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Case study · Project management

Your inbox, turned into a self-updating project registry.

A Microsoft Copilot Studio agent that reads every incoming and outgoing email and keeps a live Excel task table current — creating a row for a new thread, updating the right row for a reply, and calculating real deadlines from the text.

Platform: Microsoft Copilot Studio + Power Automate
The problem

Tasks get buried in email threads.

The usual routine: read an email, copy the task into a spreadsheet, try to keep it current. It falls apart across dozens of threads — context gets lost, follow-ups scatter, and the spreadsheet is stale the moment you look away. Worst of all, a reply to an existing task ends up as a fresh, duplicate row.

What we built

One agent that keeps the registry honest.

A Copilot Studio agent reads each email, looks at what's already in the Excel table, and decides: is this a new task, or an update to one already there? It writes the row, calculates real deadline dates from phrases like "next Friday", and never leaves a duplicate behind.

new email message ID email + table decide add row update row Excel registry creates a new row, or updates the right one — no duplicates
How it works

Create or update — decided every single email.

01

Trigger, lean

A Power Automate trigger fires on every new email and hands the agent just the message ID — not the whole message — keeping the prompt small.

02

Pull the full email

The agent uses an Outlook tool to fetch the email by that ID: subject, body, sender, recipients, and date.

03

Read the current registry

Before deciding anything, it reads the existing Excel table, so it knows which tasks are already tracked.

04

Decide: create or update

A prompt reads the email and the table together and returns structured JSON — create a new row, or update an existing one — keyed on the message ID, so replies land on the right task instead of spawning duplicates.

05

Calculate the real deadline

It turns natural language into actual dates: "by next Friday" becomes the calculated calendar date, written straight into the deadline column.

06

Write the row

Depending on the decision, the agent adds a new row or updates the matching one — capturing topic, description, from/to, last email date, direction, to-do, and deadline.

Why the detail matters

The difference between a useful registry and a messy one is the update logic. Because the agent checks what's already there before writing, a three-email thread stays one row that keeps current — not three near-duplicates you have to reconcile later.

The stack

Built entirely on the Microsoft platform.

Microsoft Copilot Studio · agent + prompt logic Power Automate · new-email trigger Outlook · fetch email by ID Excel · living task registry SharePoint · table store Reasoning model · create-or-update decision
Documented, not a black box

The whole build lives in flospect.

Every action, variable, prompt, and connection is cataloged — and the documentation is AI-generated from the real flow structure, so it never drifts from what's actually running.

  • Focus & scope, foundation summary
  • Canvas screenshots embedded inline
  • Step-by-step process breakdown
  • KPI, monitoring & document-control sections
  • Owner, version, and last-modified tracking
  • Shareable via a tenant-safe link
Open the library entry →

Want this running in your tenant?

This is the kind of build we ship in a 4-week Flow Build Sprint — architected, tested, and handed over fully documented in flospect.

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4-Week Flow Build Sprint · fixed project price · one production-ready agent