Microsoft's Power Platform release wave cycle runs twice a year: Wave 1 (April–September) and Wave 2 (October–March). Wave 2 2026 preview features are now live in early-access environments, with General Availability landing October 2026. For Power Platform practitioners, this is the window to test, validate, and prepare before features auto-enable in your production tenant.
This post summarises the Wave 2 2026 highlights across Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Copilot Studio, and Dataverse — with a testing checklist at the end so your team can systematically validate before GA drops.
How the Wave Preview Works
Each wave has two opt-in dates before mandatory GA rollout:
- August 2026: Preview features available via opt-in. Admins enable on sandbox environments.
- September 2026: Additional features added to preview. Early adopter window.
- October 2026: GA begins — features roll out to all production tenants. Some features auto-enable; others remain opt-in.
To enable Wave 2 2026 preview in your environment: go to Power Platform Admin Center → Environments → [your env] → Updates → 2026 Release Wave 2 and click Update now to opt in on a sandbox first.
Do this on a sandbox first. Wave preview features can change form builder behaviour, flow expression syntax handling, and canvas app control defaults. Testing on production without a validation window is a common source of user support tickets in October. Enable preview in a sandbox at least 3 weeks before your GA update window.
Power Apps Wave 2 2026 Highlights
Power Apps
Canvas, Model-Driven, and Power Pages updates
Copilot-Assisted Formula Bar
The formula bar in Canvas apps now includes an inline Copilot suggestion panel. Start typing a formula — Copilot suggests completions based on your data sources, named formulas, and surrounding context. Works in both Power Fx expressions and control properties.
Responsive Layout Templates (Canvas)
New built-in responsive layout containers: fluid grid, adaptive columns, and breakpoint-aware stacks. Replaces the old manual X/Y positioning approach for most UI patterns. Existing apps are unaffected — opt-in migration per screen.
Modern Controls Default-On
Modern controls (introduced in Wave 1 2025) become the default for new canvas apps. Classic controls remain available. If your app uses classic controls with heavy custom styling, test rendering — some layout calculations differ between modern and classic control families.
Model-Driven App Quick Create Improvements
Quick create forms in model-driven apps now support sub-grids and related table lookups inline — previously only available in the full main form. Reduces context switching for data entry workflows.
Delegation Rule Changes for SharePoint Connector
The SharePoint data connector's delegation limit handling is tightened. Formulas that previously returned wrong-but-consistent results at the delegation boundary now throw explicit delegation warnings. Test all Gallery sources backed by large SharePoint lists.
Power Automate Wave 2 2026 Highlights
Power Automate
Cloud flows, desktop flows, and AI agent updates
Agentic Flow Loops
Cloud flows can now run in agentic mode — the flow runs in a loop, evaluating a condition after each iteration and deciding autonomously whether to continue, branch, or stop. No fixed loop count or fixed trigger. Useful for monitoring flows that need to "watch" state until a condition is met.
Natural Language Flow Editing
Edit existing flow steps using natural language in the designer: "Change this email send to only trigger when the priority field is High" rewrites the condition automatically. Copilot also explains what existing complex conditions do in plain English on hover.
Process Mining in Power Automate
Process Mining (acquired via Minit, then integrated in Wave 1 2025) reaches GA. Analyse your Dataverse, SAP, or Dynamics event logs to automatically discover where process bottlenecks exist before building automation. Available on Process Mining addon licence.
Desktop Flow Resilience Improvements
UI automation flows now have automatic retry on transient UI failures (window not loaded, control not found within timeout). Configurable retry policy per action — previously required manual Scope + Error handling patterns. Reduces brittle flow maintenance.
Expression Language — Stricter Type Coercion
Expressions that implicitly coerced string "123" to integer 123 in conditionals now require explicit int() conversion. Existing flows using implicit coercion in condition comparisons may start returning false. Test flows with mixed-type comparisons.
Copilot Studio Wave 2 2026 Highlights
Copilot Studio
Agent authoring, multi-agent orchestration, and deployment
Multi-Agent Conversation Hand-off
A Copilot Studio agent can hand off a conversation to another agent mid-session — passing full conversation history and context. The receiving agent continues without the user needing to re-state their question. Enables specialised agent networks (HR agent → IT agent for hybrid requests).
SharePoint Grounding — Incremental Indexing
Agents grounded in SharePoint document libraries now use incremental indexing. Previously, changes to SharePoint content could take 24 hours to reflect in agent answers. Incremental indexing brings this to near-real-time (15–30 minutes for most tenants).
MCP Tool Integration
Copilot Studio agents can connect to external services via Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools — reaching GA after Wave 1 preview. Build agents that call your .NET API, PostgreSQL database, or external SaaS system via a typed MCP interface rather than custom HTTP connectors.
Autonomous Agent Scheduling
Agents can now be triggered on a schedule (daily, weekly, event-based) and run autonomously — completing multi-step tasks without a user prompt. Combine with MCP tools for agents that run nightly reports, check system health, or process approval queues automatically.
Power BI Wave 2 2026 Highlights
Power BI
Reports, semantic models, and Fabric integration
Direct Lake on PostgreSQL (Preview)
Microsoft Fabric's Direct Lake mode — which streams data directly from OneLake without import — now supports PostgreSQL as an external data source via Fabric mirroring. Data changes in your PostgreSQL database appear in Power BI dashboards within minutes, not on the next scheduled refresh.
Copilot Narrative Summaries GA
Copilot-generated narrative summaries (plain-English description of what changed in a report between periods) reach GA. Now embeddable in paginated reports and PowerPoint exports. Available to all Power BI Premium and Fabric licensed users.
DAX Query View in Power BI Desktop
Write and run DAX queries directly against your semantic model in Power BI Desktop — without publishing to the service. Great for debugging measures, inspecting calculated columns, and validating model behaviour during development.
Dataverse Wave 2 2026 Highlights
Dataverse — the database layer underlying most Power Platform apps — also sees meaningful Wave 2 updates:
- Elastic Tables GA: Elastic Tables (introduced in preview for unstructured/IoT data at scale) reach GA. Azure Cosmos DB-backed, they support schemaless JSON storage alongside relational tables in the same Power Apps model-driven app.
- Audit Log Streaming to Azure: Dataverse audit logs can now stream directly to Azure Monitor or Event Hubs in real time. Eliminates the need to poll the audit API for SIEM integrations.
- Solution Layering UI Improvements: The solution checker and layering UI in the Maker Portal is significantly redesigned — easier to identify which layer owns a component and resolve conflicts in ALM pipelines.
- Environment Variables in Flows — Breaking Change: Flows referencing Environment Variables now require explicit variable binding at deployment time via Pipelines. Manually-deployed flows that relied on runtime lookup may break. Check your ALM pipeline documentation.
Pre-GA Testing Checklist
Enable Wave 2 preview on a sandbox environment and work through this checklist before your production tenant is updated:
- Canvas Apps: Open each production app in edit mode. Check for delegation warnings on Gallery data sources backed by SharePoint lists over 500 items. Verify modern control rendering matches expected layout.
- Canvas Apps: If you use classic controls with custom styling (colour overrides, icon positioning), render each screen side-by-side with Wave 1 and document any shifts.
- Cloud Flows: Search your flows for conditions comparing strings to numbers or booleans. Test with the stricter type coercion enabled. Add explicit
int(),float(), orbool()conversions where needed. - Cloud Flows: Run your highest-volume scheduled flows in the sandbox. Check run history for any new expression evaluation errors that weren't present pre-Wave 2.
- Copilot Studio: Test agents grounded in SharePoint with fresh document additions. Verify the incremental indexing reflects new content within 30 minutes (check admin indexing logs).
- Dataverse: If you use Environment Variables in flows deployed via Pipelines, update your pipeline configuration to explicitly bind variables. Test a deployment end-to-end before GA.
- Power BI: Refresh all reports using Dataverse connectors — confirm no schema changes from Elastic Tables GA or audit log changes affect existing data models.
- Licensing check: Agentic Flow Loops and Autonomous Agent Scheduling may require Power Automate Premium or Copilot Studio add-on licences. Verify your tenant has the required licences before enabling in production.
Set a Wave 2 testing window in your team calendar now. The preview window closes at GA in October. Teams that skip sandbox validation routinely spend the first two weeks of October fixing broken flows and confused users. Thirty hours of testing in September saves hundreds of hours of incident response in October.
How to Enable Wave 2 Preview
- Go to Power Platform Admin Center (admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com)
- Select Environments → choose your sandbox environment
- Click Updates in the top toolbar
- Under 2026 Release Wave 2, click Update now
- Confirm — the environment updates within 24 hours
- Use the Try it now toggle in individual apps to opt specific features in during preview
For feature-by-feature enablement (testing specific features in isolation), use the Feature management section in your environment settings. Not all Wave 2 features support granular opt-in — check the official Microsoft release notes for each feature's rollout type.
Summary
Power Platform Wave 2 2026 brings meaningful advances across the stack — more Copilot integration everywhere, agentic flows, multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio, and PostgreSQL mirroring in Power BI via Fabric. Two areas need immediate attention before GA:
- Test now: Power Automate expression type coercion changes and SharePoint connector delegation behaviour changes are the most likely sources of production flow failures in October.
- Review licences: Agentic Loop Flows and Autonomous Agent features may require Premium or add-on licences your tenant doesn't yet have.
Enable the preview on a sandbox today. October comes quickly, and the teams that test in advance are the ones who get to spend October shipping new features rather than fixing broken ones.