cs.AIMay 17, 2026

GraphMind: From Operational Traces to Self-Evolving Workflow Automation

Authors: Yiwen ZhuJoyce CahoonAnna PavlenkoQiushi BaiNima ShahbaziDivya VermareddyMeina WangMathieu Demarne+8 more

Organizations: Microsoft, USA · University of Illinois · *Work done during an internship at Microsoft. · Microsoft, Spain

Abstract

Complex operational workflows coordinating personnel, tools, and information are central to system operations, yet end-to-end automation remains challenging due to extensive human input requirements and limited ability to adapt over time. We present GraphMind, a system that constructs, executes, and evolves action-centric workflow graphs with minimal human effort. The system operates in three phases. First, a scalable offline pipeline extracts structured workflow graphs from large volumes of human resolution traces, capturing problems, actions, and their causal relationships. Second, an online multi-agent traversal engine navigates the graph to dynamically construct and execute workflows, combining graph-guided retrieval with LLM-driven reasoning at each step. Third, Adaptive Traversal Reinforcement (ATR) reinforces successful traversal paths, enabling execution-informed graph adaptation. GraphMind has been deployed across four production cloud database services for incident investigation. Evaluated on 93 held-out incidents and validated via blind expert review, the system outperforms an Agentic Summary-RAG baseline in mitigation reach, hallucination rate, and diagnostic throughput while requiring 8x less retrieval context. The ATR layer reduces hallucination rate by 26%, demonstrating that workflow graphs can learn from execution feedback. A 12-week field study confirms practical value: 97% of scored conversations yield actionable results within interactive latency.

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