On January 25, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between April 2024 and September 2024. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and improvements, showcasing our ongoing commitment to fueling digital transformation for both our customers and partners.

This release reinforces our dedication to developing applications and experiences that contribute value to roles by dismantling barriers between data, insights, and individuals. This wave introduces diverse enhancements across various business applications, emphasizing improved user experiences, productivity, innovative app development and automation, and advanced AI capabilities. Watch a summary of the release highlights.

Explore a heightened level of convenience when examining Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans using the release planner. Enjoy unmatched flexibility as you customize, filter, and sort plans to align with your preferences, effortlessly sharing them. Maintain organization, stay informed, and remain in control while smoothly navigating through various active waves of plans. For more information, visit the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 release wave

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enhances customer understanding and boosts sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. The 2024 release wave 1 focuses on providing sellers timely customer information, expediting deals with actionable insights, improving productivity, and empowering organizations through open configurability and expanded generative AI leadership. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching the Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales specific skills, data, and actions. Additionally, the team will focus on assisting sellers on the go within the Outlook and Microsoft Teams mobile apps.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot, filtering response verification, diagnostic tools for admins and agents, and usability improvements to multi-session apps. Additionally, we’re making enhancements to the voice channel, and improving unified routing assignment accuracy and prioritization. Watch this video about the exciting new features in Customer Service.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is a field service management application that allows companies to transform their service operations with processes and experiences to manage, schedule, and perform. In the 2024 release wave 1, we’re introducing the next generation of Copilot capabilities, modern experiences, Microsoft 365 integrations, vendor management, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations integration.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues on its journey of autonomous finance, building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process, to increase user productivity and business agility. This release focuses on enhancing business performance planning and analytics, adding AI powered experiences, easing setup of financial dimension defaulting with AI rules guidance, increasing automation in bank reconciliation, netting, expanding country coverage, tax automation, and scalability. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Finance can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhances business processes for increased insight and agility. Copilot skills improve user experiences, while demand planning transforms the forecast process, and warehouse processes are optimized for greater efficiency and accuracy. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on core functionality improvements, including support for discounts and fees, enhanced resource reconciliation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Project Operations can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including supporting high-detail 3D model support through Microsoft Azure Remote Rendering and greatly improved web content support that enable customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data. Additionally, support for Guides content on mobile will be generally available in the coming wave through a seamless integration with the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile application.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources will continue to improve recruiting experiences with functionality to integrate with external job portals and talent pools and offer management. We will continue to expand our human capital management ecosystem to include additional payroll partners and build better together experiences that span the gamut of what Microsoft can offer to improve employee experiences in corporations of any size and scale across the globe. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Human Resources can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to invest in omnichannel retail experiences through advancements in mobile point of sale experiences like Tap to Pay for iOS and offline capabilities for Store Commerce on Android. The business-to-business buying experience is enhanced with new capabilities, and a streamlined order management solution for buyers who work across multiple organizations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is delivering substantial enhancements, with a central emphasis on harnessing the power of Copilot. Available in more than 160 countries, the team is focused on Copilot-driven capabilities to streamline and enhance productivity through enhanced reporting and data analysis capabilities, elevated project and financial management, and simplified workflow automation. We have also upgraded our development and governance tools and introduced improvements in managing data privacy and compliance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. With this release, we’re making it easier and faster to ingest and manage your data. AI enables quick insights and democratized access to analytics. Real-time data ingestion, creation, and updates further enable the optimization of experiences in the moments that matter. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys brings the power of AI to revolutionize how marketers work, enabling businesses to optimize interactions with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, we empower marketers with a deeper customer understanding, we enable them to create new experiences within minutes, reach customers in more ways, and continuously optimize results. Thanks to granular lead qualification, we continue to boost the synergy between sales and marketing to achieve superior business outcomes. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

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Watch this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave in Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Apps focuses on integrating Copilot to accelerate app development with AI and natural language, enhancing user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. The team is also simplifying the creation of modern apps through contemporary controls, responsive layouts, and collaboration features. Additionally, they’re facilitating enterprise-scale development, enabling makers and admins to expand apps across the organization with improved guardrails and quality assurance tools.

Microsoft Power Pages interactive Copilot now supports every step of site building to create intelligent websites—design, page layouts, content editing, data binding, learning, chatbot, accessibility checking, and securing the site. Connect to data anywhere with the out-of-the-box control library and secure the website with more insights at your fingertips.

