If your organization still runs the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit, you already know something changed this year. The monthly release cadence that used to ship new Power BI dashboards, governance flows, and inventory jobs went quiet in February. By May, Microsoft made it official: the kit is “no longer receiving ongoing feature investments or updates.” For a lot of IT Directors and Power Platform CoE leads, that left a real question sitting on the desk. The DIY governance stack your team spent two or three years building and patching now has no vendor behind it, and the natural next move, moving everything into the Power Platform admin center, only gets you partway there.
That gap just got a little smaller. In September 2026, Microsoft opened public preview on the Agentic Center of Enablement, a set of three AI agents built directly into the admin center that are meant to take over a chunk of what the CoE Starter Kit used to do by hand. It is a meaningful step. It is not, on its own, a like-for-like replacement, and understanding exactly where the line falls matters more than the headline announcement.
What Actually Happened to the CoE Starter Kit
The timeline is worth stating plainly, because a lot of the commentary around this has blurred it. Development on the CoE Starter Kit effectively stopped in February 2026. Microsoft’s public confirmation followed in the spring, framed not as an abandonment but as a redirection of engineering effort: governance capability was moving from a community-maintained accelerator into the product itself. That framing turned out to be accurate, just slower to materialize than the announcement implied. Between May and September, organizations that depended on the kit for environment inventory, maker identification, and license reclamation were largely left running an unsupported toolset with no clear native equivalent for several of its core jobs. The admin center had usage and licensing dashboards, but not the ownership tracking, lifecycle states, or cross-tenant rollups that a mature CoE program actually runs on day to day.
That is the backdrop the Agentic Center of Enablement is stepping into, and it explains why the reaction from practitioners has been cautiously interested rather than celebratory.
Agentic Center of Enablement: Three Agents, One Governance Loop
The Agentic Center of Enablement is not a dashboard you configure. It is three purpose-built agents that run continuously against your tenant, and each one does a distinct job in what Microsoft is positioning as a closed governance loop.
The Highlights agent produces a daily snapshot of tenant activity with no setup required: new resource creation, capacity consumption shifts, and other changes an admin would otherwise have to go looking for. The Insights agent is the one doing the heavier analytical work. It scans the tenant continuously and surfaces governance issues, ownerless resources, activity happening in the default environment, and security, compliance, performance, and adoption problems, then ranks them by impact so an admin isn’t left triaging a flat list. The Action Plan agent takes whatever the Insights agent surfaces and turns it into a concrete remediation plan with defined steps, which an admin reviews and approves before anything actually executes. Every action any of the three agents takes is logged in a full audit trail, which matters for organizations that need to show a paper trail to internal audit or a regulator.
Access is straightforward by design. It requires at least one managed environment in the tenant and the Power Platform administrator role, and it activates automatically rather than needing a deployment project the way the old kit did. For a CIO comparing total cost of ownership, that alone is worth noting: there is no solution to import, no Power Automate flows to maintain, no Dataverse tables to keep patched against breaking API changes.
Picture the scenario the Insights agent is actually built for. A regional sales team spins up a canvas app in the default environment to solve an immediate problem, the maker moves teams six months later, and the app keeps running with nobody watching its connector permissions or its data exposure. Under the old model, that app surfaces only if someone happened to run the right CoE Starter Kit inventory flow and then manually reviewed the output. Under the new model, the Insights agent flags it as default-environment activity with an ownerless resource attached, ranks it against everything else it found that day, and the Action Plan agent proposes reassigning ownership or migrating it into a governed environment before anyone has to go looking. That is a genuine reduction in the manual triage work a CoE analyst used to own.
Where the Gap Still Sits
Here is where the caution comes in. Reviews of the preview from consultants who ran real CoE programs on the Starter Kit have flagged the same handful of missing pieces, and they are not minor ones. The admin center, even with the new agents layered on top, still does not give you shadow IT detection in the sense the kit’s telemetry did, since it inventories what exists inside the platform rather than surfacing unsanctioned use happening around its edges. Lifecycle management, the process of formally retiring an app or flow, reassigning ownership when someone leaves the company, or tracking an asset through draft, active, and deprecated states, is not something the Insights and Action Plan agents currently model. Cross-tenant visibility, relevant to any organization running multiple tenants after an acquisition or a regional split, also is not part of what shipped in September’s preview. And the business context that made the old kit useful to non-technical stakeholders, tagging an app as customer-facing, financially regulated, or tied to a specific business unit, still has to be built and maintained separately, because the agents currently work from platform telemetry rather than organizational metadata.
None of that makes the Agentic Center of Enablement a disappointment. It genuinely automates the parts of governance that used to eat the most analyst hours: finding orphaned resources, flagging default-environment sprawl, and building a first-draft remediation plan instead of starting from a blank spreadsheet. It just is not yet the full replacement that some of the messaging around the CoE Starter Kit’s retirement implied it would be.
What This Means for Your Governance Roadmap
For an organization still weighing what to do with its Starter Kit investment, the practical move right now is not to rip anything out. The kit’s dashboards and flows will keep functioning even without updates, and the specific gaps described above, ownership workflows, lifecycle tracking, cross-tenant reporting, are exactly the pieces worth keeping running in parallel while the native agents mature. Treat the preview period as a chance to pilot the Insights and Action Plan agents in a single managed environment, compare their findings against what your existing telemetry already tells you, and use the overlap to decide which manual processes can retire first. Ownerless resource detection and default-environment cleanup are reasonable early candidates, since those are exactly the categories the Insights agent targets today.
A workable sequence looks like this. Start by enabling the agents in whichever managed environment already has the most mature governance discipline, since that gives you a clean baseline to compare against rather than a noisy one. Spend two or three weeks letting the Highlights and Insights agents run before acting on anything, so you get a real read on how their findings line up with what your team already knew versus what genuinely surprises them. Then hand a small batch of the Action Plan agent’s proposed remediations to whoever currently owns that work by hand, and measure the time saved rather than assuming it. Only after that comparison holds up across a full reporting cycle does it make sense to talk about retiring pieces of the Starter Kit stack rather than just running both in parallel.
It is also worth flagging this to whoever owns license and compliance risk in your organization, since the daily snapshot and continuous scanning behavior changes what “governance coverage” means for audit purposes, even during preview. A feature that is not yet generally available can still become the thing an auditor asks about six months from now.
We have walked several clients through exactly this kind of platform transition at Routeget Technologies, and the pattern holds regardless of which specific tool Microsoft is retiring or introducing: the risk isn’t in adopting the new capability too early, it’s in assuming a preview feature already covers ground it hasn’t gotten to yet. Run the pilot, keep the documentation for what the old system covered that the new one doesn’t, and revisit the gap list when general availability lands, since that is typically when Microsoft fills in the pieces a preview release leaves out.
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