AI credits

What it does

AI Builder credits are the consumption currency for AI Builder features in Power Automate and Power Apps. Credits arrive from AI Builder capacity add-ons or seeded in premium licences, sit in a tenant pool, and are drawn down as models and prompts run. That currency is being retired in favour of Copilot Credits.

Key facts

Microsoft announced a progressive end to AI Builder credits in October 2025. New customers haven't been able to buy AI Builder capacity add-ons since 1 November 2025.
On 1 November 2026, seeded AI Builder credits are removed from premium licences for all customers, and existing add-ons reach end of life — no renewal, no new purchases. Credits on already-active add-on contracts remain usable until those contracts expire.
The fallback model is sequential: AI Builder features consume AI Builder credits first, then Copilot Credits if those are exhausted or absent, then fail. There's no conversion between the two currencies.
Seeded amounts per licence per month, while they last: Power Automate Premium 5,000, Power Automate Process 5,000, Power Apps Premium 500, Power Apps per app 250, Dynamics 365 F&O 20,000. Most seeded sources are capped at 1,000,000 credits per tenant.
An AI Builder capacity add-on unit is 1,000,000 credits per month.
Credits are unallocated by default and pooled at tenant level. Allocating credits to an environment reserves them — and that environment then draws only on its allocation, with no automatic fallback to the tenant pool.
Consumption resets on the first of the month. Unused credits don't carry over.
Admins can block consumption of unallocated credits with a tenant setting, so only environments with explicit allocations can use AI features.
Overage is never billed. It's a grace period — the environment is blocked, or falls back to Copilot Credits, until the month resets.
Training models, testing prebuilt or custom models, and testing in prompt builder are all free. Prompts always consume credits, including in preview.

When to use / skip

Treat AI Builder credits as a legacy currency you're managing down rather than a model to build a new programme on. If the client already holds add-ons, use them until the contract ends. If they're starting now, the answer is Copilot Credits, because seeded credits stop in November 2026 and new add-ons can't be bought. The one thing worth doing regardless is measuring actual consumption before anyone commits to a number, since rates differ per capability and per model and estimates made without the rate card are guesses.

Configuration decisions

Whether credits are allocated to specific environments or left in the tenant pool, which is a control-versus-flexibility trade rather than a cost one.
Whether unallocated credit consumption is blocked at tenant level, which is the real lever for deciding where AI is allowed to run.
Which capabilities are in scope, since rates vary widely by tier and prompt consumption depends on input tokens, output tokens and the model chosen.
Whether Copilot Credits are purchased prepaid or drawn pay-as-you-go, given pay-as-you-go removes the blocking behaviour.
Who monitors consumption monthly, because nothing about this is self-correcting.

Gotchas

Consumption is computed periodically — ideally daily, but it can lag five days or more. The block or fallback decision uses the last computation, so a heavy month can run a long way into overage before anything stops.
An environment with allocated credits never falls back to the tenant pool. Allocating credits can therefore make an environment more likely to be blocked than leaving it unallocated.
Failures surface as EntitlementNotAvailable, NoCapacity or QuotaExceeded, which read like transient service errors rather than a licensing wall.
Overage in one environment doesn't affect others, but the global consumption graph shows a single tenant figure, so it looks like everything is in trouble when one environment is.
Adding an AI Builder action to a flow used inside an app makes the app premium, even though the flow isn't considered premium.
Preview-model prompts fail everywhere if an admin turns the AI Builder preview toggle off.

Consultant notes

Raise the November 2026 date with any client relying on seeded credits. That's a live budget item, not a future consideration, and their Power Automate Premium licences stop supplying credits on that date.
Get a consumption baseline from the AI Builder consumption report before sizing anything. The rate card lives in the Power Platform Licensing Guide and the capability rate table, and neither is something to estimate from memory.
Recommend the tenant setting that blocks unallocated credit consumption on any client who cares where AI runs. It's the cleanest governance control available here.
Be clear that overage isn't a bill, it's a stoppage. Clients who assume they'll simply be charged for the excess will be surprised when the flow fails instead.

Worth revisiting well before 1 November 2026, when seeded credits are removed and add-ons reach end of life.