Artificial Intelligence / Use Cases / Emails
A shared inbox that sorts, organizes, and tracks messages
Understand the request, prepare the response, open the file in the right place—and have a person send it.The info@, orders@, or support@ email address receives two hundred emails a day. Three people read them, each in their own way; the same request comes in twice; there’s no way to tell who responded to what. The automated email processing system reads each message, understands what is being requested, prepares the response, and creates the file where it belongs —in Customer Service, in theERP, or in Teams. A person reviews it and sends it. Nothing goes out without their approval.
Three Situations Every Shared Inbox Faces
It's not a matter of volume; it's a matter of form: a shared inbox has no queue, no owner, and no trail.
Three people are reading the same messages, and no one knows who took which one
One person reads the message, another handles it, and it gets replied to twice—or not at all. The client follows up, we search through sent items, and we find a reply from a colleague who’s on vacation. The shared inbox is a workspace without any work rules.
A message queue is not a line.
A simple request takes just as long as a complicated one
“Where is my order?”, “What are your hours?”, “Can you resend me the invoice?”: The answer is in the system; someone has to look it up, copy it, and format it. Twenty times a day. Meanwhile, the complaint that deserved an hour’s attention is left waiting.
The simple gets in the way; the complicated waits.
Nothing is predetermined where the story unfolds
The conversation is in Exchange ; the customer is on Dynamics 365 or theERP ; the commitment made via email is nowhere to be found. Six months later, no one can locate what was promised. The audit requests proof, and the proof is in an email that someone archived.
If it's not in the file, it never happened.
What the solution does, in plain language
Six steps, from the arrival of the message to the closure of the file. The fifth—preparing without sending—is what makes the rest acceptable.
The system reads the message and its attachments
The text, the signature, the previous thread, and the attached PDF. It identifies the sender in your systems—known customer, supplier, or unknown—and the actual subject, not just the subject line.
The system recognizes the request and extracts the data from it
A complaint about order 4521, a request for an invoice, a question about a delivery date, a supplier quote. The order number, date, product, and urgency indicated.
The system sends the message to the correct queue, along with its priority
Customer service, accounting, purchasing, and the technician at the branch in Sion. A complaint from an important customer takes priority over a request for a schedule. The rules are yours—and they’re written down.
The system creates or updates the file in the tool that hosts it
A ticket in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, a line inERP, a task in Teams —linked to the customer, along with the message and its attachments. The record is there before a human has even read it.
The system drafts a response, citing its sources
The order status retrieved fromERP, the invoice located, the procedure referenced, the company’s tone. The draft sits in the person’s inbox, and they proofread it, make corrections, and send it.
The system saves the conversation in the folder
The response sent, the commitment made, the promised deadline: in the client file, not in an email inbox. Everything the audit will ask for is already there.
A concrete, step-by-step example
A customer writes to service@: “Hello, the order delivered yesterday is incomplete; two boxes are missing. This is urgent for our construction site on Monday.” The company manages its customers at Dynamics 365 and its orders atERP.
What Remains Human
The process reads, compiles, prepares, and tracks. It never binds the company. Four decisions remain with designated individuals, and the first is the most important.
Decisions That Cannot Be Delegated
Written before the system goes live, tested, and reviewed every month. A process that would automatically send a response to a customer would commit the company to a response generated by a model. We don’t set it up that way.
- Send. Every response sent externally is reviewed and sent by a person. The draft feature speeds up the process; it does not replace it.
- Make a commitment. Whether it’s a deadline, a refund, a goodwill gesture, or a discount: never in a draft, always in the hands of someone authorized to make that promise.
- Handling ambiguity. A message that the system cannot process with sufficient confidence is placed in a “to be reviewed” queue, where it is read by a human. The system does not make guesses.
- Establish the rules. Queues, priorities, the tone of drafts, and confidence thresholds: these are determined by the department and reviewed monthly based on any errors identified.
The data used, and what they require
The message alone isn't enough: it's what your systems know about the customer and their order that determines the quality of the draft.
Sources
- Exchange Online: the shared inbox, the conversation thread, and attachments.
- Dynamics 365 : the customer, their contract, their open cases, and their history.
- ERP: orders, delivery, invoices, inventory.
- The knowledge base: procedures, schedules, conditions—the topics covered in frequently asked questions.
- Past responses: the company’s tone, based on what your teams have written before.
What they must have
- An identifiable customer: an email address listed at Dynamics 365 orERP. A customer database with three duplicate entries makes identification unreliable.
- An up-to-date knowledge base with a single owner. A draft that lists an incorrect schedule is worse than an empty draft.
- Defined queues and roles: who processes what, and by when. Without them, routing has nowhere to go.
- A real-world sample for the prototype: the last 500 messages, not the 50 simplest ones.
- Retention: How long messages are kept in the file, and under what legal provisions.
Where the solution works, and which one we would examine first
In this case, the answer is almost always the same: wherever the email and the folder are already located.
At Microsoft
RecommendedMessaging is available Exchange Online, the case in Customer Service, orchestration in Power Automate, and the agent in Copilot Studio. Everything is already in place; the first workflow will go live in a few weeks.
At your facility
RarelyOnly if the email is still on a server Exchange on-premises and must remain there. The processing adapts accordingly; it loses native integration.
Partly at Microsoft, partly at your office
PossibleWhen attachments contain sensitive information—such as medical records or banking data—they are opened on your premises, while the orchestration remains with Microsoft.
