Copilot in Power Pages

What it does

Copilot in Power Pages is a set of generative AI features that scaffold and edit a business website from natural language: it can generate a whole site, individual pages, forms, body text and a colour theme, and it can add an AI-powered agent that answers your visitors' questions. It's aimed at makers who don't want to hand-build every page, plus a runtime agent for site users.

Key facts

Copilot for site creation is GA in all regions except DOD. You describe the site and it generates a site name, web address, home page layout and further pages with HTML, copy and images, all dropped into the sitemap and opened in the design studio for editing.
Site creation needs the enhanced data model turned on. Without it, the feature isn't available.
You can generate individual pages, single-step forms, and multistep forms (multistep is preview), each from a description with a preview before you commit.
Text assist generates and rewrites body copy, adjusting tone, length and messaging on request. There's also a colour-theme generator.
Adding an agent: turn on the Site agent option in the Set up workspace and Power Pages creates a Copilot Studio agent with generative answers that reads your site content. You can also add an existing Copilot Studio agent, or point one at Bing for public data.
Site agents are provisioned automatically during site creation when prerequisites are met, unless a service admin turns that off at tenant level.
Agents created from Power Pages use Generic OAuth 2 with token pass-through, so they work with the site's identity providers including anonymous users, and you scope visibility with web roles.
The agent is initially a trial; after the trial expires it draws on the Copilot Studio capacity in your environment.

When to use / skip

Use site-creation Copilot to get past the blank canvas: a working sitemap, home page and a few pages you then refine. It's genuinely useful for a first draft and for makers who aren't strong on layout. Use the form and text assists for quick scaffolding. Use the site agent when visitors need conversational help and your site content or a Copilot Studio agent can answer them. Skip the idea that generated pages, copy or images are launch-ready. They need a proper editorial and design pass, and generated images are placeholders saved as web files. If you already have a hand-built information architecture, generating a whole site from scratch fights you more than it helps; use the page and form assists instead.

Configuration decisions

Turn on the enhanced data model before you expect site-creation Copilot to work; it's a hard prerequisite.
Decide whether automatic agent provisioning stays on at tenant level, or have a service admin turn it off if you don't want an agent on every new site.
For agents, make sure the tenant's "Publish Copilots with AI features" setting is on and the HTTP connector isn't blocked in the environment.
Choose the agent's knowledge source: site content by default, an existing Copilot Studio agent, or Bing for public data, and plan Omnichannel handoff to a live agent if you need it.
Use web roles to control which visitors and users see which agent, and plan capacity for when the agent trial expires.

Gotchas

Generated images are placeholders stored as web files, not licensed assets. Swap them before go-live.
If you change the site's custom domain after adding an agent, turn the agent off, change the domain, then turn it back on, or it breaks.
After toggling the agent off, wait a few minutes for background operations to finish before turning it back on.
The site agent starts as a trial and quietly shifts to consuming your environment's Copilot Studio capacity; budget for that before it surprises the client.
Availability is region- and language-limited for several features, and multistep forms are still preview, so check before promising them.

Consultant notes

Site-creation Copilot is a scaffolding tool, not a site builder. Sell it as "faster first draft", set editorial and design expectations early, and bill the refinement.
The agent is the Power Pages front door into Copilot Studio. Once a client wants real conversational behaviour, you're doing Copilot Studio work with its own licensing and capacity, so scope that separately.
The custom-domain-plus-agent ordering trap catches people during cutover. Note it in your go-live runbook.
Watch this one: enhanced data model and the auto-provisioning tenant switch both change what's available, and neither is obvious from the maker UI. Confirm both at the start of an engagement.

Confirm the site agent's trial-to-capacity behaviour and current preview flags against the Learn docs before quoting a client. This one has cost tails.