I’ve been digging deep into Power Automate AI Builder lately, mainly because it’s a great first step for organizations unsure of what they can achieve with AI and how it can help them. The hype around AI is huge, and it can make you feel like you need to push yourself to deliver an all-encompassing solution your first time out, when really, that’s not the case at all.

I wanted to look at the “Extract Standard Entities” action and was impressed with the value it could provide an organization.

The purpose of “Extract Standard Entities” is to look at a piece of data presented to it and extract information into a pre-defined set of entities that it has defined, which can then allow you to do work with. One way to think of it is a truly advanced screenscraper that you don’t have to create yourself.

More on the entity definitions of entity extraction is located here.

Configuring the Extraction

Getting started is fairly simple; you provide the AI Builder with a large amount of text (there is a 5000-character limit) and let it work. I asked ChatGPT for a history of the muppets.

After the extraction is complete, I extract the content to a compose action for display purposes only.

The Results

First off, when you look at the results of the extraction, you will see that it has classified data into the Entity Types that are available to us with no inference from us. The following element is classified as a PersonName, and you can see the confidence score associated with the entity.

Another way to see the data, the extract the “1950s” as a DateTime object with a score of .8.

Where would I use this?

I doubt your business is in the muppets, if so, awesome; if not, that’s still okay. Where I would see next in using this with a customer would be in the integration to their CRM systems – i.e., parsing feedback from customers coming in from the website and creating new cases or creating new records in your CRM system. Perhaps even identifying information related to what their jobs and roles are, and redirecting them to different levels of service.

All of these and more are great starter packs for getting started with the AI Builder and injecting it into your business logic.