Overview

Built for the Microsoft Agent Academy Hackathon 2026 (Operative Track — advanced multi-agent orchestration, prompts, agent flows, and security), VendorGuard is a fully autonomous, multi-agent vendor contract compliance system built for procurement teams. It took first place as the single highest-scoring entry of the entire hackathon.

The Problem

Procurement teams receive vendor contracts by email and review them manually — reading PDFs, checking clauses against policy, writing reports, and notifying stakeholders. This typically takes 2–4 hours per contract and frequently misses critical clauses. VendorGuard was built to eliminate that process entirely.

The Solution

We designed a hub-and-spoke multi-agent system, orchestrated in Microsoft Copilot Studio:

  1. Contract Intake Agent — detects incoming vendor contract emails, extracts the PDF, and creates a contract record in Microsoft Dataverse
  2. Compliance Scoring Agent — retrieves the contract text and the live 15-rule compliance rulebook, evaluates the contract across 5 dimensions (Commercial, Legal, Data Privacy, SLA & Performance, Regulatory), and scores every clause Red, Amber, or Green
  3. Report & Notification Agent — generates a full compliance review report, posts a notification in Microsoft Teams, and updates the contract status
  4. Contract Q&A Agent — makes every contract, compliance result, and report queryable in natural language

A Power Automate flow triggers the entire pipeline the moment a contract PDF arrives by email. The compliance rulebook lives in Dataverse rather than hardcoded into the agents, so rules can be updated without touching agent logic.

Impact

  • Reduces contract review time from 2–4 hours to under 2 minutes, from email arrival to compliance report
  • Fully autonomous pipeline requiring zero manual effort once a contract email arrives
  • Compliance rulebook stored in Dataverse, so rules can evolve without redeploying agents
  • Demonstrated advanced orchestration: 1 orchestrator coordinating 4 specialist agents in a hub-and-spoke architecture

Future Enhancements

  • Expanding the compliance rulebook beyond the initial 15 rules
  • Adding support for contract types beyond vendor agreements
  • Building a dashboard view for procurement teams to track compliance trends across their full contract portfolio