What is AI builder and what is it used for?

This blog is part of the series: What is <this tech> and what is it used for?

Copilot answer

AI Builder is a low-code AI capability in Microsoft Power Platform that lets business users build, train, and deploy AI models without writing code.

It provides prebuilt models such as form processing, object detection, text recognition, sentiment analysis, and templates for custom prediction and classification.

Organizations use AI Builder to automate document and image processing, extract insights from data, route and classify requests, and add intelligence to Power Apps and Power Automate workflows.

Explain it to me like I’m 10 years old

AI Builder is a tool that helps people add smart computer tricks to apps without writing code.

It can teach apps to read forms, understand pictures, or figure out what people write or say.

Companies use it to make boring tasks faster and more accurate, like sorting requests, reading invoices, or spotting items in photos.

Specialist answer

Pauline Kolde, Partner at CRMK Deutschland

Every business has those repetitive tasks like forms to read, data to sort, emails to analyze. AI Builder helps you take those routines and make them smart without a single line of code.

You can easily train models with your own data or use ready-made ones to automate predictions, recognize customer sentiment, document reading, or even lead scoring.

It works hand in hand with Dynamics 365, Power Apps, and Power Automate, so tasks that once took hours can now happen automatically.

Adrian Sjøholt, AI Lead Solutions Architect at ProsessPilotene

AI Builder acts like a connector between business applications, like Power Automate and AI.

It is a no-code tool to use AI functionality such as prompts and predefined models directly into your automation.

It’s a tool which gives you superpowers to create smarter processes, analyze output and predict outcomes without the need for developers or data scientists.

Explain it like it’s my first day on the job

You want to use AI for lots of things, but you’re unsure of where to start, and you doubt your own skills, maybe you’re not a developer? Well, the AI Builder is the tool for you! The AI Builder has multiple pre-build AI models you can start using as well as custom models where you can train the model on your own data.

The AI Builder can be used to to process documents, text, images, build generative AI capabilities or act on tabular data. All of this without much work needed from you!

For what the AI builder can help you with, we have this great “No code AI Cheat Sheet by AI Builder” from Microsoft. This poster tells us the capabilities the AI builder gives you.

As you can see, under AI Models, there are lots of different models you can use.

How about an app where you can add images and get a description of the image, like the screenshots below.

I’ve changed nothing here, and it created the app for me which is now ready to use, and I’ve uploaded the AI Builder Cheat Sheet from earlier, and it’s 68% sure it’s a diagram. Useful? Perhaps not right now without changing more, but it’s a good start created in less than 2 minutes.

Or maybe you want to detect objects in an image? Select the custom model “Detect custom objects in images” and select the type of image you want to detect.

Because this is a custom model, you need to give it the images for it to learn what it should detect. As many images as you can give it, the more the merrier and it will help the precision of the model.

Imagine having hundreds of tools in your shed, someone sends you to get this one specific tool, but you have absolutely no idea which it is. It would be useful to take a picture of the shed, and then get told all the names of the different tools you have, making it easier to find the one tool you’re looking for. Or maybe a “thing” is broken on your equipment, but you have absolutely no idea what the “thing” is called – take a picture and you get told what the “thing” is and now you can order a new one easily.

Lets say you’re a membership organisation and you want to use your historical data to see how likely it is for your members to churn. You can use the custom model “Predict future outcomes from historical data” and add your own data to find your companies possible churn. This can then be updated in Dataverse using Power Automate and you can do other automations based on this.

There are lots of potential use cases for AI Builder, I highly recommend trying it out and see how it can help you! AI Builder is one of the hidden gems of the Power Platform!

Use cases with large customers

The British Heart Foundation is using the AI Builder in a Power App to help with their stock management process. The app uses AI Builder to analyze item attributes like telling them what it is, how well the condition is and which season it belongs to. It will even help them set a price and where to sell it! Can you imagine the amount of time that would take for one person to do for everything they get in to the company?

I was talking to fellow MVP David Lorenzo Lopez, from Prodware, about one of their AI Builder projects, here’s what he said about it:

The use case is a company that Labour Consultancy company that needs to keep track of customers employment activity (time off, holidays, contract terms, number of hours that employee work, salary, etc).

The goal is to get all that information from different legal documents that they get from Hacienda and seguridad social from Spanish government, and compute that information to calculate different KPIs like the employee hourly cost, the total days worked in a period, etc.

So basically we have a model-driven app where they can create a process, we support around 10 document types, each one is linked to a different AI Prompt and extract different data from it.
We first split the document in pages (using Az Function) and process each page individually (this is because there are documents with more than 100 pages that we can’t feed directly to the AI Prompt)

We have then a different AI prompt for each document type that returns a JSON that we than parse and insert in Dataverse.

Users review the extracted information and confirms the extraction (or fix something if needed)

Then that information is normalized and processed to the final tables where it is presented to the user (calculating the KPIs and some reports they need)

Can you imagine how long it would take them to go through all of that manually? The project sounds like such a great time saver!

Use cases with small customers

I had a school as a customer once, they had applications for this school on paper. People had to manually send in the application and the grades from their current school. Then two people were responsible for manually punching all of this data into their old, old system. We created a new application portal for them (build on Power Pages), and had all the pdf’s of grades go through the AI Builder to read, extract and use Power Automate to push the data into Dataverse. This meant the former punchers could focus on helping students and not manually add every application and every former grade for the new applicants. This saved them (and the applicants) a lot of time.

Training material

AI Builder learning path: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/paths/implement-ai-models-microsoft-power-platform-ai-builder/

Guided project on learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/guided-project-document-process-model-email-approval-ai-builder/

AI Builder documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/

Update Dataverse currency exchange rates with AI Builder from Nick Doelman.

Podcast from the Microsoft 365 and SharePoint side: https://www.m365.fm/your-sharepoint-is-stuck-in-2013-heres-the-fix/

Summary

AI Builder is a great hidden gem of the Power Platform and could give your company a lot of functionalities that could help you save time. The use cases for AI Builder are many and the potential time saved is plenty.

Be aware of licenses and changes to licenses that have been announced: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/credit-management

Original Post https://malinmartnes.no/2026/01/09/what-is-ai-builder-and-what-is-it-used-for/