AI Builder credits after 1 November 2026: what changed, and what the new errors mean

On 1 November 2026, AI Builder credits stopped being sold and stopped coming with new or renewed licences, but they did not all disappear that day. Microsoft’s current pages say two things ended. Existing customers could renew or buy more AI Builder capacity add-ons only up to that date, and add-ons already active keep working until they expire. And “no new or renewed Power Platform or Dynamics 365 licenses will receive seeded AI Builder credits”, while licences bought or renewed before 1 November keep their seeded credits “through the end of the applicable contract term”. AI Builder itself carries on: once a flow or app has no AI Builder credits left, it draws on Copilot Credits, and if there are none, it stops.

So for most estates the date was a turning point, not a cliff edge. Credits now run out estate by estate, at each licence renewal and each add-on expiry. Where no Copilot Credits are available, the failure arrives as a stopped flow with one of two messages: “All AI Builder credits in this environment have been consumed” or “Missing Copilot Credit or AI Builder credit capacity”. This article sets out what changed according to Microsoft’s pages as checked on 2 November 2026, what those messages mean, how to fix a flow that has stopped, and what the same work costs in Copilot Credits.

When this article was first published in August, it said seeded credits would be removed on 1 November. Some of Microsoft’s pages still say so. Its dated calendar now says otherwise, and the conflict is set out below.

What changed on 1 November 2026

Microsoft’s End of AI Builder credits page sets out a calendar that began a year earlier. In its words, the change “doesn’t impact AI Builder features; they continue to be supported in all contexts, using Copilot Credits.” What ends is the AI Builder credit as a way of paying for them.

Two details on that page matter to anyone holding an add-on. Against the add-on end of life, Microsoft’s note reads: “Customers must turn off auto-renew in Microsoft 365 admin center/Partner center.” It does not say what happens to an add-on left on auto-renew. And after the date, customers with an active add-on “continue using their AI Builder credits to run AI Builder features until their licenses expire.” Separately, Microsoft’s licensing overview says AI Builder trials are discontinued, without giving a date.

Microsoft’s pages disagree about seeded credits

The calendar, and Microsoft’s AI Builder licensing overview, say seeded credits run to the end of the contract term: “Customers who purchased or renewed eligible licenses before November 1, 2026 will continue to receive their seeded AI Builder credits through the end of the applicable contract term.”

Two other Microsoft pages, both dated 8 October 2026, still say the opposite. The FAQ on the AI Builder credit management page says “Seeded credits will be removed on November 1, 2026”, and the Power Platform licensing FAQ says “The 5,000 AI Builder credits will be removed on November 1, 2026.” The credit management page also contradicts itself: a note higher up says existing seeded credits will be honoured through the end of the contract term.

The calendar is the more specific statement, and it is the page Microsoft links to as the explanation of the change. But do not plan on either reading. The Power Platform admin center shows the AI Builder credits your tenant actually holds, and that number, checked after each renewal, is the one that decides whether your flows keep running.

What did not change

AI Builder credits do not convert. Asked whether they will be migrated to Copilot Credits, Microsoft answers that “There’s no automatic conversion”, and that instead “a dual-mode licensing model applies: Environments first consume AI Builder credits, then Copilot Studio Credits, if needed.” There is no exchange rate either, because each capability has its own rate in each currency. In Copilot Studio, AI Builder features always consume Copilot Credits, so nothing moved there.

Which AI Builder credits are going, and when

Two kinds of AI Builder credits exist, and both now have an end date.

Seeded credits arrive bundled with a licence you already bought for another reason. Microsoft’s credit management page still lists them:

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 has 250,000 seeded credits sitting at tenant level, quietly funding whatever AI Builder actions were built over the last two years. Under Microsoft’s calendar that number does not fall to zero on a single day. It falls when those licences renew, block by block if they were bought at different times, and reaches zero at the last renewal unless an add-on is still active.

The AI Builder capacity add-on came in three tiers. Microsoft’s troubleshooting guidance lists them as AI Builder Capacity Add-on T1, T2 “(min 10 packs)” and T3 “(min 50 packs)”, each pack providing 1 million AI Builder credits, and Microsoft’s rate table describes a T1 add-on as 1 million credits of monthly capacity for $500 a month, on a yearly prepaid basis. That guidance, last updated in January, still walks through buying more packs in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Microsoft’s credit management page limits that to existing customers, up to 1 November 2026.

The two error messages, and what each one means

If you arrived here with an error message, it is probably one of two. Microsoft’s troubleshooting article, All AI Builder credits have been consumed, documents what a flow shows when it stops: “All AI Builder credits in this environment have been consumed” or “Missing Copilot Credit or AI Builder credit capacity”, in the Error panel on the flow run page.

The messages people paste into search are longer versions that name both currencies. One says the environment’s Copilot Credits and AI Builder credits have all been used up for the month. The other says the environment has no Copilot Credit or AI Builder credit capacity at all, and that an environment admin needs to allocate some. Microsoft documents them under the shorter wording above, with one cause and one fix.

Underneath, the error details of the AI Builder action carry Code=”EntitlementNotAvailable”, Code=”QuotaExceeded” or the message “Credit usage exceeds allocation.” Microsoft’s credit management FAQ adds NoCapacity and “No capacity was found” to the same list. In Power Apps, the same condition shows as a banner: “You need an AI Builder license to use this component” or “Missing Copilot Credit or AI Builder credit capacity”.

The cause is the same for all of them. In Power Apps and Power Automate, AI Builder actions “consume AI Builder credits first. If those credits are exhausted or unavailable, the actions consume Copilot Credits instead.” When neither is left, the actions are blocked. Since 1 November, an environment can reach that state in three ways:

1. Its seeded credits or add-on have ended at a renewal or expiry, and no Copilot Credits have been made available to it.
2. Its own AI Builder allocation is used up, even though the tenant pool may still hold credits.
3. The tenant pool is switched off for it. If an admin has cleared the Allow users to consume unassigned AI Builder credits setting, environments without their own allocation cannot use the unallocated credits at all. When the longer message adds that unallocated tenant-level AI Builder credits are blocked by an admin, this setting is the reason, and the fix is an allocation or the setting, not a purchase.

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.

Copilot Credits behave differently, which matters now that they are the fallback: an environment can be set to draw on the tenant’s unallocated Copilot Credits once its own allocation runs out, as the next section shows.

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.

The block also arrives late. Actions stop once calculated consumption passes 125% of the credits available, and the calculation lags. Microsoft’s pages put the delay at “up to five days”, at “up to five (5) or more days”, and, on the credit management page, at possibly “a long period like seven (7) days”. While it lags, the last calculation stands, so an environment can run well past its capacity before anything is blocked. That overage “isn’t billed to you and doesn’t affect other environments.”

How to fix a flow that has stopped

Microsoft’s credit management page lists four ways to give an environment capacity again. Since 1 November, one of them has closed.

Reallocating AI Builder credits. In the Power Platform admin center, go to Licensing, then Capacity add-ons. The Add-ons tab lists the environments that have AI Builder credits allocated, and Assign to an environment changes them. An environment that is not listed draws on the tenant pool. If it should and cannot, check the Allow users to consume unassigned AI Builder credits setting (Settings, then the AI Builder credit page) before anything else.

Making Copilot Credits available. This is now the main route, and it is managed in a different place. In the Power Platform admin center, go to Licensing, select Copilot Studio under Products, and on the Summary tab select Manage Capacity or Manage Copilot Credits. You allocate a number of credits to an environment, and under Capacity overages choose what happens when that allocation runs out: “Draw from the available capacity in my tenant”, or “Bill to my pay-as-you-go billing plan”. Microsoft’s capacity management guidance notes that “If no overage source is enabled, the environment can consume only its allocated prepaid credits”, and that eligible Copilot Studio environments without an allocation configuration draw from the tenant by default.

Pay-as-you-go. A billing policy in the Power Platform admin center links environments to an Azure subscription, and the meter bills what was consumed at the end of the monthly billing period, at “$0.01 per credit” according to Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go meters page. It keeps a flow that cannot stop running when prepaid capacity is gone, in exchange for a bill without a fixed ceiling.

One distinction catches estates that have read the Copilot Studio documentation. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio billing page says “Power Automate cloud flows use Power Automate licensing, not Copilot Credits”, and that is true of the flow itself. It does not cover the AI Builder actions inside a cloud flow: Microsoft’s AI Builder guidance on Copilot Credits says those consume Copilot Credits once AI Builder credits are absent or in overage. And if a classic flow is converted into an agent flow, its AI Builder prompts and models “can only consume Copilot Credit.”

Where Copilot Credits pricing is the question, Copilot Studio licensing: who is talking decides the bill covers packs, pay-as-you-go and enforcement in detail. In short, Microsoft sells Copilot Credit packs “($200.00/pack/month for 25,000 Copilot Credits)” on its Copilot Studio pricing page, meters pay-as-you-go at $0.01 a credit, and offers a one-year prepurchase plan bought in the Azure portal.

What the same work costs in Copilot Credits

There is no conversion ratio, but Microsoft’s capability rate table prices each AI Builder capability in both currencies, with a dollar figure for each. The dollar figures use two different bases: AI Builder credits at the T1 add-on rate of $500 a month for 1 million credits, and Copilot Credits at the pay-as-you-go rate of $0.01 a credit.

On Microsoft’s own figures, document processing is where the bill rises most among the capabilities above. A receipt or invoice page costs five times as much at the pay-as-you-go rate, and a custom document processing page 60% more. Outside this table, object detection rises further still, from $0.004 to $0.08 an image. At the pack price of $200 for 25,000 credits, which works out at $0.008 a credit, the receipt page is $0.064, still four times the add-on rate. At the pay-as-you-go rate, text recognition is the only line that gets cheaper, and simple text analysis costs the same. So the change in cost depends on which capabilities your flows use: an estate whose AI Builder use is mostly invoice and receipt extraction faces one of the steepest rises.

