Microsoft has unveiled Sales Copilot, an application that supports salespeople as they complete tasks across Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales.
In doing so, it aspires to improve productivity and personalize customer conversations.
That personalization comes from a CRM integration – be it Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.
By pulling in that data, Copilot autogenerates emails tailored to the customer, which the salesperson can review, tweak, and send.
Moreover, Copilot can automate tasks between the CRM and communication channels, craft meeting summaries, and prepare pre-meeting notes.
AI powers these notes, incorporating real-time insights, such as top business and customer opportunity summaries.
Finally, a post-interaction capability recommends the next moves to salespeople and suggests AI-generated follow-ups.
Satya Nadella: “The Dream We’ve Been Waiting For”
Introducing Sales Copilot during his keynote at Microsoft Inspire, Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO at Microsoft, described it as “a super exciting next step in the evolution of the scope of Copilot.
“We’ve talked about the horizontal knowledge work, individuals, and how they collaborate,” he continued. “But, now we uplevel this to the level of the organization and business processes that span the organization.
“This allows any one of us – who’s in sales – to stay in the flow of our activities with our customers. So, whether you’re responding in email or a Teams meeting, you get to stay in the flow with the customer and ground that activity of customer interaction with CRM.
“[You are] able to complete your task without having to go out of bounds to your system of record. That’s the dream we’ve been waiting for for a long time.
I think every SaaS application category is going to be fundamentally rewired because of this capability.
More Capabilities for Sales Copilot
Many teams currently utilize Microsoft Viva Sales and its capabilities will now come part and parcel with Copilot.
On top of these previously teased features, these have helped 85 percent of the 10,000 sellers at Microsoft complete one or more tasks faster.
Meanwhile, 70 percent noted that Sales Copilot had helped them improve productivity.
Yet, Microsoft is not stopping there. Indeed, in a blog post, it announced further additions to Sales Copilot as it launches. These include:
- An auto-generated summary feature that includes status, progress, and highlights of critical changes within the Dynamics 365 Sales platform.
- A pre-meeting customer summary that includes recent notes, account info, previously expressed concerns, and customer news, which is available in Dynamics, Outlook, and Teams.
- Real-time suggested responses during Teams meetings, provoked by a brand or competitor mention, will help the salesperson deal with objections.
All this is available as part of existing premium licenses for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise, with Sales Copilot rolling out later this month.
A standalone subscription is available at a monthly cost of $30 per user.
Additional Announcements from Microsoft Inspire
The second significant Dynamics announcement of Microsoft Inspire is its revamp of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – its real-time customer data platform (CDP).
Now, this will come together with customer journey orchestration tools as a single offering.
Copilot will run across this platform too, allowing users to create targeted marketing segments and employ natural language to extract insights from data sets.
Elsewhere in its portfolio, Microsoft launched Bing Chat Enterprise – which will allow business users to leverage the chat tool while keeping commercial data discrete.
The tech giant also unveiled Copilot for Teams Chat and Phone, with the latter enabling users to make and receive calls from Teams across devices, receiving real-time summarizations and insights.
Finally, Microsoft revealed additions to its Power platform. The most exciting involves Power Automate, a tool that allows users to map out business processes and consider how to optimize those with AI.
Now, Microsoft has layered process mining capabilities on top. Nadella described these as: “the tip of the sphere for you to then drive additional value from every customer interaction, every customer deployment, and every customer project that you are engaged in.”
The Microsoft CEO continued by noting how Process Mining will help businesses:
Find things that can be automated, where you can deploy Copilot, and keep humans in the loop to advance business processes.
Alongside this, Power Virtual Agent received a revamp. The conversational AI application now comes with a “generative answers” function.
As Nuance already does, this feature allows users to upload website links and data sources to expand the scope of the virtual agent.
Indeed, the bot may then answer customer queries that the business has not yet trained it to handle while presenting source links to the customer, so they know where the information has come from.
Yet, more innovatively, Virtual Agents can now take actions – as well as answer questions.
These leverage plug-ins that make it easier to register skills and actions, such as checking prices, fulfilling orders, and connecting to case management systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, or Dynamics 365.
As such, users can configure where AI invokes actions to fulfill various tasks to answer more queries without as much traditional bot training.
All this came within the first hour of Microsoft Inspire. To keep tabs on what comes next, subscribe to the CX Today Newsletter and never miss a beat.