Microsoft Power Automate is bringing Copilot capabilities across cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining. This will allow customers to use natural language to discover optimization opportunities, build automations, quickly troubleshoot any issues, and provide a delightful experience in managing the automation estate. For enterprise-scale solutions, maintenance is made easier with improved notifications on product capabilities.

Microsoft Copilot Studio brings native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilot, general availability for generative actions, and geo-expansions to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Norway, Korea, South America, and South Africa. We’re also introducing rich capabilities to integrate with OpenAI GPT models, along with new channels such as WhatsApp, and software lifecycle capabilities such as topic level import/export and role-based access control.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to make investments focusing on enhancing maker experience by improving app building productivity infused with Copilot experiences, seamless connectivity to external data sources, and AI-powered enterprise copilot for Microsoft 365.

AI Builder invests in three key areas: prompt builder for GPT prompts, intelligent document processing with new features and models, and AI governance improvements, including enhanced capacity management and data policies. These initiatives aim to empower users with advanced generative AI, streamline document processing, and strengthen governance across AI models within Power Apps.

Early access period 

Starting February 5, 2024, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2024. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page. 

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 1 plan, and share your feedback in the community forums via Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform.

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Selling is all about relationships. We hear a lot these days about the disconnect that our increasingly digital world can create. But at Microsoft, we believe that digital tools, especially those powered by generative AI and real-time insights, can help strengthen sellers’ relationships with their customers. We’re continually investing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to enable sellers to engage with their customers more meaningfully. We are pleased to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023 report, with top scores possible in the Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap criteria for our sales force automation (SFA) platform.

Reducing complexity to drive seller success

The role of a seller has only grown more complex. A process that used to involve a couple of phone calls and face-to-face meetings now includes everything from targeted emails to impromptu online chats. Organizations rely on everything from digital sellers to field sellers to customer success champions to ensure their customers are supported end-to-end throughout the sales journey. Especially with hybrid workplaces and shrinking travel budgets, sellers need assistance from technology to build connections—between colleagues, across multiple data sources, and with customers. 

The challenge is that sellers need to build these connections and foster relationships without sacrificing productivity. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, sellers spend more than 66 percent of their day managing email, leaving only about a third of their time for actual sales activities. Our answer is to provide simple solutions—focusing on collaboration, productivity, AI, and insights—to help sellers focus on closing deals. As Forrester states in its report, “Dynamics [365 Sales] showcases how SFA and office productivity solutions work together.” We believe this is what has earned our position as a Leader: we built solutions to give sellers access to real-time customer insights, subject matter experts, relevant data across different sources, and important customer and account information right in their app of choice—no context switching necessary.

Dynamics 365 Sales works natively with Microsoft Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. Additionally, copilot capabilities bring next-generation AI and customer relationship management (CRM) platform updates into collaborative apps like Outlook and Teams, unlocking productivity for sellers whether they are working in Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft 365 apps. By helping to eliminate manual data entry, meeting summarization, and other cumbersome processes, Dynamics 365 Sales ensures sellers have more time to create and nourish their customer connections, ultimately driving sales.

Providing insights that improve customer retention—and grow revenue

Referring to Microsoft, Forrester also reports that “Embedded insights are a highlight of the product”—something that Microsoft customer, DP World, knows well. DP World is the leading provider of worldwide, end-to-end supply chain and logistics. DP World implemented Dynamics 365 Sales to help the company diversify and scale after an acquisition that was driving new demand and traffic to the company. Dynamics 365 Sales provides its sellers predictive lead scoring and prioritized worklists based on AI, giving full visibility into its sales funnels and helping it effectively qualify leads and opportunities. This reduced DP World’s sales cycle, enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater customer retention.

Learn more about sales

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.

Microsoft named a Leader

We received top scores in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023.

Read the report

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Microsoft Sales Copilot

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing—for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

Source: Forrester: “The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023”, Forrester Research, Inc., 20 September 2023.

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AI is revolutionizing the way sellers operate, enabling them to work smarter, not harder and achieve fantastic results. With AI-powered tools, sellers can access real-time insights, streamline their workflow, and make data-driven decisions, all while minimizing manual effort. These advancements empower sellers to engage more effectively with customers, enhance their productivity, and ultimately achieve better results in today’s competitive market.

Our latest release is working to make AI become a natural addition to a sales toolkit. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot drive forward the lead to opportunity process providing insights, suggestions, and system updates with the click of a button. Each capability released across this wave helps build a fantastic set of scenarios to foster a better understanding of customers and provide ways to collaborate and accelerate deals with personalized and relevant insights.

