Fall 2026 is roughly 10 weeks away. Microsoft published the Power Platform Wave 2 2026 release preview notes in July — and there's a lot in there. SharePoint's Copilot layer is getting smarter. Power Apps is getting AI-generated screen scaffolding. Power Automate is pushing natural language as a first-class authoring experience. Teams is improving its AI meeting intelligence significantly.
Some of this is shipping now in preview. Some of it releases to GA in October. A few things are still on the roadmap with no firm date. This post separates what's real from what's aspirational, and gives you a prioritised action list for what to start planning today.
This is a companion to our Microsoft May 2026 roundup which covered Build 2026 announcements. If you missed that one, read it first — several of these July updates are continuations of what was announced in May.
At a Glance — July 2026
Power Apps AI Builder
Generate app screens from plain English descriptions. AI-scaffolded forms, galleries, and navigation structures.
Power Automate NL Authoring
Describe a flow in plain English, get a complete working draft — triggers, actions, conditions, and all.
SharePoint Copilot Pages
Copilot generates full SharePoint site pages from a brief — hero, sections, web parts, and sample content pre-populated.
Teams Meeting AI Recap v2
Expanded AI recap: per-person summaries, follow-up task assignments, and searchable transcript indexing in SharePoint.
Power Automate Agent Loops
Agentic flows that can re-evaluate their own logic mid-execution, branch dynamically, and retry failed steps with context-aware reasoning.
Entra Conditional Access
New AI-assisted conditional access policy recommendations — Entra analyses signin patterns and suggests tighter policies for risky accounts.
Power Platform Wave 2 2026 — What's Actually Changing
Power Apps Wave 2 2026
- AI-generated screen scaffolding Preview — Describe the app you want in the Power Apps studio: "I need a purchase request form with an approval inbox and admin dashboard." Copilot generates the screen structure, data bindings, and navigation. You then edit the generated result. The quality is high enough that it's faster to edit than to build from scratch for straightforward patterns.
- Responsive canvas improvements GA — The new Container control finally supports fluid layouts that adapt between phone and tablet/desktop. This was the most-requested feature in the Power Apps Ideas forum for two years running. You can now build one app that genuinely works across all form factors without the workarounds we used to need.
- Named formula performance GA — Named formulas (introduced in preview in 2025) are now GA and significantly faster. They evaluate once and cache, rather than re-evaluating on every screen repaint. Apps with heavy Gallery items will see load-time improvements.
- Natural language data queries Preview — In the formula bar, describe what you want in English and get the Power Fx expression. "Show requests from this week where status is Pending, sorted by urgency" →
SortByColumns(Filter(Requests, Status="Pending", Created >= DateAdd(Today(),-7,Days)), "Priority", Descending). Useful for makers who don't know Power Fx well, though experienced developers will still write formulas directly. - Dataverse low-code plug-ins Oct 2026 — Write server-side logic for Dataverse using Power Fx instead of C#. This removes the need to write custom plug-ins in Visual Studio for many common business rule scenarios.
Power Automate Wave 2 2026
- Natural language flow authoring Preview — Describe a flow in the Copilot sidebar: "When a new SharePoint item is added to PurchaseRequests with status Pending, look up the category's approver, send them a Teams message, and wait for their response." Copilot generates the complete flow structure. You review, adjust, and enable. For flows up to moderate complexity, this is genuinely faster than manual construction.
- Agentic flow loops Oct 2026 — A new flow pattern where the flow can evaluate results mid-execution and decide to retry, branch, or escalate based on AI reasoning rather than pre-defined conditions. Useful for approval escalation (e.g., if no response in 24 hours, automatically escalate to the next approver) without writing parallel branch logic by hand.
- Connector error intelligence GA — Power Automate now surfaces connector failures with root-cause analysis and suggested fixes inline in the flow run history. If an HTTP action fails with a 429 throttling error, the system tells you what it is and suggests adding a retry with delay automatically.
- Desktop flows AI recorder improvements Preview — The desktop flow recorder now generates cleaner recordings with AI-generated variable names, comment blocks, and error-handling scaffolding. Reduces the post-recording cleanup work significantly.
