Industrial Automation Company Unlocks Customer Intelligence from Email with GenAI

An industrial automation and process control company faced a critical challenge: valuable customer intelligence was locked inside individual seller email inboxes with no way to share, access, or act on it across teams. Manual data entry into CRM systems was causing low adoption, and sales, technical, and coordinator teams were engaging the same customers with no unified view of the relationship.

Lantern was engaged to design and deliver a six-week proof of concept that uses Generative AI to automatically extract and structure customer insights from seller emails, surfacing sentiment, intent, out-of-office signals, and key entities, and making them accessible through a SharePoint list and Copilot Studio agent for natural language querying.

The solution was deployed within the organization’s Azure tenant and Microsoft 365 environment, ensuring data sovereignty and security. The proof of concept met all requirements, and the organization approved a Phase 2 engagement to scale the solution across the enterprise.

The organization faced a critical challenge: valuable customer intelligence was locked inside individual seller email inboxes with no way to share, access, or act on it across teams. Customer conversations were siloed, preventing a shared view of customer relationships.

Low CRM adoption, driven by manual data entry requirements, created friction and limited usage for lead management and relationship tracking. Sales, technical, and coordinator teams regularly engaged the same customers without a centralized audit trail or comprehensive engagement history. Existing CRM and ERP systems lacked effective integration, creating a significant operational gap. Rich customer context existed within emails and meetings but was never extracted or leveraged to drive actionable insights.

Lantern delivered a GenAI-powered email intelligence solution built on Microsoft Azure. The solution ingests email from seller mailboxes through Microsoft Graph API, applies Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI to summarize communications and extract structured signals including category, sentiment, out-of-office status, and key entities, and stores the resulting insights in SharePoint alongside customer metadata.

Intelligence is surfaced through a Copilot Studio agent that enables natural language querying by business users. Four use cases were validated:

• Pre-Outreach Customer Context
• Customer Engagement Visibility
• Sentiment Analysis
• Out-of-Office Detection

The solution was deployed within the organization’s Azure tenant and Microsoft 365 environment, ensuring data sovereignty and security.

The engagement delivered measurable value across sales intelligence, operational efficiency, and readiness for enterprise-wide scale:

• Eliminated manual email review and data capture by automating the extraction of customer intelligence signals from seller inboxes.
• Enabled sales teams to quickly access customer context across multiple inboxes before engaging prospects or customers.
• Delivered automated sentiment analysis that classifies inbound communications as positive, negative, or neutral, including complaint and compliment signals.
• Introduced out-of-office detection to improve follow-up timing and customer engagement.
• Created a centralized view of customer communications across sales, coordination, and technical teams.
• Surfaced customer intelligence through a Copilot Studio agent that enables natural language querying.
• Ensured data sovereignty and security by deploying the solution within the organization’s Azure tenant and Microsoft 365 environment.
• Successfully met all proof-of-concept requirements, resulting in approval to proceed with enterprise-wide expansion.