Let’s take a closer look at how the latest capabilities are transforming sellers into agile and informed professionals, helping them stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional value to their clients.

Microsoft Sales Copilot

Maximize productivity with the AI assistant designed for sellers.

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Revolutionizing the seller workspace

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: With the general availability of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, we are changing the customer relationship management (CRM) work patterns for sellers. By seamlessly integrating AI into the application, Copilot alleviates sellers from routine tasks, expedites their actions, and ultimately enhances business outcomes. It achieves this by offering valuable recommendations, summarizing essential data, retrieving information, and facilitating context-specific actions, all seamlessly integrated into the natural flow of work.

Not only in a side panel, expect to see Copilot across the CRM application within email replies and across search and homepage experiences to help salespeople think less about data entry, record search, and activity timelines and instead spend more time building strong customer relationships.

Insightful record summaries: We’re introducing new AI-generated summaries, for lead and opportunity summaries including citations and CRM-linked highlights to validate the accuracy of the information. Now a salesperson can see an instant summary to help keep them up to date with the latest changes and news items.

Elevated customer profiles: Sellers understand the importance of seizing the moment with customers, and staying promptly informed to support their deals. Sales Copilot can now integrate with People.ai and Seismic to expand and enrich screens with valuable references and insights, thereby amplifying stakeholder and deal intelligence.

Real-time intelligence: Our objective is to empower sellers with timely, relevant information. When customers mention a competitor or brand during sales conversations, real-time information cards instantly populate the Microsoft Sales Copilot pane within Microsoft Teams meetings. This ensures that sellers are consistently well-prepared and informed.

Efficient sales qualification: Copilot also plays a pivotal role in streamlining the sales qualification process. It proactively prompts sellers with crucial questions during interactions with prospects, ensuring that vital data points are captured to advance the deal. Employing established frameworks like budget, authority, needs, and timeline (BANT) qualification, Copilot guarantees that budgets, key stakeholders, needs, and timelines are all well understood and accounted for in customer interactions.

Automation and assignment enhancements: In addition to all the AI capabilities arriving to Dynamics 365 Sales, we want to ensure quality leads and opportunities get to the doors of the sellers, fast. With the latest assignment features, new leads or opportunities can be automatically assigned to sales teams or added to queues based on lead attributes and matching team or sales queue attributes.

Refreshed user experience: The Dynamics 365 Sales user experience has been refreshed to enhance the look and usability of the system, providing updated styling, including drop shadows and brighter background colors; new fluent-based controls in forms; business process flows; and dialogs and refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows in form pages. This new and refreshed user experience delivers improved productivity, increased user satisfaction, and better decision-making.

Manage key stakeholders and buyer relationships: Account team members often need help identifying the right stakeholders within a customer organization for their deals. With the new smart organization charts, sellers can build and visualize a customer’s organization, capture the buyers’ roles easily, and get a snapshot of each contact’s activity levels with your organization. This helps sellers maintain a healthy business relationship with their customers.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot

These are just a few of the new capabilities we’re rolling out for sellers in 2023 release wave 2. To learn more, check out the resources below.

• Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot release wave documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Microsoft Sales Copilot webpage.

If you’re not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

The post New sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 2—Helping sellers work smarter appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As businesses around the world increasingly recognize the value of generative AI in driving growth through better customer experiences, Microsoft has taken the lead in developing advanced AI features within its journey orchestration and customer data platform product—Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Our AI journey began more than two years ago. Since then, we’ve already implemented 10 groundbreaking AI features, with more coming each month. Our AI features already assist data analysts and marketers in their daily tasks—improving data quality, unlocking data to understand customers, identifying audiences, and building journeys and content to engage customers. This demonstrates our commitment to promptly deliver announced product innovations offering cutting-edge solutions that boost productivity, unlock capabilities, and leverage data, effectively addressing the needs of organizations worldwide.

As we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, we’re delighted to give you a sneak preview of the new features releasing as part of 2023 release wave 2.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Leverage data to personalize your customer experiences

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Unleash the power of AI and real-time insights to fuel customer experiences

To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. Dialog with data offers an intuitive way to explore your data across all your data sources and uncover new opportunities to grow your business. Chat with your data and ask questions using everyday words to receive answers as well as additional insights within seconds. Dialog with data is available in all geographies in 23 languages.