How to find what still runs on AI Builder credits

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. The Summary tab shows how many AI Builder credits the tenant owns and how many are allocated to environments, and the Add-ons tab shows which environments hold them. If you have no active AI Builder add-on, every credit there is seeded, and it ends when the licences that carry it renew. Those renewal dates, for each block of premium licences and each add-on, are the dates that now matter, and they are in your licence agreements rather than on Microsoft’s calendar.

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. The activity page also shows whether each run consumed AI Builder credits or Copilot Credits, which tells you which flows have already moved to the new currency.

That last check is the one most estates skip, and it is the one that produces surprises.

Across the estates we review, 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.

Most estates we see have no application risk tiering, so central IT learns an app is business-critical only when it breaks: after a platform change, an expired connection, or a leaver’s account being disabled. A credit that ends at a licence renewal is that kind of platform change. Classifying solutions by risk before that happens is covered in Power Platform adoption is not a usage number.

What to do now

The decision has changed shape since August, because one of the options has gone.

If you hold an active AI Builder add-on, keep using it until it expires, and check its auto-renew setting against Microsoft’s note. Before it expires, decide what replaces it: Copilot Credits for the flows that earn their place, or retirement for the ones that do not. Microsoft’s licensing overview still describes add-on renewals and true-ups by existing customers without giving an end date, while its credit management page limits them to 1 November 2026. If an add-on is critical to you, get the answer on renewal in writing from whoever bills you.

If you rely on seeded credits, the date that matters is each licence renewal. Size the Copilot Credits you need before the first one, from the consumption report and the rate table above.

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 buying dedicated Copilot Studio capacity or a pay-as-you-go meter for. The add-on can no longer be bought, so the comparison is now with Copilot Credits, at up to five times the cost per receipt page.

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. Microsoft’s credit management page says 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.

Microsoft’s pages now disagree on the flow half of that. The credit management page still says “adding an AI Builder action to a flow doesn’t transform it into a premium flow”, but the rate table in the licensing overview says “A Power Automate flow that uses any AI Builder action is a premium flow. It requires Power Automate premium licensing.” Until Microsoft reconciles the two, do not count on the flow exemption without confirming it for your agreement. In our own licensing reviews we apply the stricter rule from the licensing overview, treating any flow with an AI Builder action as requiring a premium Power Automate licence alongside the credits it consumes, because the same page classes AI Builder actions as premium connectors.

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. Agent flows are stricter: there, prompts and models always consume Copilot Credits, even when run from the test panel or the flow designer.

Our position: this is an audit, not a purchase

We do not recommend treating the November change or your next credit renewal 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 expiry at renewal 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. Copilot Credits have their own controls in the same admin center, an allocation per environment and the choice of overage source, and they deserve the same attention now that AI Builder runs on them.

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, find the date your seeded credits or add-on end, and decide before then between prepaid Copilot Credits, pay-as-you-go for the flows that cannot stop, and retiring the dependency.

If a flow has already stopped, work in this order: read the message, check whether the environment has its own AI Builder allocation, check the unassigned credits setting, then make Copilot Credits available to the environment.

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, we track this against each subscription renewal and add-on expiry date.

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 your first renewal, not after it.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to AI Builder credits on 1 November 2026? Two things ended. Existing customers can no longer renew or buy AI Builder capacity add-ons, though active add-ons keep working until they expire. And new or renewed Power Platform and Dynamics 365 licences no longer carry seeded AI Builder credits; on Microsoft’s calendar, licences bought or renewed before 1 November keep them to the end of the contract term. AI Builder features keep working on Copilot Credits.

Can I still buy AI Builder credits or the AI Builder capacity add-on T1? Not according to Microsoft’s credit management page. New customers lost the option on 1 November 2025, and renewals and extra purchases by existing customers were allowed only up to 1 November 2026. The replacement is Copilot Credits, bought as prepaid packs, through a one-year prepurchase plan, or pay-as-you-go through an Azure subscription.

What does “Missing Copilot Credit or AI Builder credit capacity” mean? The environment has no AI Builder credits and no Copilot Credits it can draw on, so AI Builder actions are blocked. Microsoft documents it alongside “All AI Builder credits in this environment have been consumed”, with one cause and one fix: reallocate AI Builder credits if you still hold any, check the Allow users to consume unassigned AI Builder credits setting, or make Copilot Credits available to the environment, prepaid or pay-as-you-go.

Do AI Builder credits convert to Copilot Credits? No. There is no automatic conversion and no exchange rate. Environments consume AI Builder credits first and Copilot Credits after them, and each capability has its own rate in each currency, published in Microsoft’s AI Builder capability rate table.

If an environment runs out, does it use the tenant pool automatically? Not for AI Builder credits: an environment with allocated AI Builder credits consumes only those and does not fall back to unallocated tenant credits, so you have to reallocate manually. Copilot Credits are different. An environment can be set to draw on the tenant’s unallocated Copilot Credits, or to bill a pay-as-you-go plan, once its own allocation runs out.

Anuj Kumar Mishra

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.