How to Summarize Documents with AI in Power Automate
Document summarization is one of modern AI’s most useful time-saving capabilities. No matter how strong your reading comprehension skills are, distilling 5, 10, or even 100 pages of dense text into a short paragraph takes forever and isn’t fun. Workflows involving contracts, batch files, or even long-winded Excel reports with dozens of worksheets can all benefit from automated summary generation.
Implementing Document Summarization in Power Automate
Let’s take a quick look at how easy it is to implement AI document summarization in a short example Power Automate flow.
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We’ll start off by creating a manual trigger which accepts a single file upload at runtime. This will make testing our summarization action super easy.
Next, we’ll search for the Document AI connector in the Power Automate connector library. This connector gives us a suite of AI capabilities for a wide range of document types, including Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEG, PNG, and many other formats.
The action we’re looking for is called “Extract Summary from a Document using AI”. Note that we’ll need to configure an API key to establish our connection, and we can easily test this out for free with a free-tier API key. We can get one of those by creating a free account on the Cloudmersive website.
Next, we’ll configure our request parameters. Recognition mode lets us decide whether we’re more interested in request speed or request accuracy; we’ll leave this at its default “Advanced” value for now. Below that, we’ll configure the Input document and Input document (file name) parameters respectively with the file bytes and file name dynamic content values from our manual trigger step.
Finally, we’ll use the Send an email (V2) action as a simple and practical output so we can view our AI-generated summary cleanly. Including document summaries in emails with attachments saves the recipient time having to open and skim the document; they’ll get the key points up front. As we can see below, we’ll find body/DocumentSummaryText available in the dynamic content window, and we can simply click on that to add it to our message body.
Now we’ll run our flow and review the output. In this walkthrough, we’re using a 9-page contract document in PDF format.
In case that’s hard to read, here’s the full summary:
This Professional Services Agreement, entered into as of June 1, 2026, outlines the terms and conditions under which Meridian Dynamics LLC (the Service Provider) will provide professional services to Nexus Solutions Inc. (the Client). The agreement details service deliverables, a timeline specified in Exhibit A, payment terms based on hourly rates or fixed-fee milestones (as detailed in Exhibit B), and intellectual property ownership, granting the Client exclusive rights to work products. The agreement also addresses termination clauses, including provisions for termination for convenience or cause, and requires both parties to maintain confidentiality. The term of the agreement is from June 1, 2026, to May 31, 2027, unless terminated earlier.
That’s all there is to it — one quick step in our flow produced a concise, easy-to-read summary of dense legal content. AI can add serious value in Power Automate, and this is one of the best ways to do that.
