On 1 November 2026, the AI Builder credits that come bundled with Power Platform licences stop existing. Microsoft’s wording is not ambiguous: post November 1, 2026, only AI Builder add-on credits remain active, and all other ones are removed.
That is under thirteen weeks away. If any flow or app in your estate uses an AI Builder action and is running on seeded credits rather than a purchased add-on, it will stop working, and the failure will arrive as a runtime error in a production flow rather than as a licensing notice.
The second change matters just as much and has had less attention. New customers can no longer purchase the AI Builder capacity add-on at all. Existing customers can renew or buy more, but only up to 1 November 2026. After that the route is Copilot Credits. This is not a price change, it is a change of currency, and it lands in the middle of a lot of production automation.
What exactly is being removed
Two kinds of AI Builder credits exist today. Only one survives.
Seeded credits arrive bundled with a licence you already bought for another reason. They are the ones being removed.
| Licence | Seeded AI Builder credits | Notes |
| Power Automate Premium | 5,000 | Removed 1 November 2026 |
| Power Automate Process | 5,000 | Removed |
| Power Automate Hosted RPA add-on | 5,000 | Removed |
| Power Automate Unattended RPA add-on | 5,000 | Removed |
| Power Apps Premium | 500 | Removed |
| Power Apps per app | 250 | Removed. Licences bought before November 2022 never included any |
| Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations | 20,000 | Removed. Capped at 20,000 per tenant |
| Power Apps for Cloud for Sustainability USL Plus | 25,000 | Removed |
| AI Builder add-on (T1, T2, T3) | 1,000,000 | Survives. This is the only one that does |
Seeded credits from licences are capped at 1,000,000 per tenant regardless of how many licences you hold, so a large estate is not accumulating an unlimited buffer.
The practical shape of the exposure is this. An organisation with fifty Power Automate Premium licences currently has 250,000 seeded credits sitting at tenant level, quietly funding whatever AI Builder actions were built over the last two years. On 1 November that number becomes zero unless an add-on was purchased separately.
How to find out whether this affects you
Three checks, and none of them take long.
Check your entitlement source. In the Power Platform admin center, go to Licensing, then Capacity add-ons, then the Add-ons tab. This shows what capacity you hold and where it came from. If everything you see traces back to user licences rather than a purchased AI Builder add-on, your credits are going away.
Check your consumption. The Summary tab shows allocated and consumed credits against purchased capacity. The AI Builder consumption report breaks it down per environment, per day, per user. If consumption is zero across the estate, this change costs you nothing and you can stop reading. If it is not, the number you are looking at is the size of the problem.
Find what is actually consuming. The AI Builder Activity page in the Power Automate portal shows predictions made against models in an environment in real time. The Dataverse AI Event table in the environment with the highest consumption tells you which model is responsible.
That last check is the one most estates skip, and it is the one that produces surprises.
Eighteen months in, the pattern we see is consistent. The majority of AI Builder credit consumption comes from background document-processing flows, invoice and receipt extraction and OCR, together with automated text classification built during early pilot phases. Most of those runs execute in default or personal environments with no active business owner, and they carry on burning capacity long after the people who built them changed roles or left.
What happens when the credits run out
Worth being precise, because the failure mode is specific and it is not graceful.
When monthly consumption exceeds available credits, the environment is in overage. The system first tries to use Copilot Credits. If none are available, running models in flows and apps is blocked. Actions fail with EntitlementNotAvailable, NoCapacity or QuotaExceeded error codes, and the flow editor shows a remediation panel reading “All AI Builder credits in this environment have been consumed”.
Two details change how you should plan for it:
- Overage is never charged. Microsoft treats it as a grace period, and it does not affect the following month’s consumption. So the cost of getting this wrong is not a bill, it is a stopped process.
- Credits reset on the first day of each month and unused capacity does not carry over. An environment blocked on the 20th starts working again on the 1st, which is exactly long enough for a month-end process to fail.
There is a further trap in how credits are allocated. Credits are either allocated to a specific environment or left unallocated at tenant level, and there is no automatic switch between the two. An environment with allocated credits consumes only those credits. When it runs out it does not fall back to the tenant pool, even if the pool is full. Estates that allocated credits carefully to control spend are the ones most likely to be caught by this.
What to do in the next thirteen weeks
The decision is not complicated, but it has a deadline attached and one of the options disappears on the date.
