Stop Reading Dashboards, Start Asking Questions

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About this session

Most teams consume process data by staring at dashboards. This session shows a different way: ask your process questions in plain language and get grounded answers from live data. Using Power Automate Process Mining and the new Process Mining MCP (Preview) connector in Microsoft Copilot Studio, I build a conversational "Process Insights" agent that surfaces bottlenecks, rework loops, and Power Automate flow failures on demand - every number traceable to the data, never a guess.

Inside the demo

• Two live processes: a Procure-to-Pay business process, and Power Automate Flow Health (mining your own failing flows).
• A Copilot Studio agent on the Process Mining MCP (Preview) - 9 tools, generative orchestration.
• Ask: "Where's the biggest bottleneck?" -> Approve Purchase Order, plus a 15% rework loop.
• Ask: "Which flow fails the most?" -> Invoice Sync, throttled (429) on POST invoice.
• Ask: "What's driving the long cycle times?" -> one vendor, Globex.
• Every number comes from the live Process Mining engine, not the model.

Prompts to try

Point an agent at your own Process Mining data and adapt these:

• ›Where is the biggest bottleneck in our process?
• ›What is driving the long cycle times?
• ›Which variant has the most rework?
• ›Show me the cases that took longer than 5 days.
• ›Which vendor (or department) influences duration the most?
• ›Which Power Automate flow fails the most, and where does it break?

Build it yourself

1. 1

   Set up Process Mining

   Create a process in Power Automate Process Mining and ingest at least one event log. You only need three columns: Case ID, Activity, and a Start timestamp.

   Process Mining tutorial (free sample data)→
2. 2

   Create the agent and turn on generative orchestration

   In Copilot Studio, create a new agent and enable generative orchestration - it is required for the agent to choose MCP tools at runtime.

   Generative orchestration→
3. 3

   Add the Process Mining MCP tool

   Tools > Add a tool > the Process Mining connector. Confirm all nine MCP tools are discovered (get_processes, get_bottleneck_analysis, get_correlation, and more).

   Step-by-step build guide→
4. 4

   Write grounding instructions

   Give the agent a system prompt that routes each question to the right tool and answers only from tool results - never a guessed number.

   The 9 tools, explained→
5. 5

   Test, add starter prompts, publish

   Ask the prompts above in the test pane, save the best ones as starter prompts, then publish to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

   Publish and deploy→

Slides

Download the deck (PDF) ↓

Resources