If you’ve been working with AI in your business processes lately, you’ve probably run into a really frustrating roadblock: the gap between the chatty text an AI wants to give you and the structured data your automation actually needs.
Let’s say you’re building a Power Automate flow to pull details out of customer emails. You want the person’s name, the priority, and the category. Ideally, you want to get back something clean like this:
JSON:
{
"customer_name": "Sarah Johnson",
"priority": "High",
"issue_category": "Billing"
}Instead, the AI usually gives out a whole paragraph:
“The customer, Sarah Johnson, appears to have a high-priority concern related to billing. It would be advisable to route this to the finance team for further assistance.”
That’s great if a human is reading it. But for an automated flow? It’s a nightmare. You end up trying to write expressions using ‘split()’ or regular expressions just to grab the values you want, and if the AI rephrases even slightly on the next run, those expressions break. The core issue is straightforward: AI produces conversational text, but automated systems require structured, predictable data.
Microsoft’s Power Platform has a fix for this inside the AI Builder Prompt action. Whether you are using Power Automate or Copilot Studio, you can just tell the AI to hand you back perfectly formatted JSON instead of a paragraph. And the best part? That JSON maps straight into your Dynamics 365 fields, your flow conditions, or your Copilot variables. No messy parsing needed.
Understanding AI Builder Prompts
The Prompt tool can be accessed via the Power Apps maker portal, under AI Builder in Prompts. It allows users to define a custom AI instruction with optional dynamic input variables, and the generated response can be consumed in Power Automate or in Copilot Studio. By default, the output is plain text, but switching the output format to JSON enables the AI to return a structured object that downstream actions consume directly... Read More