As customers engage with your business, they constantly provide signals about their interests, such as adding a product to a cart or signing up for a trial. It’s crucial to build on these signals as they happen so you can deliver the right experience at the right time. With this release, we are introducing in public preview real-time capabilities to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, enabling you to now personalize your customer’s experience on web and mobile in real-time, whether they’re anonymous or known. You can deliver the most relevant offer, content, or experience by combining their latest interactions and activities with your brand together with their profile data, the segments they belong to, and insights about them, such as their lifetime value.

As customers engage across digital and human-assisted channels, it’s essential for sellers also to have access to comprehensive data and insights to ensure a seamless cross-channel experience. By unifying, enriching, and transforming customer data and interactions into actionable insights using data from multiple sources, Customer Insights equips sellers with unparalleled knowledge. We’ve made these insights readily available to sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot. Sellers can consult customer profile summaries, an at-a-glance view of essential customer engagement, predictions, and insights to help the follow-up conversation. Metrics such as lifetime value, churn risk, and buying propensity, displayed right on the page where sellers are working, assist them in identifying high-value opportunities and enable them to have hyper-personalized conversations.

Orchestrate personalized journeys using Copilot

In the past, the idea of completing complex tasks by simply describing them seemed like something out of a sci-fi movie. But with AI and natural language models, this is becoming a reality. Journey creator, a Copilot feature, streamlines the process of designing customer journeys. Just describe your journey in English, and let Copilot build it for you. Get suggestions to create the journey on segments, triggers, communication timing, branching options, and easily make journey edits. Journey creator is now available in North America and coming to all geographies in December.

Query assist, our AI powered segment builder, is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys, so both marketers and data analysts can build complex segments just by describing them. Thanks to intelligent segment summaries, teams can easily collaborate. Sharing segments, understanding the intent of the segment, and ensuring the logic matches the intended outcome has never been easier. Marketers also receive recommendations to optimize their segments.

In addition, with this release, you will receive a variety of features aimed at enhancing customer engagement and streamlining communication. These include setting up quiet times, preventing duplicate emails to the same address, choosing the most effective email address for reaching customers, and allowing the use of your brand as an SMS sender.

Boost content impact, streamlining creativity and efficiency with Copilot

Designing content that resonates with your audience requires a combination of creativity and time, and with the assistance of Copilot, this process becomes more efficient and impactful. Content ideas, your solution for generating captivating emails in minutes, is now accessible worldwide in English, and in seven additional languages. Continuous enhancements, such as sample key points for typical email types or choosing a tone of voice best suited to your brand, have made content generation even more efficient.

While content ideas is perfect to kickstart new emails, you can now use Content rewrite to rapidly iterate and perfect your existing messages. Whether you are creating emails, text messages, push notifications, or forms, you can easily rephrase your messages, adjust the tone of voice, shorten or lengthen your copy, and uplevel your campaigns.

To complement your content, Copilot automatically recommends a selection of images from your library matching your copy, so you can easily add images in your emails, forms, and push notifications without spending hours searching.

Finalizing your campaigns often required dedicated time from you or a designer to achieve just the right look. Using Copilot, you can effortlessly style your emails, event registration pages, and forms to interpret your website and instantly apply a similar design. Maintain a consistent brand identity by saving those themes in your brand profiles and easily apply them to your future campaigns. This streamlines the process, reducing the time spent fine-tuning styles and allowing you to focus on other core activities.

Generate higher quality leads to maximize your opportunity pipeline and increase win rates

Organizations that prioritize sales and marketing alignment are typically more likely to achieve their organization’s growth goals. Sellers want marketers to deliver good quality leads. Marketers want sellers to follow-up on the leads they generate and convert these into revenue. To boost conversions, it’s crucial for marketers to identify prospects that are most likely to make a purchase and send them to sellers when they are ready to engage. Our enhanced lead scoring model, with its granular qualification criteria and signals, helps your team in assessing a prospect’s likelihood to purchase. Once you’ve identified qualified leads, you can automatically handoff in Dynamics 365 Sales at exactly the right time for the seller to reach out.

Thanks to the analytics dashboard, you can see the impact of your marketing efforts. It enables you to drive better conversion rates and optimize your activities to deliver higher return on investment (ROI). Marketers can better align with Sales by sharing a comprehensive view of the pipeline, from prospects to won opportunities.

Recognizing that each business has unique needs and requirements for aggregating data from various sources, we will now provide additional custom reporting capabilities. In Customer Insights – Journeys, you can leverage Microsoft Fabric, an all-in-one analytics and business intelligence reporting solution, to create custom Power BI reports. You can unlock more insights using data science and machine learning, without the need to move your data or conduct any data transformation activities.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

These innovations are just a small part of what is coming in this wave release. With real-time capabilities, generative AI, and by unifying sales and marketing efforts, your teams can do more with less and focus on customer experiences that win you customers for life.

