Agentic AI and process mining, defined

Core concepts

Agentic AI

AI that is triggered by a business condition and completes a multi-step process across systems, applying documented rules and escalating exceptions — rather than answering a person's prompt inside one application. Compared with Copilot →

AI agent

A single deployed unit of agentic AI: a trigger, the tools or connectors it may call, the knowledge and rules it applies, and a defined escalation path to a human.

Autonomous agent

An agent that runs on its own trigger rather than waiting for a person to start it. Autonomy is always bounded by the thresholds and approval rules configured for it.

Copilot

Microsoft's in-application assistant. It drafts, summarises, and answers questions about data a user can already access, and returns output for that person to apply.

Orchestration

Coordinating a process that spans more than one system so state, sequence, retries, and exceptions are handled as one flow — rather than by people moving between applications.

Cross-module process

A process whose steps sit in different modules or products, for example a CRM opportunity becoming a Business Central sales order. The handoffs between modules are where most manual work survives.

The Microsoft stack

Copilot Studio

Microsoft's tool for building conversational copilots and autonomous agents, including their triggers, tools, knowledge sources, and connections to Dataverse and business systems.

Dataverse

Microsoft's managed data platform underneath Power Platform and Dynamics 365. It provides the tables, security model, and APIs that agents read from and write to.

Power Platform

Microsoft's low-code family — Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Copilot Studio — used to build the flows, interfaces, and agents that surround Dynamics 365 and Business Central.

Power Automate

The workflow engine in Power Platform. It runs deterministic, step-by-step flows and is frequently the execution layer an agent calls to act on a system.

Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the ERP most mid-market organisations run for finance, purchasing, inventory, and operations.

Dynamics 365

Microsoft's suite of business applications spanning finance, supply chain, sales, service, and field service, sharing the Dataverse data platform.

Azure AI Services

Microsoft's hosted AI capabilities — including Azure OpenAI, document intelligence, and search — that agents call for reasoning, extraction, and retrieval.

Process names

Quote-to-Cash

The end-to-end revenue process: quote, order, fulfilment, invoice, and cash collection. In mid-market Microsoft environments it typically spans a CRM and an ERP, which makes it the most common orchestration target.

Procure-to-Pay

The purchasing process from requisition and purchase order through goods receipt, invoice matching, approval, and payment.

Hire-to-Retire

The employee lifecycle from recruitment and onboarding through role changes to offboarding, usually spanning HR, IT provisioning, and payroll systems.

Process mining

Process mining

Reconstructing how a business process actually runs by reading the timestamped event records your systems already write, rather than asking people how it is supposed to work. It exposes every real variant, cycle and waiting time per step, and where work loops back. How Orqive runs it →

Task mining

Desktop-level discovery: recording the clicks, applications, and copy-paste steps a person performs, to capture the part of a process no back-end system logs.

Event log

The input to process mining — a table of case identifier, activity, timestamp, and actor. In Business Central and Dynamics 365 it is built from change logs, posting and document history, approval entries, job queue records, and Dataverse audit data.

Process variant

One distinct path through a process. A single documented process typically runs as dozens of variants in practice; most volume follows a few, while the long tail concentrates errors and manual effort.

Conformance checking

Comparing the mined process against the process as designed, to find skipped steps, bypassed thresholds, and approvals granted out of sequence — the same evidence a governance review needs.

Bottleneck

A step where cases accumulate, usually queue time waiting for a person or an approval rather than processing time inside the step. Mining separates waiting from working so the real constraint is visible.

Rework loop

A path where a case returns to an earlier step — re-approved, re-priced, re-keyed. Rework is invisible in average cycle time and is often the largest single cost in a mid-market process.

Foundations & governance

Human-in-the-loop

A designed pause where an agent stops and asks a named person to decide, for cases above a threshold or outside its rules. It is what makes agents deployable on higher-stakes work.

Exception rule

A written statement of what counts as an exception, at what threshold, who owns it, and where it routes. Agents can only execute exception handling that has been written down.

Master data

The core reference records an agent acts on — customers, vendors, items, accounts. Duplicates and stale records become automated errors at scale, so quality and ownership gate deployment.

AI governance

The policy, access control, audit logging, and review cadence that make automated decisions traceable and defensible as automation scales past pilots.

Time-to-value

How long an initiative takes to produce a measurable business result. Orqive engagements target measurable wins inside about 90 days, against a baseline agreed before build.

Orqive terms

OARI

The Orqive AI Readiness Index: a free 18-question diagnostic that grades an organisation L1 to L4 across six dimensions of agentic AI readiness and returns its three highest-value agent opportunities. Take the assessment →

APQC Process Classification Framework

A widely used cross-industry taxonomy of business processes. Orqive maps a client's current state against its L3 to L5 levels so gaps are described in a standard vocabulary rather than local jargon.

Agent blueprint

The build-ready specification for an agent: its trigger, the systems it touches, the decision and exception rules it applies, its escalation path, audit requirements, and success metric. Produced in phase two →