Know This Before Adding Human Review and Long Tasks to Copilot Studio Agent Flows

How does the request for information action work?

According to the Microsoft Learn documentation, this action pauses the flow, collects input from the person you specify, and makes that value available to later steps. The flow resumes when the reviewer submits from Outlook email.

You can make an input optional or give it single-select or multi-select choices. There is also one known issue. If an input name contains a space, the output value can come out wrapped in double curly braces, so the documentation advises using names without spaces.

When do you turn on asynchronous response?

Existing agent flows had a 2-minute limit. Turning on asynchronous response lets the flow keep running past that limit and return the result to the agent once it finishes. The setup steps are as follows.

1. Check that the trigger is "When an agent calls the flow".
2. Turn on asynchronous response in the settings of the "Respond to the agent" action.
3. Save or publish the flow.

The documentation states three limits. It works only in new-infrastructure environments, callbacks are fully supported in Microsoft Teams, and callbacks are not supported in the Microsoft Copilot and phone channels. Also, if the user sends a new message before the flow finishes, the flow still runs to the end, but the agent answers the latest request first.

What should you watch for when using both together?

• Channels: If human review is an approval flow that takes days, first check whether the channel supports callbacks. The phone channel does not support asynchronous callbacks, so you cannot carry the same flow over as is.
• Joint approval: Even if you specify several reviewers, only the value from whoever answers first is used. Design on the assumption that this one action cannot satisfy a case that needs approval from everyone.
• No response: What happens when the request email does not arrive or nobody answers is not stated in this documentation, so I cannot present it as confirmed. Have your operations team set the time limit and reassignment criteria separately.

What is the node added in September?

The September 2026 entry in What's new includes an extract node you place in a workflow. It pulls named values and tables out of documents such as invoices, contracts, and financial statements so later steps can use them. The Microsoft 365 Copilot node was also introduced as a preview that month. Rather than passing extraction results straight to follow-up processing, it is more realistic to put a human confirmation step first, using the request for information action, for values that are hard to undo, such as amounts or contract terms.

Where do you check the latest status?

In the Copilot Studio documentation, What's new and each feature's page show the stage (preview or general availability) and environment conditions. This article is current as of 2026-10-08. Features roll out in stages over several days, so if you do not see one on screen, start by checking whether your environment supports it.