Microsoft has launched a “next generation” of AI product enhancements for the services business apps portfolio on Monday
They discuss both Dynamics 365, the company’s package of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management solutions, and Power Platform, Microsoft’s collection of low-code tools for creating apps and workflows.
Charles Lamanna, CVP of business apps and platforms at Microsoft, hailed the upgrades as the obvious next step in Microsoft’s automation journey in an interview with TechCrunch. It was created using the Azure OpenAI Service and is driven by technology from the AI firm OpenAI.
“Over the last four years, we’ve been on a journey to bring generative AI and foundation models to the workplace,” Lamanna said by email, stating that Microsoft has a partnership with OpenAI to commercialize the vendor’s tech in Microsoft’s own products
“And we’ve now reached the point where the tech and product can enable transformative outcomes for customers.”
Microsoft is releasing a feature called Copilot for Dynamics 365, which, broadly speaking, intends to automate some of the most repetitive sales and customer service processes (borrowing branding from GitHub’s Copilot service).
“We securely and intelligently access information from customers’ CRM, ERP and other enterprise data sources at runtime,” Lamanna added.
“We use large language models to combine the enterprise data with underlying knowledge to produce responses tuned for each customer. Importantly, we don’t use customers’ data to train the models.”
In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot may create “contextual answers” to client questions submitted via chat or email and offer customer support representatives an “interactive chat experience” that incorporates case studies and knowledge sources.
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can construct target segments by describing the segment in their own words and receive suggestions regarding client categories that they may not have previously considered.
Users can also request specific themes from Copilot, which generates them by drawing from “a range” of online resources as well as an organization’s current marketing emails, to gain ideas for email campaigns, according to Lamanna.