Event Moment: Nick Leamon and Chad Dickerhoff on Building AI Sales Order Agents

In this moment, excerpted from a keynote by Sachin Gandhi, Microsoft Principal R&D Solution Architect, guest speakers Nick Leamon, AI Consultant (Staff) | Forward Deployed Engineering at Crowe, and Chad Dickerhoff, ERP Manager at Nucor Steel, explained how organizations are rapidly deploying AI agents to automate operational workflows and return human focus to higher-value work.

Key Takeaways

• AI Adoption Is Moving from Exploration to Operational Deployment: What began as experimentation quickly evolved into enterprise-wide agent development, with teams collaborating to identify ethical frameworks, implementation strategies, and reusable AI agents that can scale across multiple business divisions.
• Sales Order Agents Eliminate Manual Administrative Work: The sales order agent automates one of the most time-consuming tasks for sales teams: manual order entry. By extracting information directly from customer emails and attachments, the agent reduces operational overhead while allowing employees to focus on customer relationships.
• AI Bridges Human Language and Enterprise Systems: Using Azure Content Understanding alongside the Power Platform, the agent not only extracts information but translates customer terminology into ERP-compatible data structures — matching customers, products, and order details automatically within enterprise systems.