If you are an existing customer with real consumption, you can still purchase or renew the AI Builder add-on in the Microsoft 365 admin center, but only up to 1 November 2026. One add-on is 1,000,000 credits, which is a large multiple of what most seeded estates consume. After the date, that door is closed.
If you are a new customer, the add-on is not available to you at all. Copilot Credits are the route, and that is a different commercial model that should be sized against actual consumption rather than guessed.
If consumption is genuinely low, the honest answer is often to remove the AI Builder dependency rather than buy capacity for it. A single receipt-processing flow built as a proof of concept and never decommissioned is not worth an add-on.
There is a licensing side effect worth flagging to whoever owns the Power Platform budget. Adding an AI Builder action to an app makes it a premium app, and that applies even when the AI Builder action sits inside a flow used by the app rather than in the app itself. Adding an AI Builder action to a flow does not make the flow premium. That asymmetry catches people, and it means an audit of AI Builder usage is also an audit of premium licensing exposure.
Some things do not consume credits at all, which is useful when planning a rebuild: training models, testing prebuilt or custom models, and testing prompts in prompt builder are all free. Previewing AI models is free with one exception, prompts, which always consume credits even in preview.
Our position: this is an audit, not a purchase
We do not recommend treating 1 November as an automatic procurement trigger. It should be treated as a mandatory governance audit.
For years, seeded credits acted as a financial cushion. They allowed low-value, fragile or redundant citizen-developed automations to run without any financial scrutiny at all, because nobody was ever billed for them. Buying replacement Copilot Credits purely to preserve those legacy workflows, without questioning whether they earn their place, converts unmanaged technical debt into a recurring operating expense.
A credit deadline is the strongest forcing function you are going to get. If an automation cannot demonstrate a clear return once it is pushed onto explicit billing, it should not be migrated. It should be decommissioned.
The wider point about governance
A licensing deadline is a poor reason to discover what your Power Platform estate contains, but it is a common one.
The estates that will handle this smoothly are the ones where someone can answer three questions today: which environments consume AI Builder credits, which flows and apps are responsible, and who owns each of them. The estates that will not are the ones where the answer to all three is a search through the admin center on the morning something breaks.
Blocking the use of unallocated credits is available as a tenant setting, by clearing the “Allow users to consume unassigned AI Builder credits” checkbox in the Power Platform admin center. It is a blunt control, but it is how administrators stay in charge of where AI is used rather than finding out afterwards.
Where to start
Run the entitlement check first. It takes ten minutes and it tells you whether the rest of this matters to you at all. If consumption is zero, close the tab. If it is not, you have under thirteen weeks to decide between buying an add-on while you still can, moving to Copilot Credits, or retiring the dependency.
Veratas runs Power Platform governance and licensing reviews, alongside the licensing and CSP work that keeps this kind of change from arriving as a surprise. For estates we run under managed services, this check is already scheduled.
If nobody in your organisation can currently say which flows consume AI Builder credits, talk to our team. That is the answer you need before the date, not after it.
Frequently asked questions
What happens to AI Builder credits on 1 November 2026? Seeded credits that come bundled with licences such as Power Automate Premium, Power Apps Premium and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations are removed. Only credits from a purchased AI Builder add-on remain active.
Can I still buy the AI Builder add-on? Existing customers can purchase or renew up to 1 November 2026. New customers can no longer buy the AI Builder capacity add-on at all and must use Copilot Credits instead.
What happens if my flows run out of AI Builder credits? The environment goes into overage. The system tries Copilot Credits first, and if none are available the AI Builder actions are blocked with EntitlementNotAvailable, NoCapacity or QuotaExceeded errors. Overage is never charged, but the process stops.
Do unused AI Builder credits carry over to the next month? No. Consumption is counted from the first day of each month and resets then. Unused capacity does not carry forward.
If an environment runs out, does it use the tenant pool automatically? No. An environment with allocated credits consumes only those credits and does not fall back to unallocated tenant credits. You have to reallocate manually.
Does using AI Builder change my Power Apps licensing? Yes. Adding an AI Builder action to an app makes it a premium app, including when the action sits in a flow the app uses. Adding an AI Builder action to a flow alone does not make the flow premium.
Operations head with 20 years of experience delivering business intelligence, ERP and AI programmes across healthcare, finance and manufacturing. Focus areas include Power Platform adoption and governance, delivery models, and managed services.