7 Research Agents powered by Project Sophia
- Ana Inés Urrutia
- 8 jun
- 3 Min. de lectura
Business Research Agents, aka BRA, aka as former Project Sophia has been in the market for some time, and I'm loving the ways it's going and the potential. Based in different conversations with fellow consultants and end-users I summarized a decent amount of use cases that might be useful for those who are digging into the solution and would like to actually know what it does without the fluff.
The below are a mix of cross-industry business needs and department-specific challenges that qualify as great use cases for BRA. Let's start with the cool stuff.
Jump into the business cases that you would like to understand:
Sales Research Agent (not D365 Sales)
The data gives us deal-level info — who owns it, where it’s stuck, what stage it’s in, and how likely it is to close. Perfect to predict outcomes, spot gaps, and clean up forecasts.
What Sophia does: It scans the pipeline, flags stalled deals, highlights risky forecasts, and generates a weekly summary with predicted close values and rep-level insights.
Marketing Research Agent
The data captures campaign-level metrics like spend, CPL, conversion rates, ROI, and channel. It’s all here — enough to stop the guessing and start reallocating with purpose.
What Sophia does: It compares performance across channels, flags underperforming campaigns, and suggests where to cut or increase spend — all in one simple summary.
Customer Service Research Agent
The data gives us ticket logs with categories, resolution times, priorities, and satisfaction scores. This helps spot repetitive pain points and slowdowns before they explode.
What Sophia does: It groups tickets by theme, tracks resolution times, and surfaces repeat issues. It also shows which agents or channels are overwhelmed.
Finance Research Agent
We used two small but mighty files: one shows budget vs actuals per department, the other rolls everything up to show total gaps and variances. Enough for Sophia to highlight overspending, spot patterns, and automate those painful monthly updates.
What Sophia does: It consolidates department data, highlights overspending, and gives you a clear variance summary — ready to share with leadership, no extra work.
HR Research Agent
The data tracks engagement scores, absences, 1:1s, and risk flags — all useful to surface who might be on their way out before they say it out loud.
What Sophia does: It identifies high-risk employees based on patterns like absences and low engagement, and recommends who needs a check-in before they resign.
Retail Research Agent
The data shows stock levels, sales trends, and predicted demand. Everything you need to align supply with reality.
What Sophia does: It compares sales trends with inventory, flags stockouts or overstock risks, and calculates what should be reordered — right when you need it.
Project Research Agent
The data gives full visibility into tasks, owners, statuses, and delivery risks. Sophia can instantly create updates and flag what’s off-track.
What Sophia does: It pulls in task and milestone updates, generates a clean summary for stakeholders, and highlights blockers so you don’t miss a deadline.
All this data? It’s the stuff we keep chasing, fixing, or ignoring until it blows up. Project Sophia/Business Research Agents do not replace your job, it just helps you stop drowning in tabs and actually get stuff done. Sales, HR, finance, support, ops… if there’s data and a decision to make, Sophia can help. You don’t need a fancy system. You just need something smart enough to make sense of the mess you already have.
Note: whoever created Project Sophia/Business Research Agent documentation, you have all my admiration. Never seen such a clear and guided documentation in Microsoft Products.
Check it out here: Project "Sophia" overview | Microsoft Learn
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