Next to the machine
Things to AvoidAn email doesn't require milliseconds or a workshop.
Why online, and when we say otherwise
Three criteria are decisive for this use case, and all three point in the same direction —which is rare.
| Criterion | What tips the scales | Toward what |
|---|---|---|
| Where is the messaging feature? | For Exchange Online for most companies. The processing is natively integrated there; moving it elsewhere would result in a duplicate copy of each message. | Online |
| Where is the file located? | In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, in theERP, in Teams. Writing to the database and reading from the client are handled by existing connectors. | Online |
| The Sensitivity of Attachments | A message is rarely so confidential that it excludes the service; its attachments, however, sometimes are. In that case, the attachments can be opened on your premises, while the rest of the message remains where it is. | Hybrid, for attachments only |
The artificial intelligence features at Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 are billed based on usage—per message processed, per response generated. We calculate the cost based on your actual volume beforehand, and someone reviews the bill afterward.
What the solution connects to
This is more of an integration use case than an artificial intelligence one: reading a message is easy; writing it in the right place is the hard part.
Infrastructure: none, in this case
Email processing that Microsoft 365 requires neither a server nor a graphics processor. It is one of the fastest use cases to implement.
Attachments that cannot be viewed online
Medical records, banking data, contractual documents: they are read within containers on your premises, Azure Local, and the rest of the processing remains on-site. This scenario is similar to document processing, which describes this approach.
How We Carry Out the Project
Five steps. The prototype runs alongside your actual email system—without sending anything—for two weeks: this is the only way to determine the actual message comprehension rate.
The Context: Messaging as It Is
Who reads it, how the messages are distributed, how many come back, where each type of request ends up, what is promised via email but never followed up on. And the status of the customer database.
Rules and Drafts
What the system does with each type of request, what it never does, the tone of the drafts, confidence thresholds, the “to be qualified” queue. Written with the department in mind, not for it.
The prototype, running in parallel with the actual messaging system
Two weeks of incoming messages, without sending or writing anything in the production systems. We measure the rate of correctly understood requests, the accuracy of routing, and the quality of the drafts as judged by the people who would have sent them.
Connection and Commissioning
Customer Service, theERP, Teams, and the knowledge base. First, one type of inquiry—often regarding order status—and then the others.
Maintenance
Messages that were misunderstood are reviewed each month; drafts are corrected and often rewritten; the knowledge base is updated; and usage is tracked.
Estimated timeline: six to ten weeks from the first “ assessment ” to deployment for a shared inbox and two or three types of requests. This is a rough estimate, not a commitment: measurement is part of the job.
Scope and Limits
What the treatment does not do, and what we do not promise.
The system has trouble processing some of the messages
An ambiguous message, three requests in a single email, a touch of irony, a thread of twenty replies: the system sometimes misidentifies the request—and it does so with confidence. That’s why the “to be classified” queue and the confidence threshold exist. The actual rate is measured using the prototype, based on your messages.
The draft quotes what your systems say—even when it's wrong
An expired order status, an outdated schedule, an outdated procedure—the draft incorporates them all. The quality of the knowledge base and reference documents determines the quality of the drafts.
Automation does not replace human relationships
An angry customer, a complex complaint, a key supplier: the system handles the preparation and tracking, and a representative makes the call. The benefit lies in automating simple, repetitive tasks, freeing up time for what really matters.
The cost is charged per message
Each message sent and each draft prepared is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. At 200 messages per day, this represents a cost that can be calculated—and weighed against the time it saves. We provide a cost estimate upfront.
What We Will Not Cover
Automatically sending a response to a customer without proofreading it. Technically, this is possible; we don’t recommend it, and we make that clear. If you decide to do it anyway, it will be your decision—for a specific type of request—and we’ll keep a log of it.
Related cases and their corresponding pages
When another use case is the right one, and the technologies behind it.
Customer Service and Contact Center
When the same request is received both by phone and via chat: the agent gets assistance during the call, and there is a single case file.
View the case A similar caseIntelligent Document Processing
When the attachment is the subject: the invoice, the contract, or the form to be extracted and reviewed.
View the case TechnologyDynamics 365 Customer Service
The case as a unit of work, deadlines met and tracked, and a knowledge base that serves both sides.
View the page TechnologyCopilot Studio
The employee who understands and uses a job description to determine: what they know, what they are authorized to do, and when to hand off responsibilities.
View the page TechnologyExchange : the messaging app where it all begins
Online or on your servers, and what each option means for automated processing.
View the page ArticleUse cases that deliver a return on investment starting in the first month in Microsoft 365
Features that are being rolled out without a project, within the licenses you already have.
Read the articleLet's talk about this use case
Tell us what's happening in your shared inbox
How many messages per day, what kinds of requests come in, who handles them, and where the case ends up. We’ll come back to you with the requests we’d handle first, the rules we’d propose, and what a two-week prototype—run in parallel with your messaging system—would allow us to measure.
What we offer is the opportunity to meet the engineers who will do the work. Assessment, prototyping, and installation are all part of the project. The initial consultation, however, is free of charge.
Renens, Sion, Châtel-Saint-Denis
Microsoft Solutions Partner. Email, the folder, the agent, and the connection toERP —all managed by the same team that maintains your tenant.
Renens VD +41 21 806 37 15
Sion VS +41 27 552 00 22
Châtel-Saint-Denis FR +41 26 322 59 05