Don’t wait to get started, the era of AI is now.

• Explore Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Leverage all our new AI innovations for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys by transitioning to real-time marketing.
• Get a full view of what is coming in 2023 release wave 2 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys.
• Check the 2023 release wave 2 video.
• Discover Microsoft Fabric.

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The innovation continues. Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.

In business applications, we’re using generative AI to break down silos and bridge gaps between data, insights, and people so sellers, marketers, and customer experience (CX) professionals can deliver exceptional experiences across the entire customer journey, seamlessly.

With our 2023 release wave 2, we’re taking these capabilities to new heights across our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Sales Copilot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights applications.

As unveiled at yesterday’s Business Applications Launch Event, I’m thrilled to share highlights of what’s to come, including new ways that these applications—fueled by generative AI and Copilot—can help you use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration more easily than ever before. With a focus on delivering value to each line of business employee, our solutions are proven to maximize business outcomes across your organization.

Many of these capabilities are available today; all of them will be generally available or in preview before April 2024. Let’s check it out.

Use data and insights that used to be hidden

To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. But if your data is incomplete or you can’t get to it or take action on it, how valuable is that data and the insights that come out of it?

The new AI-driven capabilities releasing in this wave are set to revolutionize your customer experiences. With Copilot’s assistance, marketers, data analysts, and CX professionals can rapidly unlock data for enhanced decision-making, obtain valuable customer demographic and behavioral insights, and streamline both journey orchestration and content creation processes to fuel customer experiences.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you to harmonize disparate data sources into one complete 360-degree view of each customer; it will automatically assess incoming data and offer suggestions to improve the quality, resulting in a more complete view and better insights into each customer.

For sellers to maximize the number of qualified leads or deals closed, it’s important that they spend their time with leads and contacts with the highest likelihood of conversion. Obtaining this clarity involves looking across a growing number of customer touchpoint signals that sellers often don’t have access to (such as website visits or store visits), nor have time to analyze. That’s where the combined power of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales comes in. As sellers are working their leads, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales automatically summarizes the lead details, status, and recent activity details, including profile summaries from Customer Insights – Data. Combining sales data with important intent signals helps sellers get a full picture of their customer so they can tailor every engagement, right in their flow of work.

Unlock capabilities previously out of reach

Another one of the many beautiful things about Copilot is that it can unlock capabilities that were previously out of reach, and it applies to various roles across your organization.

For instance, thanks to dialog with data—a Copilot capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—marketers and CX professionals can get insights and define the right target audience just by asking a simple question instead of relying on data experts to do the work for them.

Creating customer journeys has also been completely transformed with Copilot. Marketers can now use everyday language to describe the customer journey they want to create, and Copilot instantly designs that journey for them, offering suggestions on segments, trigger-based actions, communication timing, branching options, and much, much more. What’s even better is that the suggested journey is now editable. So if the marketer needs to make a last-minute change to the journey’s scope, they can do so by simply asking Copilot to make the update.

When it comes to creating marketing content, bottlenecks can often arise: organizations may not have the right creative resources, enough time, or funding to produce effective content. So unfortunately, many promising campaigns never see the light of day. However, now, with the assistance of Copilot, marketers and CX professionals can easily produce highly appealing content with none of those roadblocks. Copilot capabilities like content ideas and content rewrite help these professionals write or refresh emails, forms, and more. And to make sure that collateral is on brand, they can use style assist which automatically applies colors, fonts, and styles based on a web URL and brand profiles to ensure a cohesive brand identity.

And to make it even easier to both understand your customers through data and act on insights from that data, we’ve combined Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into a single offering, with the name “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.” 

Reach new levels of productivity and collaboration

With customer expectations on the rise and customer loyalty at stake, sellers and marketers need to be more on top of their game than ever, so infusing Copilot into the tools they already use—whether it’s Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, or Outlook—our solutions empower them to transform their day-to-day operations and supercharge their productivity.

Sales Copilot capabilities in Outlook deliver insights and opportunity summaries so sellers no longer have to work across multiple applications to get a comprehensive view of an opportunity or to prepare for a meeting. These summaries are accessible in various places, including collaborative deal rooms, ensuring collective visibility.

To ensure that collaboration flows smoothly across sales teams, Sales Copilot in Teams provides AI-powered planner tasks, like simplifying task assignments, setting due dates, and keeping everyone in the loop. And once it’s time for the presentation, the team is equipped with real-time tips and suggestions within the Teams meeting so they can take charge of the discussions.