- Process advisor integration Oct 2026 — Process Advisor now outputs directly into Power Automate flow blueprints. Map your process, identify automation opportunities, and get a draft flow built from the mining data — without switching tools.
Power Pages Wave 2 2026
- AI-generated page templates Preview — Describe your portal's purpose and audience, and Copilot generates the homepage, navigation, and three content pages with relevant placeholder content. Better starting point than blank-page templates.
- Built-in multi-language support GA — Pages now supports automatic content translation workflows backed by Azure AI Translator. One portal, multiple language markets, no custom code.
- Improved authentication flexibility GA — Social login (Google, Apple), B2C workflows with Entra External ID, and guest access with email OTP are now all configurable through the Pages studio without custom identity provider setup.
SharePoint — Mid-Year Copilot Evolution
SharePoint's Copilot integration has been evolving steadily since List Agents went GA in January 2026 and the AI site creation features landed in March. July's updates represent the next phase: Copilot is moving from helping you build SharePoint pages to managing SharePoint content.
SharePoint Copilot Updates — July 2026
- Copilot Pages Oct 2026 — Give Copilot a brief for a SharePoint page ("Create a Q3 project status page for the Engineering team with a hero, timeline section, key metrics, and team contacts") and it generates the full page layout with web parts, sections, and sample content. You review, edit, and publish. Comparable to how Copilot generates PowerPoint slides today.
- Document summarisation in the panel Now Rolling Out — The SharePoint document library panel now shows an AI-generated summary for any file you hover over. No need to open the document to understand what it contains. Available for Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel.
- Site lifecycle recommendations Preview — SharePoint admin centre now surfaces AI-driven site lifecycle recommendations: sites with no activity in 90+ days, sites with overly broad permissions, sites missing owners. The system doesn't auto-delete anything — it queues recommendations for admins to review and act on.
- List Agent v2 — multi-list reasoning Preview — The SharePoint List Agent can now answer questions that span multiple related lists in the same site. "Which projects have open tasks assigned to engineers who are currently on leave?" — it joins the Projects list, Tasks list, and Leave Register automatically. This was a hard limitation of v1.
- Viva Connections card generation Oct 2026 — Copilot can generate Adaptive Card Extension (ACE) JSON for Viva Connections dashboards from a description. Still needs an SPFx developer to package and deploy it, but reduces the design and markup authoring time significantly.
Most SharePoint Copilot features — particularly List Agent v2, document summarisation at scale, and site lifecycle recommendations — require a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (£25–£30/user/month depending on your agreement). The Wave 2 Copilot Pages feature is expected to require this licence as well. SPFx development and Power Automate flows are not affected — those work on standard Microsoft 365 plans.
Microsoft Teams — AI Intelligence Round 2
Teams — July 2026 Updates
- Meeting Recap v2 — per-person summaries Now in Preview — The AI meeting recap now generates individual follow-up summaries for each participant, listing only the action items and decisions that are relevant to them. Meeting recording stored in SharePoint becomes fully searchable by topic, speaker, and date — across all your meeting history.
- Intelligent meeting scheduling Oct 2026 — Teams Scheduler can now find the optimal meeting slot for a group by analysing calendar availability, focus time blocks, and time zone fairness (stops the 9am recurring meeting that's always midnight for one participant). Requires Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Teams channels and SharePoint synchronisation Now Rolling Out — Channel files are now indexed by SharePoint search in real time, including content inside documents. Copilot search results now include channel files alongside regular SharePoint content — no manual sync needed.
- Teams Phone AI transcription improvements GA — PSTN calls via Teams Phone now support real-time AI transcription with 40+ languages and automatic language detection. Previously limited to Teams calls only; now extends to regular phone calls.
Entra & Security — What IT Admins Need to Know
Microsoft Entra — July 2026
- AI-assisted Conditional Access recommendations Preview — Entra analyses your tenant's sign-in risk data and surfaced policies that would have blocked the top-5 risky sign-in patterns from the last 90 days. Recommendations include a simulation showing impact on legitimate users before you enable them. This closes the gap between knowing you should tighten policies and actually knowing which policy to write.
