AI Hub: text anonymization & redaction

Once in a while I had a walk through AI hub in Power Platform and see what is new, or what calls my attention that maybe begore wasn't s attractive.

I had a look and found something very sexy: a new prompt. For those who are not aware of AI prompts in Power Platform, these are nice ways to use AI for tasks that may require some additional work, but BEWARE, with great power comes great responsibility, so remember to use the Responsible AI practices (they are linked at the end of the article in case you want to know more).

Today I was diving into the Prompts section, which is always interesting. Today I found a hidden treasure.

Let me guide you...

Ok, so everything started when going to AI Hub and then selecting prompts

After AI Hub opens, you can see some options. I was curious enough to have a look at all the templates Microsoft provides, recommend 100000% to have a look at them, not only to use them in your apps but also to improve your prompting skills.

Below you can side a wide range of options, and todays pick is Text anonymization and redaction.

The idea of this prompt is to take personal identifiable and sensitive data from a person/business/project/you name it, and anonymize it. Ensuring that this practice takes part of your processes guarantees certain "protection" for the subject. Let's put it simple - and always HR of course - if a candidate applies and we want Hiring Managers to evaluate the match between job and person the only thing the Hiring Manager needs is the data: years of experience, education, previous roles and eligibility to work in the country they are applying. It's clear that someone should be able to identify the candidate, most likely a person that is in a support role within the process.

While the prebuild prompt from AI Hub provides a suggestion of the prompt instructions, I wasn't really happy with it. It was too plain and didn't add a lot of value to me. Maybe I'm too picky - but better to improve than complain.

This is the defaulted prompt:

Given a  that contains sensitive information such as names, locations, or personal details, develop a process to anonymize or redact this information. Ensure that the privacy of the individuals is protected while preserving the overall meaning and coherence of the text.

So I tried to level up and make it as exhaustive as possible - I did have some help from an AIssistant to draft the prompt. See below the new version:

You are a summarization assistant for recruiters.

Given the following candidate application  , generate a short, anonymized summary that highlights the candidate's relevant skills, experience, education, certifications, and accomplishments.

Do not include any personal identifiers such as name, gender, age, date of birth, nationality, marital status, or photos. Avoid any phrasing that could reveal these details implicitly (e.g. “she has 10 years of experience” → “the candidate has 10 years of experience”).

Focus on:

Years of relevant experience

Key skills and technologies used

Achievements or results (with quantifiable outcomes if possible)

Education and certifications

Languages spoken (without specifying origin)

Work eligibility or relocation info (in general terms only, e.g. “eligible to work in the EU”)

Output a concise, professional summary in neutral language suitable for recruiters to review candidate qualifications without bias.

To make sure that the prompt works accordingly, I recommend running a couple of test with random data as you can see below.

What I want to do with the prompt is to add a field in an existing model-driven app where I have all the candidates record. Big part of the recruitment process relies on Hiring Managers so what we need is to make sure we remove bias as much as possible. The challenge is that being aware or not, we evaluate and categorize things based in our own experiences - this is what is called the unconscious bias - and I'm positive you do it every day.

I have an app that is called AI Summarization and it already retrieves a lot of data from the candidate profile - more info here: AI Models + AI prompts: CV screening with Power Apps and Power Automate. We will add a field in the candidate form that display the result of the anonymization process.

This is the overview of the app I just mentioned: