In this blog, we’ll help you understand Microsoft AI Builder’s latest capabilities, discuss common use cases, and share prebuilt artificial intelligence models you can start using right now.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower businesses and people with products and services to drive efficiency, enhance processes, connect people, and use the power of data. While Microsoft Azure’s machine learning AI tools are great for professional developers, the company’s AI Builder makes artificial intelligence accessible to other businesses and users, allowing you to be more efficient and insightful in operating your business.

What Is Microsoft’s AI Builder?

AI Builder is available within the Microsoft Power Platform through Power Apps and Power Automate. The tool allows any user to use Power Platform’s low-code or no-code tools to deploy AI and begin improving the efficiency and overall performance of their business operations.

Power Apps offers citizen developers the means to build power business applications quickly and easily, while Power Automate streamlines workflows and time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

AI Builder adds to Power Apps’ and Power Automate’s capabilities. It uses AI’s most transformative powers — including machine learning, cognitive computing, natural language processing, and computer vision — to create and implement AI Builder models that automate streamlining processes and deliver data-rich insights so you can achieve your business process objectives.

Microsoft AI Builder and Prompt Builder: What’s the Difference?

Microsoft has evolved AI Builder and rebranded it as AI Hub, which includes a new tool called prompt builder (still in preview).

While we’ll continue to use the AI Builder name in this blog, the evolved tool provides powerful new capabilities, including allowing you either to use prebuilt models or create custom models using Microsoft language learning models (LLMs).

With prompt builder, you can use prompt templates or create GPT prompts to be used in Power Automate and Power Apps based on GPT-4 or GPT-3.5.

Because the back-end LLMs differ, we recommend testing both AI Builder and prompt builder to determine which will drive the expected results for your business needs. From a user experience perspective, while these tools provide similar capabilities of using AI to drive action, the deployment method is somewhat different.

Here’s a breakdown of the differences in the deployment methods between AI Builder and prompt builder.

AI Builder

• Select an existing model or choose to create your own model.
• If you choose to create your own model, you pick a model type to customize (e.g., Document Processing).
  • A wizard-like experience guides you through:
    • Indicating target data to process
    • Providing sample data inputs the model can expect to process
    • Tagging that data to provide training on what the expected outputs should be
    • Initiating training for the model to learn this way of thinking in order to be applied in Power Apps or Power Automate

Prompt Builder

• Select an existing prompt template or choose to create your own prompt.
• The prompt builder experience is similar to a chat conversation.
• In the instruction or prompt area, enter details that will be used as instructions to AI and consider an input (1) provided from either Power Apps or Power Automate.
• The Model Response (3) is the expected output that can be used for downstream actions within a Power App or Power Automate.
• When creating a prompt, you can choose which model (2) to use.

Let’s take a deeper look at how prebuilt and custom models work, as well as some common use cases.

Prebuilt or Custom AI Models? The Choice Is Yours

AI Builder models are machine learning algorithms trained on specific data to spot patterns and make decisions. This lets you configure your business processes to deliver the highest-quality operational efficiency and performance results.

AI Builder’s prebuilt models empower you to increase the intelligence of apps without having to collect data and then build, train, and publish models of your own. For instance, you can use a prebuilt model within Power Automate to determine if customer feedback is favorable or unfavorable. In Power Apps, adding a prebuilt model-based component lets you recognize contact information on business cards.

The following models can be built within AI Builder and incorporated into a Power Apps or Power Automate flow:

• Business card reader
• Category classification
• Entity extraction
• ID reader
• Image description (preview)
• Invoice (form) processing
• Key phrase extraction
• Language detection
• Receipt (form) processing
• Sentiment analysis
• Text generation (preview) (deprecated)
• Text translation (only available in Power Automate)
• Text recognition

Microsoft pretrained these models to identify key fields within documents. Case in point: The invoice model extracts the invoice ID, due date, and invoice amount from each invoice.

Here are two types of business issues Microsoft AI Builder can help resolve:

• Customer Application Processing. In a business that requires customers to complete a physical form for submission, usually, someone must manually process a stack of papers, keying in every piece of data from each field into your systems. However, within a Power App or Power Automate flow, form processing captures scanned or photographed forms into a digital format. The form processing model can also build a custom model to navigate a complex scenario since it supports extracting and analyzing key fields and data from PDF, JPG, and PNG files. It can also extract printed and handwritten text.
• Contact List Creation. In industries where people typically attend trade shows and conferences and do a lot of networking, it’s important to develop a readily accessible contact list. With the business card reader (perhaps even coupled with form processing, where contact information can be captured in multiple formats, such as a sign-in sheet), you can use the Power Platform to quickly create a canvas app that allows you to capture images of all the business cards and completed forms you collected. The upshot is that it takes less than a day instead of several weeks to follow up with your leads.

To see other kinds of business scenarios that Microsoft supports through its AI Builder models, check out this chart on Microsoft’s website, and take a look at these common use cases.

Next, we explore how these prebuilt models can solve common pain points.

Business Case Pain Points and How to Ease the Pain With Prebuilt Models

Using the following hypothetical ecommerce business case, we take a more in-depth look at how AI Builder solutions solve particular problems or pain points.

Here’s the overall challenge: ABC Retail, which sells clothes online through an ecommerce site and social media, is having trouble managing information it’s getting from their multiple channels. What can the retailer do about this?

Pain Point 1

It takes too long to find critical customer reviews on the ecommerce site, so the brand suffers.

AI Builder Solutions:

• Category classification breaks down reviews by product type.
• Key phrase extraction summarizes reviews and shares the main concepts.
• Sentiment analysis identifies any negative reviews for quick customer service.

Pain Point 2

Because of information overload, the company misses opportunities to promote their brand and engage with customers on social media.

AI Builder Solution: Entity extraction identifies when references are made to ABC Retail rather than another similarly named entity. For example, “The purse I got from ABC was so cute” is a match, but “My child loves to sing the ABC song with their friends” is not, so AI Builder identifies it as not relevant.

Pain Point 3

Information is stored in various formats, making it tedious to process and resulting in poor reporting.

AI Builder Solution: Form processing — using the invoice model — accelerates supplier invoice processing and extracts data from important fields. That means less time spent on humdrum tasks and more time available for building the business.

Pain Point 4

The company is squandering opportunities to drive customers to their website because they are not taking advantage of community posts showing people wearing ABC products.

AI Builder Solution: Object detection, in concert with entity extraction, identifies products from posted images or when creating marketing content after a photoshoot.

AI Builder’s Versatile Use Cases

With its versatility, AI Builder can improve processes across a variety of industries:

• In healthcare, it can automate patient data extraction from medical forms so that data entry is quick and accurate, and it can improve diagnosis accuracy and analyze medical images.
• In manufacturing, AI Builder can enhance product quality control and minimize production errors by analyzing images or sensor data to detect process defects.
• In finance, the tool can automate fraud detection and risk assessment, and it can streamline the accounts payable process by automating invoice data extraction.

A groundbreaking tool that can do so much would seem to be very complex to deploy, but AI Builder is very user-friendly. Below are the steps it takes to get started with the tool.

Getting Started With Creating a Custom Model in AI Builder (AI Hub)

AI Builder allows you to create custom models tailored and trained with your business data to perform tasks. You can integrate prebuilt Microsoft Models into Power Apps and Power Automate, similar to prompts that use GPT models.

In addition, you can use prompt builder to use prebuilt prompts or create prompts that generate reusable components to apply AI to complete specific tasks, such as summarization, classification, sentiment analysis, response generation, and more.

It’s easy to put AI Builder in motion. Just access it from Power Apps or Power Automate and follow these steps:

1. Select the AI model type that fits your needs.
2. Associate your data. Based on the selected AI model, the in-app wizard will guide you through the setup process and share what data the tool needs to get started.
3. Train your AI model. Set up your model, upload training data, and indicate the information you want to analyze (such as which text to extract from a document in the scenario of form processing). Now, you’re ready to go! Once training is complete, you can quickly test the tool before publishing your model, which is then ready to use in apps and automated workflows.
4. Create solutions across the Power Platform with your new AI Model. You can use your AI model in apps or flows to generate insights, create new tables, or capture the information in preexisting tables that you can subsequently review in dashboards or feed into downstream processes.

You can read more about this tool and review a comprehensive breakdown of the steps above in Microsoft’s AI Builder documentation.

Microsoft is always evolving AI Builder toward more efficiency and functionality to handle a business process climate that is never stagnant and always dynamic. Next, we’ll look at where Microsoft plans to take this tool in the future.

The Future of Microsoft AI Builder: Major Releases in 2025

Microsoft refines and augments the AI Builder solution on a regular basis. You can always visit Power Platform’s release plans to keep up, but below are some of the major releases that are in preview or intended for release in 2025:

• Monitor Usage of AI Builder Models, Including GPT Outputs. Preconfigured reports are available to show which models or prompts are being used, the data processed, and the credits consumed.
• Validation Station. This feature lets you send feedback to makers based on the AI generated content in order to modify and enhance models to generate more accurate results.
• Document Processing Agent. Copilot Studio Agents can be extended with document processing capabilities from AI Builder to automate and streamline document workflows.
• Ground With Connectors in Prompt Builder. This lets you use connector data in prompts that are currently limited to data only in Microsoft Dataverse.

Optimize Enterprisewide Operations With Microsoft AI Builder

AI Builder is a tool for all operational seasons. It has risen to meet today’s business process challenges and, given its Microsoft pedigree, can expand and diversify to effectively manage what the future brings as well. Its broad portfolio of technological capabilities can establish and maintain peak operational efficiency in every facet of your organization, leading the way in harnessing AI’s seismic beneficial potential to change the way the world does business.

[cta bg="blue" button="See What’s New" link="https://centricconsulting.com/resource-categories/blogs/"]Want more great content like this? Check out our blog.[/cta]

Still not sure about the latest Microsoft Power Platform features? Don’t be afraid to embrace the change. Our experts are here to help. Contact us