Power Automate Use Cases: How Businesses are Automating Work in 2026

EY’s Global Finance team faced a scale problem that manual work could not solve. The firm receives approximately 1.5 million client payments every year from more than 200,000 clients worldwide, and only 30 percent were automatically matched with the correct invoice and cleared in SAP. The rest required manual research, taking between 7 and 30 minutes per payment just to locate the matching invoice, plus another 4 to 25 minutes to process and clear it. 

EY’s Global Controlling Transformation team, led by Ajith Haripaul, built a solution called PowerMatch using Power Automate, AI Builder, and Dataverse. AI models trained through AI Builder extract key details from incoming payments and remittance notices, while Power Automate flows handle the matching and clearing logic against SAP. 

The results moved the needle significantly. Automatically matched and cleared payments rose from 30 percent to 80 percent, with an additional 15 percent automatically matched and only requiring manual clearing. Only 5 percent of payments now require full manual processing.  

Across a related initiative called PowerPost, which standardized general ledger posting using Power Automate flows connected to SAP, EY reduced processing lead times by 95 percent. These Power Platform initiatives are collectively helping EY save approximately 230,000 hours annually.   

The global legal services and technology company Epiq was looking for a solution to fix its diverse onboarding process, which varied widely by role, location, and department. New hires often waited a week or more before every department, from IT to Facilities, completed its part of the process. 

So, in order to overcome these onboarding delays, Epiq’s team built an onboarding solution called Launchpad. It was developed using Power Apps and Power Automate. This system was strategically designed and developed to route the onboarding tasks to the correct department. It automatically handled onboarding tasks such as sending reminders and follow-up emails, providing real-time visibility into onboarding progress. 

The impact was immediate and measurable. Epiq’s onboarding process now takes just a few days instead of a week or more, saving the company approximately 2,000 hours of onboarding work each month and more than 500,000 US dollars annually in associated costs.

The Canadian resources company Teck came across a kind of bottleneck that is common in many sectors with strict compliance requirements. Each day Customs Supervisor Rodolfo Rodrigues and his team had to manually compare the customs documents that arrived with the records generated by the system, examining each piece of data to identify any discrepancies. The procedure was slow, tiring, and allowed for the kind of human error which results in compliance fines.  

Even though Rodrigues had no formal training in software development, he taught himself to use the Power Platform through online tutorials. Together with a colleague he created a solution which integrated Power Automate, Power BI and AI Builder with SharePoint, Outlook and Excel. Since customs documents now arrive by email, the process automatically saves the attachments, applies AI Builder to extract the relevant data and highlights any discrepancies for review rather than carrying out a full manual comparison.

As a result, the customs team was able to free itself from spending hours on routine verification tasks and could then concentrate on the cases which actually require human judgment instead of having to examine every line of each document.

Cineplex, one of Canada’s largest media and entertainment companies, began its automation journey in 2021 when Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation and Treasury, taught himself Power Automate to build robotic process automation flows for his own team. The early results were strong enough that Cineplex expanded the approach company wide, eventually building an Automation Center of Excellence to manage the initiative at scale. 

Today, more than 100 employees across Cineplex build and maintain automation solutions, ranging from desktop flows integrated with backend finance systems to AI driven processes handling guest service inquiries and ticket refunds. The Automation Kit for Power Platform gives leadership a dashboard to track savings generated across every automation project. 

With these automation solutions, Cineplex now saves more than 30,000 hours of manual processing time annually across departments such as finance, guest services, scheduling, and more. This intelligent solution resulted from one employee experimenting with a single flow.  

US Acute Care Solutions, a physician owned healthcare organization formed in part through the acquisition of Alteon Health, faced a data volume challenge unique to healthcare. The organization processes more than 20 million medical records annually, arriving from a wide variety of providers in inconsistent formats, all of which need to be consolidated into a coherent medical history for each patient. 

The team of software developers within the organization came up with an idea of automating the process of data collection and processing. They used Power Automate to gather, process, and organize data from different resources. It not only reduced manual work and human errors, but also supported real-time decision-making to improve patient care.   

Given the volume involved, even modest gains in processing speed translate into substantial time savings for clinical and administrative staff, freeing them from manual record reconciliation so they can focus on patient facing work. 

Community Fibre, a full fiber broadband provider serving London, was growing quickly and wanted its internal operations to keep pace with its network expansion. Working with implementation partner Cognizant, the company identified three priority areas: lead reporting, billing and payment processes, and business development. 

Using Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop as the primary tools, the team automated 13 processes and 29 process variants across these areas, including a redesigned direct debit setup flow that improved the company’s cash flow. Process Advisor was layered in to identify which tasks offered the most value once automated, since manual processes varied significantly across teams. 

The result was an 85 percent reduction in average process handling time, translating into approximately 12,000 hours saved in the first year alone. A single update to the billing process contributed a meaningful share of that total, demonstrating how one well targeted flow reshapes an entire operation.

Even Microsoft’s internal teams faced the kind of manual process Power Automate is built to solve. Employees on the company’s global Accounts Payable and Procurement teams handled a heavily manual process whenever a supplier or partner requested a change to standard payment terms, a request that historically required submitting a ticket to Microsoft Digital and waiting for a custom-built solution. 

Rather than wait in that queue, a small group of finance and procurement professionals, none of them professional developers, built their own automated solution using Power Automate. The flow routes payment term change requests directly to the right approvers and systems without requiring a developer to build custom integration code for each request type. 

The project reflects a theme visible across every example in this article: the people closest to a repetitive process are often best positioned to fix it, and Power Automate gives them the tools to do so without waiting on a formal development cycle.