And with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers no longer have to sift through tabs and sections, they have access to what they need at their fingertips, like AI-generated account summaries, and the ability to quickly follow up on emails using recommended actions.

Our goal is to equip sellers with the right information at the right time, in real time, so they can make every moment count when interfacing with a customer; and we’re making it all available within their flow of work.

Learn more about 2023 release wave 2 capabilities

The capabilities coming in this release wave are ushering in a new era of AI-powered efficiency and innovation, enabling you to use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.

To see how all of this comes to life, watch the CX overview segment of the Business Applications Launch Event.

The future of AI-driven success is here, and Copilot is leading the way. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and be ready to implement these transformative capabilities in your organization.

Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 2

Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.

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Today, at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, we kicked off the 2023 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a six-month rollout of new and enhanced capabilities scheduled for release between October 2023 and March 2024.

This release wave introduces hundreds of new features across Microsoft Power Platform applications, including enhanced capabilities for governance, administration, and professional development. Updates for Dynamics 365 include innovation to help employees be more productive, create exceptional customer experiences and deepen relationships, and drive meaningful growth across the business. This release also features new AI capabilities in Copilot—which more than 130,000 organizations have now experienced—that help to improve insights, save time, and enhance creativity across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.  

Tune in to the launch event, live or on-demand, for a concise overview of the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Nestlé, Kodak Alaris, Northern Trust, Centrica, Spark NZ, Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland, and Suffolk are adopting these capabilities to drive transformative changes in their businesses.

Some of the themes at the event include:

• A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
• Transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) with AI
• Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
• Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform

A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service

As a frontline for customer loyalty, service agents and field teams need access to information and insights to understand customer needs and respond appropriately. New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will help reduce time spent on common tasks, as well as introduce enhancements to the Customer Service workspace. Updates include improved inbox functionality, a redesigned voice experience, enhanced collaboration through Microsoft Teams, and integrated diagnostics for administrators—all aimed at boosting agent productivity and operational efficiency.

During the session led by Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Customer Service, we demonstrated how Copilot assists customer service and field service processes, including customer self-service, across various channels.

We also revealed how customers like Northern Trust Corporation, a leading wealth and asset management institution, can use Copilot to assist the client services team with tasks ranging from account reviews and case investigations to post-resolution wrap-ups. Northern Trust Corporation has not only gained recognition for its innovative financial services, but also for its unwavering commitment to customer service. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a steadfast component of its journey, the latest capabilities in release wave 2 can help the client service teams at Northern Trust be even more efficient, effective, and customer-focused, streamlining its workflow and enhancing its ability to provide timely and accurate support to clients. 

The session also delved deeper into the field service domain, where Centrica, a global energy services company, effectively manages its sizable workforce of 12,000 field operatives on site by harnessing the new capabilities of Dynamics 365 Field Service, streamlining processes from task assignments to issue resolution.

To learn more about release wave 2 capabilities for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, visit the release planner.

Transforming ERP with AI

The new release wave harnesses AI, automation, and analytics to help organizations drive greater operational efficiency across finance, supply chain, and operations—capabilities that enhance visibility, automate processes, extend coverage, and deliver a more integrated experience across departments.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance include the general availability of extended planning and analysis, which brings together operational and financial planning to continuously plan, act, and analyze. In addition, the general availability of business performance analytics streamlines financial reporting by centralizing data from multiple business processes and in an easy-to-use interface.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management include improvements in demand planning, as well as procure-to-pay processes. Copilot will now suggest actions that can help purchasing agents make better decisions in response to new and updated information that affects open purchase orders.

At the launch event, Georg Glantschnig, Vice President, AI ERP, showcased how Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland is improving its demand planning accuracy by using AI. These new features have greatly enhanced its capacity to serve more customers by precisely planning food requirements, thereby reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability through more efficient facility operations. Additionally, the process of fulfilling purchase orders has also seen a remarkable enhancement, thanks to Copilot.

We also demonstrated how New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider, Spark NZ, is transforming its finance and supply chain operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365. It can now automate many of its financial processes—including vendor invoice processing, automatic revaluation of foreign currency transactions, transaction reconciliation, billing, and complex tax calculations. Human resources can also streamline processes, from hiring to self-service vacation time requests and tracking.

See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, and Human Resources.

Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Copilot you can use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.

The new release wave introduces a variety of solutions to help marketers and sales professionals use Copilot to deepen their understanding of their target customer base, streamline engagement processes, and push the boundaries in crafting exceptional customer experiences. 

