Automating PDF Data Extraction Using Computer Use within Copilot Studio

Business documents such as purchase orders, invoices, reports, and shipping documents often contain valuable information in tabular format. In many organizations, this information is still copied manually into spreadsheets or business applications, which takes time and increases the possibility of errors.

Microsoft Copilot Studio includes Computer Use, a capability that enables an agent to interact with applications through their user interface. Instead of depending on APIs or custom integrations, the agent can automatically open applications, navigate through screens, identify information, and complete tasks based on what it sees on the screen.

In this blog, we’ll build a practical solution that uses Computer Use to open a PDF document, identify the primary table, and extract its contents into a structured JSON format. The extracted data is then passed to a Power Automate flow, which converts it into a CSV file and sends it as an email attachment. This demonstrates how AI-driven UI automation can simplify document processing while reducing manual effort.

Let’s consider a potential use case:

Many organizations store business documents such as purchase orders, invoices, and reports in SharePoint document libraries for centralized access and collaboration. These documents often contain important tabular information that needs to be extracted and shared with other teams or business applications. Performing this task manually requires users to open each PDF, identify the required table, and copy the data into a structured format, making the process repetitive and prone to errors.

In this scenario, a purchase order PDF is stored in a SharePoint document library. A Copilot Studio agent uses Computer Use to open the PDF directly from SharePoint, identify the primary table containing the line-item details, and extract the data into a structured JSON format. The extracted data is then passed to a Power Automate flow, which converts it into a CSV file and sends it as an email attachment. This approach reduces manual effort and provides a simple way to automate document processing using AI-driven UI automation.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to:

• Configure a Computer Use tool in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Extract tabular data from a PDF stored in SharePoint.
• Pass the extracted JSON to Power Automate.
• Generate a CSV file from the extracted data.
• Email the CSV file automatically using Outlook.

Let’s go through the end-to-end implementation of this solution... Read More