You are probably already paying for Power Automate

A multi site healthcare group had no management reporting of any kind.

To find out how the business was doing, the owner clicked through the booking system. Site by site, practitioner by practitioner, working it out as he went.

Roughly two thirds of the billing came through insurers, some of whom were sitting on invoices without telling anybody.

This was not a struggling business. It was a well run, profitable one, where nobody had ever built a report because the owner had got good at doing it manually.

The tool that is already in the cupboard

If you are on Microsoft 365, and most businesses of that size are, you are already paying for Power Automate. It has been sat inside the licence for years.

It moves information between the things you already use. When a form gets filled in, put a row in this spreadsheet and tell that person. When an invoice lands in this inbox, save the attachment there and flag it. Every Monday at eight, build this summary and email it round.

It is not glamorous and it is not, strictly speaking, AI. Some of it now has AI bolted on, which is where it gets more interesting, but the useful half is plumbing.

The reason nobody uses it is not cost. It is that nobody has ever sat down for an afternoon and worked out what it could do, because there is always something more urgent.

Why this is the gap, not a niche

The ONS asked UK businesses what they actually use. Large language models came top at 18 per cent, then visual content creation at 16 per cent, then machine learning for data processing at 12 per cent.

So the typical adopting business is using a chatbot. That is it. That is the adoption.

The same ONS release found the average adopting firm uses 1.6 AI technologies, and only 10 per cent describe their use as extensive.

I quote that statistic more than any other, because it is the whole picture in one line. Nearly everyone has tried something. Almost nobody has connected it to anything.

Power Automate is where the connecting happens for most small businesses, and it is sitting there unopened.

What it is actually good at

Reporting that nobody has time to build. The weekly figure somebody currently works out by clicking.

Handovers. The moment where a thing finishes in one system and somebody has to remember to start it in another.

Watching. Tell me when an invoice has been outstanding thirty days. Tell me when a form comes in from a postcode we do not cover.

None of that is clever. All of it is the sort of thing that quietly does not happen when everyone is busy.

What you could do on Monday

Open Power Automate. It is in the app launcher, the grid of squares in the corner. Most people have never clicked it.

Look at the templates. Do not build anything.

You are only doing one thing: seeing whether any of them describe something a person in your business currently does by hand. That takes twenty minutes and it will either be obvious or it will not.

If three of them jump out, you have found a genuine afternoon's work with a real return. If none of them do, close it and get on with your day, and at least you know.

The honest limit

Power Automate is fiddly.

The interface is not friendly, the error messages are unhelpful, and there is a real difference between watching a demonstration and building something that survives a month of actual use. That is genuinely why consultancies exist for it, and why the difficulty of ranking for the term is so low while the cost per click is so high.

It is also the wrong tool for anything that needs judgement. It follows rules. It does not decide.

And there is a version of this that goes badly, which is a business with fourteen automations nobody understands, built by somebody who has since left. Build few, write down what each one does, and put a person's name against every one.