standard Power Platform environments on NHS.net Connect have stopped working; they are supported only in designated Copilot Studio environments, which must be requested. In force now, with no deadline stated.

Takeaway

Any agent a team built in its own environment is already dead. Audit for orphaned builds before someone reports it as a Copilot fault.

support.nhs.net

Voices

Simon Willison, independent researcher and writer on LLMs

simonwillison.net, 2026-08-14

Faced with 1,856 tags and a part-tagged archive, Willison endorses Doug Turnbull's inversion: let the model invent tags with no sight of the vocabulary, then use embeddings to snap each invention to the nearest real one.

Takeaway

The pattern fits any NHS coding problem with a fixed vocabulary: complaint categories, FOI topics, procurement codes. Generate then match, do not prompt-stuff.

simonwillison.net

Coffee break

Choosing between a prompt, a flow, a robot and an agent

Four technologies, one question: which fits this process?

A **Copilot prompt** is one person doing one task faster. No build, no assurance, no reuse: the value only lands if that person changes their habit. Right for drafting, summarising and one-off analysis.

A **Power Automate cloud flow** is deterministic plumbing between systems that expose APIs. It runs unattended, it is testable, and it fails loudly. Right for transactional and rules-based work with structured inputs.

An **RPA robot** does the same job by driving a user interface, because the system has no API. More brittle, more expensive to maintain, and justified mainly by legacy you cannot change.

A **Copilot Studio agent** earns its place when the input is unstructured or the path is not fixed: query handling, document processing, triage. It needs grounding data, an evaluation set and a named owner, and on the GitHub Copilot harness it bills by credits rather than licence.

The expensive mistake is reaching for an agent where a flow would do.

Also worth reading

  • NHS.net Connect blocks new Power Platform connectors by default; business-category access needs a DLP exception request and a business case. support.nhs.net
  • Defra's own write-up of how it built developer AI capability: Microsoft workshops, then developer-run local sessions. defradigital.blog.gov.uk
  • CMS on handling AI-drafted complaints: word limits, structured formats, and do not use AI to reply. cms.law
  • CLEARvalidate expressions of interest close 5pm Friday 21 August. Five funded AVT validations. clearprogramme.org.uk
  • Alder Hey's SipSmart lets parents log a child's fluid intake by QR code on their own device. ukauthority.com