Microsoft will release two new AI Agents for its Dynamics 365 Contact Center “early in 2025”.
The first is its Customer Intent Agent, which discovers new intents by listening in on customer conversations across all channels.
It then analyzes the case notes, transcripts, and summaries to map issues and uncover the key troubleshooting steps agents may take to resolve each query.
The second agent is its Knowledge Management Agent. Leveraging intelligence from the Intent Agent, this crafts new knowledge articles.
Additionally, it isolates opportunities to update existing articles, suggests changes, and puts these forward for review.
Customer service teams – including both human and AI Agents – may then leverage the knowledge articles to autonomously solve customer issues.
Businesses can build such a customer-facing AI Agent for the Dynamics 365 Contact Center via the Copilot Studio. For voice, they may also leverage the native conversational IVR, powered by the Studio.
Either way, the AI Agent may interact with a customer and – if connected to the correct systems – solve many of their problems.
Of course, there will still be cases that stump the virtual agent. After all, many customers will ask questions that buck the norm.
As such, escalation paths to a live agent – who receives a summary of the conversation so far – remain necessary.
Nevertheless, when AI Agents work together, the contact center can pick up on new intents, create a plan of action to handle them, and then do so autonomously.
As such, the announcement beckons the self-learning contact center.
Hinting at this, Bryan Goode, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms at Microsoft, wrote in a company blog post:
Collectively, these agents are trained to autonomously learn to address new and emerging issues via self-service, improve the quality of issue resolution across channels, and help drive time and cost savings.
Of course, some rival vendors may offer similar solutions. For instance, Verint provides three “bots” that the business can chain together to create a comparable continuous learning cycle.
Nevertheless, Microsoft may demonstrate its customer service innovation streak by releasing these AI Agents so early into its contact center journey.
Some may have doubted this, given how the tech giant only entered the space six months ago.
However, it’s planting a stake firmly in the ground by making its CCaaS platform a recipient of two of its first ten AI Agents for enterprises.
As such, the platform may receive another significant PR boost – alongside another it recently received when HCLTech, the global business services provider, announced the Dynamics 365 Contact Center as its “preferred” platform for CCaaS migrations.
Given this, Microsoft has had a big start to its contact center adventure in 2025, and the announcements keep coming…
What Else Is Coming to the Dynamics 365 Contact Center?
As part of its latest release, the Dynamics 365 Contact Center has many new capabilities coming its way over the next four months.
Consider the additions to Copilot, which supports agents and supervisors on the platform. To start, Microsoft added Copilot-generated notes, which assist human agents in capturing the key facts of an issue.
Additionally, the Copilot may soon plug into non-Microsoft CRM platforms – like ServiceNow or Zendesk – to send Copilot-generated prompts into these systems. Again, this will help better equip human agents, this time with real-time, relevant knowledge from the CRM.
By May, Microsoft also plans to use its native Copilot to retrieve customer feedback. In doing so, the CCaaS solution lives up to its billing as a “Copilot-first” solution.
Other headline soon-to-be-released features include proficiency-based routing, a proactive outreach solution, and a fraud prevention tool.
Yet, most additional capabilities are brick-in-the-wall additions, such as the availability of key operational metrics, messaging APIs, and broader regional voice coverage.
To appear on more enterprise CCaaS shortlists with the likes of NICE, Genesys, and Five9, Microsoft must continue to build out these baseline capabilities across 2025.
The Challenges and Opportunities for Microsoft in CCaaS
Microsoft delivers CCaaS as a solution that offers seamless integration with its widely adopted tools like Teams and Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Moreover, customers and agents will likely find the solution familiar and comfortable, utilizing the same design language and usability as other Microsoft tools. That lowers the learning curve.
For these reasons, Microsoft will likely find success in this space with brands already investing in the Dynamics ecosystem.
Beyond that, it may face challenges in engaging a new type of buyer. After all, Microsoft excels at marketing to CIOs. Yet, the traditional buyers of CCaaS solutions are often contact center leaders who may not have strong existing ties to Microsoft.
Also, it may struggle with being late to a mature market and perceptions of its market readiness.
That said, when Microsoft enters any space, it does so with a splash. By bringing agentic AI into the platform so early, it will also expand its market awareness.
As it does so, it may capitalize on the many mid-market CCaaS contracts up for renegotiation in 2025.