PL-900 Changed on 24 July 2026: Power Pages Out, Copilot Studio Agents In

Microsoft revised the PL-900 skills outline on 24 July 2026. The change is bigger than a reshuffle: an entire functional group was removed, a new one worth 20-25% of the exam was added, and AI-assisted authoring now appears across three domains that previously had none. If you were already preparing, roughly a quarter of the exam is material your notes may not mention at all.

What was removed

Two things went, according to Microsoft's own change log on the PL-900 study guide.

Power Pages lost its functional group. The previous outline carried a whole area called "Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Pages", including the task of creating a Power Pages site. Both are gone. Power Pages has not vanished from the exam — it survives as a single business-value bullet, "Describe the value of Microsoft Power Pages to build websites" — but you are no longer expected to know how to build one.

The build-an-app tasks went too. "Build a canvas app" and "Build a model-driven app" were both removed, replaced by a task framed around description rather than construction: "Describe how to build basic apps by using Power Apps". So did "Describe the business value of extending business solutions by using Microsoft Power Platform".

What was added

A new domain: agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio, at 20-25%. This is the headline. The outline now carries "Describe features and capabilities of agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio" as a full skill area, with two task groups underneath it — building agents, and managing them. Between them they cover use cases for agents, building conversation paths with topics, knowledge sources, tools including MCP servers and agent flows, publishing by channel, Microsoft Agent 365, monitoring usage and adoption, and agent evaluations.

Microsoft published a matching training module, Understand features of Copilot Studio agents, and refreshed the whole official learning path on 22 July — two days before the outline itself changed.

AI spread into the domains that were already there. Dataverse gained "Describe how to use AI to create and edit tables, columns, and relationships". Power Apps gained AI-assisted creation of both canvas and model-driven apps, plus a bullet on "creating AI-powered apps by using the vibe experience". Power Automate gained AI-assisted creation and modification of both cloud and desktop flows.

What the weightings look like now

Skill-area names and weightings below are quoted exactly as Microsoft publishes them on the PL-900 study guide, because you will want to match them against that page word for word.

Skill area	Weight
Describe the business value of Microsoft Power Platform	5-10%
Manage the Microsoft Power Platform environment	20-25%
Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Apps	20-25%
Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Automate	20-25%
Describe features and capabilities of agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio	20-25%

Business value went down; managing the environment and Power Automate went up. Four of the five areas now sit in the same 20-25% band, which makes PL-900 a flatter exam than it used to be — there is no longer one dominant area to carry you.

If you were already studying

Three practical steps.

Check whether your material has a chapter on agents at all. If it does not, it predates 24 July 2026 and is missing about a fifth of the exam. That is the single most useful test you can run on any PL-900 resource right now, including ours.

Stop practising how to build a Power Pages site. Know what Power Pages is for and who it serves — external users, self-service, sites connected to the same Dataverse tables as everything else. That is the depth the surviving bullet asks for.

Expect AI-assisted authoring questions in the app and flow domains. Not deep mechanics, but the shape of the thing: that Copilot builds the data model before it builds a canvas app, that the model-driven route produces forms, views and navigation, that a description in ordinary language is the input.

One honest note on the "vibe experience" bullet: Microsoft's own documentation still labels that capability preview and states plainly that preview features are not intended for production use. The study guide says most questions cover generally available features, and that preview features may appear if they are commonly used. We would learn what it is and what it does, and not go deeper.

Why this article exists

We rebuilt our own PL-900 material against the 24 July outline rather than patching the old one, because a quarter of the exam changing is not a patch. We also captured Microsoft's change log the day we read it — that table is replaced whenever the exam is next revised, and once it goes, the record of what the exam used to look like goes with it.

Independent study material. ciply.io is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft.