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There is a lot of conversation going on around AI and automation, and it can sometimes feel like it might take a lot of work and time to see value from implementing workflows that leverage automation using AI (artificial intelligence).
The reality is that Copilot Studio, AI Builder and Power Automate provide all the required tools to design and build intelligent, production-ready automation today and today we will show you 5 different examples of use cases where AI can be implemented right now within all the Microsoft ecosystem.
AI Automation use cases you can deploy immediately
Classify incoming leads from contact emails
Your contact@yourcomany.com inbox likely receives all types of emails, some of them are potential customers interested in making business with you but probably a handful of other emails are marketing, subscriptions or something non-lead related. With Power Automate triggers and AI prompts you can analyze the content of all your incoming emails in the contact mailbox to:
- Automatically detect lead intent and company details
- Qualify or discard based on relevance
- Route each inquiry to the appropriate sales representative
Extract Invoice data and classify expenses
Your Accounts Payable team most likely processes many invoices daily. With Power Automate triggers, Document Intelligence and prompts you can:
- Retrieve key data from the invoice
- Categorize expenses and assign GL coding
- Route invoices to the correct approver
IT Service desk Triage and Resolution
If you have a shared mailbox, a SharePoint list or a Microsoft Forms form where employees can submit their tickets to request support from the IT team, AI is the perfect fit for this process. With artificial intelligence the content of the request can be automatically processed for keywords and sentiment to understand priority and ticket classification.
By adding AI to your service desk process the following can be improved:
- Automatically assign requests to teams or users based on the type of request
- Identify if an issue is critical or lower priority
- Automatically escalate issues or tickets
Employee HR Self-Service Agent
HR teams sometimes have to answer the same questions more than a couple of time a week:
- How many leave days do I have left?
- How do I submit an expense claim?
- What’s the parental leave policy?
- Is there a company floating day?
- How do I submit a time off request?
A Copilot Studio HR agent can be developed and deployed in Microsoft Teams to answer policy questions using all your company’s existing HR documentation and policies as its knowledge base. Simply add all the documents into a SharePoint library and connect this library to the Copilot Studio agent:
Process emails based on content
When you have a shared mailbox where multiple types of requests can come, it may become difficult to manage. It’s common for mailbox management to require steps like the following ones:
- Read email
- Assign a category
- Reply to email, forward it, flag it or ignore it
- Move email to a different folder
Using Power Automate and AI prompts, the process above can be fully automated. When a new email arrives to the shared mailbox, Power Automate will pick it up and send the content of the body for analysis, based on this output, different paths can be branched to ensure all emails are correctly classified and processed.
How to identify the best processes to automate
Before moving forward with an automation, run a process audit and map it as it currently behaves so you can find potential improvements. Some guidelines and key considerations for finding the best processes to automate with Power Automate and AI are:
- Find high volume and high repetition processes
- Identify bottlenecks that are causing delay or slower processing
- Find processes that involve more than one system
- Look for exception-heavy processes that still have a clear happy path
Discover the joy of automation
The five use cases in this blog are just the starting point. Whether you already know which process you want to automate, or you’re still working out where to start, with our Power Platform consulting services, we can help you move from conversation to production and value.
