Understand the request
Extract request type, customer, product, quantity, requested date, priority, language, and confidence. Missing information stays empty rather than being invented.
AI & AUTOMATION / MICROSOFT POWER PLATFORM
PROTOTYPE CASE STUDYFrom incoming emails to actionable customer requests.
AI Customer Request Center turns email-driven work into structured, traceable requests—with business validation and human review built in.
Built by Arc Innovations as a prototype. Screenshots show the demonstration environment; no measured client savings are claimed.
THE CHALLENGE
Your inbox should not be your tracking system.
RFQs, orders, product questions, and support requests arrive as email text and attachments. Employees then re-enter information, look up customers and products, organize documents, and decide who should act.
The friction
- Repeated email triage and data entry
- Missing or inconsistent customer and product references
- Documents scattered across inboxes
- Exceptions without a clear reason for review
- Commercial risk from unsupported automatic replies
THE SOLUTION
AI understanding. Trusted data. People in control.
Validate before routing
Match customers in Dataverse and validate product codes against the Product Catalog. Combine deterministic business rules with AI confidence.
Give the team context
Create a request record, organize attachments, prepare a reply draft, and notify the team in Teams. Keep uncertainty visible.
HOW IT WORKS
One workflow, two controlled paths.
Understand the email
A custom AI Builder prompt produces structured fields from the incoming Outlook message.
Validate business references
Power Automate matches the customer and checks product codes against trusted master data. Confidence is one input, not permission to bypass rules.
Create the request
Dataverse stores status, priority, owner, AI summary, and review notes.
Organize documents and draft a reply
SharePoint folders are created when attachments exist. A second prompt prepares a reply in the customer’s language without confirming price, availability, or delivery.
Route and notify
Validated requests are assigned. Unknown, ambiguous, or invalid requests become Needs Review, with the reason recorded and a relevant Teams notification.
THE OPERATING WORKSPACE
Manage requests, not flow runs.
The model-driven Power Apps workspace gives employees one queue for assigned requests and review-required exceptions. They can search, assign, review, and complete business records without opening Power Automate.
PATH 01 / VALIDATED REQUEST
Known customer. Valid product. Assigned request.
In the demonstration, an RFQ from Alfa Meccanica Srl refers to product AX-450. The customer is matched, the product is validated, and the request is assigned to the account owner.
- RFQ classified and structured
- Customer and product matched against business data
- Request created and assigned
- Attachment stored in SharePoint
- Reply drafted for employee review
- Teams notification with supporting document link
PATH 02 / HUMAN REVIEW
High confidence does not override an invalid product.
The second RFQ contains product ZZ-999, which is absent from the Product Catalog. AI understands the email, but the deterministic product check prevents automatic processing. The record is marked Needs Review.
A clear reason to act
“Product ZZ-999 was not found in the Product Catalog.” The reason is stored on the request, so the reviewer has immediate context.
COLLABORATION
Bring the work to the right people.
BUSINESS VALUE
Capabilities demonstrated. Outcomes to measure.
| Before | Prototype capability | Pilot measure |
|---|---|---|
| Manual email interpretation and re-entry | Structured extraction and request creation | Handling time and corrections per request |
| Repeated customer and product lookups | Validation against trusted business data | Match accuracy and invalid-reference detection |
| Attachments spread across inboxes | Request-linked SharePoint folders | Document retrieval time and completeness |
| Unclear exceptions | Needs Review status with a stored reason | Review completion time and missed exceptions |
| Replies composed from scratch | Customer-language reply drafts | Draft acceptance rate and editing time |
These are suggested pilot measures, not measured results from a client deployment.
THE STACK
Microsoft tools, one business process.
Power Automate
Workflow orchestration
Dataverse
Business data and requests
AI Builder
Email understanding and drafting
Power Apps
Operational workspace
SharePoint
Request documents
Microsoft Teams
Notifications
Outlook
Email intake
Solutions & environment variables
Deployment configuration
WHERE IT FITS
Adapt the pattern to your workflow.
Sales inquiries & RFQsSupport intakeSupplier requestsShared mailbox triageDocument-heavy approvalsInternal service requests
A production rollout needs agreed routing rules, permissions, licensing, monitoring, retry behavior, and acceptance tests. Those requirements are scoped for each engagement.
YOUR NEXT STEP
Have a similar email-driven process?
In a free consultation, we can review one workflow and discuss which parts are suitable for automation, where human review belongs, and how to evaluate a pilot.
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