- Passkey (FIDO2) rollout push GA — Microsoft is pushing hard on passkeys as the MFA successor. July brings improved passkey registration UX for end users (no longer needs IT intervention) and an admin-controlled rollout policy. If your organisation is still on SMS-based MFA, the writing is on the wall — start planning the passkey migration.
- Cross-tenant access policies — granular controls GA — You can now set per-application cross-tenant access rules, not just per-partner. Useful for organisations that allow external collaboration in Teams and SharePoint but want different rules for different apps.
- Workload identity federation expansion GA — App registrations and managed identities can now use workload identity federation with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and external OIDC providers. Reduces the number of client secrets in your CI/CD pipelines significantly.
What to Prioritise Before October
Wave 2 2026 hits GA in October. That gives you roughly 10 weeks to prepare for the changes that affect your tenant, plan adoption for the new features you want to roll out, and clean up anything that might cause issues.
Enable Preview Features
- Opt into Power Automate NL authoring in the admin centre — start testing with your citizen developers
- Enable the AI meeting recap v2 in Teams admin for a pilot group
- Turn on document summarisation in SharePoint for your information workers
Ready for Wave 2 GA
- Brief your Power Apps makers on the responsive Container improvements — existing apps may need layout adjustments
- Plan Copilot Pages training for communications/intranet teams
- Review your Conditional Access policies — use the new AI recommendations to tighten them before October
Monitor Progress
- List Agent v2 multi-list reasoning — test with your most complex SharePoint data scenarios
- Power Automate agentic loops — track the preview for approval escalation use cases
- Passkey rollout timeline — monitor the Entra roadmap for GA enforcement date
Still Maturing
- Power Apps AI screen scaffolding — useful for prototypes, not production yet
- Dataverse low-code plug-ins — limited to Dataverse environments, irrelevant if you're on SharePoint-only
- Natural language Power Fx — faster to write it directly if you already know Power Fx
The Power Automate natural language authoring preview is worth testing immediately — not because it replaces knowing how to build flows, but because it dramatically lowers the floor for your non-technical users to draft flows for review. The pattern that works: have citizen developers describe flows in NL, get a draft, then have a qualified maker review and harden it. That's faster than pure maker-builds for volume.
For SPFx Developers — What Changes in Your Stack
If you primarily build SPFx solutions, the Wave 2 announcements have fewer direct implications than the Power Platform-side changes. But there are a few things worth noting:
- Viva Connections ACE card generation (October 2026) — Copilot can draft the Adaptive Card JSON, but you'll still need to package and deploy via SPFx. The authoring burden reduces; the development pipeline doesn't change.
- SharePoint search index changes — Teams channel files now index in real time. If you have SPFx components that query SharePoint search for content across channels, test them against the new indexing behaviour before October.
- Copilot extensibility via SPFx — The Direct Line API pattern for embedding Copilot Studio agents in SPFx web parts (which we covered in our May Copilot Studio guide) remains the supported method. No API changes announced in Wave 2.
- SPFx 1.23 reminder — If you haven't tested your solutions against SPFx 1.23 (released April 2026) with the List Panel and Navigation Customizer APIs, do it before October tenant upgrades push it to more tenants.
July 2026 — Key Takeaways
Power Platform Wave 2 2026 preview is out. Test the NL authoring in Power Automate and the responsive Container controls in Power Apps now — both are worth your time before October GA.
SharePoint Copilot is moving from page-building to content management. List Agent v2 multi-list reasoning and site lifecycle recommendations are the big ones — test the previews in a non-production tenant first.
Teams Meeting Recap v2 is in preview now and worth enabling for information workers. Per-person summaries with action item filtering are a genuine improvement over the v1 recap.
Entra's passkey push is accelerating. If you're still on SMS-based MFA, start planning the migration. The AI-assisted Conditional Access recommendations give you a low-effort starting point for tightening your policies.
October is 10 weeks away. That's enough time to test previews, train your makers, and prep your rollout plan — but not enough time to procrastinate and expect a smooth Wave 2 landing.