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Power Platform / Automation
·2025

Copilot Studio service assistant on the Power Platform.

Employees across two European countries now self-serve IT, HR, Facilities and Finance requests from one conversational assistant in Teams, instead of hunting through separate portals. Specialist time goes back to specialist work; routine requests are automated or routed automatically, with a clean handoff to a human when it's warranted. Just as important, the platform is governed and maintainable — one API gateway, a documented naming and flow standard, and a reusable child-agent pattern ready to extend across the remaining domains.

Client
Multinational holding group
Scale
4 domains · 81 topics · 3 systems via APIM
Duration
Ongoing platform — architecture & build
Year
2025
The situation

Specialists doing work the software should do

IT and HR specialists across the group were spending hours on repetitive, manual requests — and employees had to know which system did what. Leave lived in one portal, IT tickets in another, software requests somewhere else again. A third-party chatbot had been piloted for about a year: it proved real appetite for conversational self-service, but it wasn't where the organisation wanted to standardise for the long term.

What we did

One assistant, a governed integration layer behind it

I designed and built a single conversational assistant in Microsoft Teams on the Microsoft Power Platform. Employees describe what they need in plain language; the assistant gathers the right details and routes the request to the correct backend — without the user ever needing to know which system handles it. Every external call runs through one Azure API Management gateway, so security, authentication and monitoring are enforced in a single place across the whole DTAP pipeline.

Conversational layer in Microsoft Copilot Studio — 81 custom topics across four domains (IT, HR, Facilities, Finance) under a 'Department | Area | Action' naming standard
Orchestration in Power Automate, with Dataverse holding authorization and routing logic — chosen over SharePoint lists for real-time query performance and clean promotion across environments
Every integration funnelled through a single Azure API Management gateway: custom connectors per system, reusable policy fragments, consistent auth, central logging and rate limiting
Integrated leave management, ITSM and the CMDB (TOPdesk), and endpoint self-healing (Nexthink) — with HR and recruitment systems next on the roadmap
A dedicated child agent for software identification: searches the CMDB from a fuzzy description, confirms with the user, then pulls full asset detail so downstream automation runs on clean data
Smooth human handoff — when automation can't complete, the assistant opens a TOPdesk ticket, with a separate, more careful path for sensitive HR escalations
Built on Azure AD identity with GDPR-aware handling of sensitive HR data, promoted cleanly through Development, Test, Acceptance and Production
The result

A single front door for four departments

Employees across two European countries now self-serve IT, HR, Facilities and Finance requests from one conversational assistant in Teams, instead of hunting through separate portals. Specialist time goes back to specialist work; routine requests are automated or routed automatically, with a clean handoff to a human when it's warranted. Just as important, the platform is governed and maintainable — one API gateway, a documented naming and flow standard, and a reusable child-agent pattern ready to extend across the remaining domains.

Tech & tools
Microsoft Copilot StudioPower AutomateDataverseAzure API ManagementAzure ADCustom ConnectorsTOPdeskNexthinkMicrosoft TeamsDTAP