The Power Platform May 2026 feature update dropped on the 14th and the release notes are dense. I read through the whole thing twice. Most of it is noise for day-to-day builders. A few things are not. This is the short list of what I am actually turning on this week and why.
What shipped in the May 2026 update
The headline item is Power Fx user defined types going generally available as of version 3.26044. UDTs are enabled by default on new apps and require a manual toggle in settings > updates > new > user-defined types on existing ones. Defined with the Type function in App.OnStart or app-scoped formulas.
Beyond that, the release covers Copilot Studio shipping bits around agent authoring, more Dataverse plumbing for skills and knowledge sources, governance tweaks for managed environments, and a long tail of small Power Apps and Power Automate quality-of-life updates. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is preview-flag churn that will not affect what I build this month.
Why this release is heavier than it looks
On the surface, the May 2026 update reads like another monthly drop. It is not. UDTs going GA changes how I write Power Fx, full stop. Component libraries stop being copy-paste exercises and start behaving like an SDK. The agent and skill updates keep moving business logic out of system prompts and into managed Dataverse artifacts, which I have written about before.
The governance pieces are quieter but they hit the parts of the platform that decide whether your environment stays usable at 200 makers or collapses into sprawl. None of these are flashy. All of them shift how you architect.
The three things I am turning on this week
1. Power Fx user defined types on existing apps. This is the one. Before UDTs, type information was inferred from whatever record you passed first. One missing field and the schema silently widened. Runtime surprise. With UDTs you declare the shape once with Type and the formula bar catches mismatches at authoring time. I am going through my medium-sized apps and flipping the toggle, then retyping the component props that have caused the most regression bugs. The trade-off is real. Existing formulas can break when types get strict. You will spend an afternoon fixing things. You get type safety for the next two years. Worth it. More on what UDTs unlock in my earlier post.
2. The Copilot Studio agent authoring improvements tied to Dataverse skills. If you have not moved your business logic out of system prompts yet, this release is the nudge. A focused 400-token skill outperforms a 4000-token prompt every time. I am rebuilding two internal agents this week, lifting policy logic into skills with named owners and version history. The governance gain matters more than the latency gain. If you want a practical look at surfacing those skills inside an app, How to Build Custom Copilot UI Widgets in Power Apps covers how to wire the Copilot payload to a real component rather than a text box.
3. The managed environment governance updates. Specifically the changes around DLP scope and the maker access controls. I am not going to pretend this is exciting. It is the unglamorous flipping of switches that keeps the platform from rotting. If you run a CoE, read that section twice and update your baseline. Skipping this is how you end up with the month-three stall I described in Inside a Power Platform Center of Excellence: Why Most Setups Stall in Month Three.
What I am ignoring this month: most of the preview flags, the cosmetic Power Apps studio tweaks, and anything in the Copilot canvas experience that is not GA. Preview features burn debugging time and break when the next release lands. I will come back to them when they ship for real.
For the official documentation on UDTs and the Type function, the Microsoft Learn reference is the place to start. For my running notes on what I turn on and what I skip, I keep a list on LinkedIn.
Monday morning: toggle UDTs on one app, port one skill out of a system prompt, update the managed environment baseline. Three concrete moves. Everything else can wait.
Source: What’s new in Power Platform: May 2026 feature update (Microsoft Power Platform Blog).
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