In the closing keynote session, Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience, demonstrated how Kodak Alaris, a global technology company, effectively used Copilot within Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights. Taking advantage of the new AI capabilities, it tapped into previously hidden data to target its customer base, unlocking capabilities that were once out of reach. Using Copilot, it was able to create unique personalized content to keep customers informed about its services and effortlessly establish new levels of productivity and customer connection, attracting new businesses like never before.

For more details, review the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform

Copilot in Power Platform ushers in a new era of AI-assisted low-code development. Copilot features in release wave 2 make it even easier to quickly create solutions.

At the launch event, Sangya Singh, Vice President, Power Pages, showcased how Copilot plays a vital role in democratizing development, enabling a broader audience—both citizen and professional developers—to create innovative solutions using natural language.

Through the lens of Suffolk, one of America’s largest construction companies, we demonstrated how Microsoft Power Automate helped them streamline critical material request processes, enabling teams to use Copilot in Power Automate to build flows by describing what they need.

We also showcased how Microsoft Power Apps can help Suffolk facilitate efficient coordination of construction status updates, and how the generative answers capability in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents can search industry resources for answers, reducing manual research. We also demonstrated how Microsoft Power Pages improves collaboration with multiple partners on construction projects, and how Microsoft Power BI can help Suffolk visualize safety data at construction sites across the globe, highlighting the trends, causes, and outcomes of incidents and near misses so that preventative actions can be easily identified and implemented.

In addition to enhancing daily business operations, Copilot within Microsoft Power Platform has significantly improved the governance and administrative experience, expediting the development of these applications.

Visit the Microsoft Power Platform release planner for more details.

Tune in to the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event 

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in live or on-demand for a concise overview of the release wave.

Watch now

Watch the launch event on-demand for in-depth insights and demonstrations of the new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You can also delve into several deep-dive presentations on topics including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, responsible AI practices, and a fireside chat that explores the latest features in this release wave.

Don’t forget to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to stay informed about what’s new and on the horizon.

We also invite you to learn more about the latest AI innovation at Microsoft Ignite 2023, taking place in Seattle from November 14 through November 17, 2023, with online sessions available live and on-demand on November 15 and November 16. Register today.

The post Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event introduces wave of new AI-powered capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

AI is ready to support work—the question is: What will your business do with it?

Join us at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on October 25 and explore how to create an AI-powered business that helps people and teams be more productive, solve problems quickly, and focus more energy on building revenue.

This will mark our tenth Business Applications Launch Event—a milestone in our commitment to business app innovation, our customers, and our partners. But we’re just getting started. To see what’s next—and what it means for your organization—you’ll hear directly from Microsoft leaders about their vision for AI, customer service, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and low-code solutions.

Register for a glimpse at the future of business AI, with thought leaders and Dynamics 365 experts guiding you. Be first to see the latest AI advancements in action, including:

• The latest AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales that provides relevant recommendations, summarizes data, retrieves information, and performs actions within the flow of work.
• Advanced Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service that streamline agents’ workspaces, let them see transcripts of live chats and voice calls in their inboxes, and allow them to respond to customers quickly with the right information.
• New Microsoft Sales Copilot features that help compose emails, update customer relationship management (CRM) records, recap meetings, and offer real-time tips to help sales teams close more deals.
• Enhanced automation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance to help handle accounts payable and bank statements, complex tax scenarios, and e-invoicing requirements in more markets.
• New Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to help marketers quickly create memorable customer experiences using whole new levels of personalization for emails, images, and layouts.

Plus, learn about updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources—all ready to help your employees be more productive, build customer loyalty, and drive meaningful growth. You’ll also hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about what’s driving innovation today. Then catch some of the newest AI capabilities in action, with demos led by the people behind the 2023 release wave 2, offering expert guidance on how these updates will help you:

• Improve insights, save time, and fuel creativity with the latest AI-powered solutions.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating work and avoid repetitive tasks with automation.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization using modern, AI-enhanced collaboration tools.

Insights on putting AI to work for you

The Business Applications Launch Event is more than our chance to showcase hundreds of new features and updates. It’s also a great opportunity for you to learn expert tips on how to apply these new technologies to some of your business’ biggest challenges. And if you have questions about new features, the role of AI at work, the evolution of copilots, or what’s ahead for business apps, get them answered by experts—we’ll be hosting a live Q&A chat at the end of the event, so be sure to stick around.

It’s been inspiring to see all the new features that the Dynamics 365 team has been working on, and we’re looking forward to celebrating 10 events’ worth of advancing business applications ahead.

Business Applications Launch Event

Explore how to create an AI-powered business.

Register now

We hope you’ll join us.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

 9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

The post Discover new AI for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at our tenth Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.

Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.

Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.

With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.

Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.

Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.

Helping to ensure our customers’ success

Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.

MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Microsoft Sales Copilot

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

__________________________________________________________________________

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Six months ago, we introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first AI Copilot natively built for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Since then, more than 63,000 organizations have experienced Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform first-hand, empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways to improve experiences across the customer journey.

Copilot is designed to help people do their very best work—and we’re seeing real value to support this vision. Today, I’m excited to share the most widely used scenarios and performance metrics from employees at Microsoft and leading organizations using Copilot capabilities across the customer journey. These stories and insights showcase what’s possible when employees are assisted by AI in the flow of work—helping them to boost productivity, perform tasks more efficiently, and focus on what matters most.

Transforming customer experience in the age of AI

Sellers, service agents, and marketers share a common goal: developing exceptional customer experiences that ultimately impact the bottom line. In July, we introduced the next wave of Copilot and AI capabilities to deliver connected customer experiences—from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, all the way through to the customer interactions in Outlook and Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Sales Copilot. With Dynamics 365 Copilot and Microsoft Sales Copilot, marketers can use everyday language to create relevant and targeted campaigns and brainstorm creative copy; sellers can move from one customer call and email to the next with relevant context on the opportunity at their fingertips; and service agents can become super agents with the help of AI to serve up relevant information to close customer cases more quickly.

Assisted by Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft Support team resolves more cases faster, with less effort

At Microsoft, we’re also leading our own AI-first transformation and, since April, have been using Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service within our Customer Service and Support (CSS) team—one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Today, we can share how Copilot has impacted the way agents work to resolve support cases, and the impact on their efficiency and productivity.

Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Economist, in partnership with the Dynamics 365 product group, evaluated how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service has impacted agent productivity since April. The initial results shared here reflect those of 11.5K agents, with 6.5K agents who used Copilot and the control group of 5K agents who did not use Copilot.

The findings demonstrate how Copilot can support agents of all experience levels in their workflows to increase efficiency and quality of customer engagements. Key results included:

• Expedited agent onboarding. High turnover rates are common for service teams across industries, placing a burden on organizations to onboard new agents to be productive quickly. Copilot has been particularly effective in helping newer agents who don’t have years of experience or institutional experience get up to speed and find relevant information more quickly, the study found. Specifically, for low-severity chat cases in one area of our commercial support business, we observed a 12 percent reduction in average handle time—the time actively spent on resolving a customer case.
• More cases resolved faster—without peer assistance. In the most productive scenario, the study found that in one support business, 10 percent of cases that normally require collaboration with peers were resolved independently. This means fewer customers had to experience being put on hold.

Direct feedback from Microsoft Support agents reveals how Copilot improves interactions with customers:

• “Just wanted to share my gratitude to Copilot as a person who always struggles to wrap up wording before sharing with the customer—amazing time and pain saver for me!”
• “[A] customer switched language mid-chat from English to Spanish. Copilot enabled me to continue to solve the problem regardless of the language shift.”
• “I used Copilot to help a customer and got CSAT [customer satisfaction score] 5 out of 5. Their feedback was, ‘Very informative and to the point.’”

While the study captures just the first few months of AI-assisted service within the Microsoft Support organization, the results should encourage other organizations looking to optimize service operations with AI. The findings offer a glimpse of efficiencies and productivity gains that other organizations might experience when using Copilot. Read more details about the Microsoft Support team’s experience with Copilot on Microsoft Source. For the full story and video testimonial about the team’s transformation journey, check out the case study.  

In addition to performance metrics, Microsoft employees provide feedback to the development team, helping to ensure every new capability provides the best possible benefit for users. This step is crucial as we roll out new features across Dynamics 365 Copilot—including a feature available today. Copilot summarization, now generally available, helps agents to quickly review the details of a case without sifting through notes, chat transcripts, and emails. This feature generates automatic conversation summaries, helping service agents to quickly understand highlights of a case—such as key customer problems and steps that agents took to resolve the case.

The Copilot summarization feature joins a host of upcoming Copilot capabilities for service teams, from the call center to field service professionals. View the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service for details. 

Service organizations expect Copilot to help deliver new levels of agent productivity and customer experiences

In addition to the early results from the Microsoft Support team, we’re hearing directly from leading organizations getting an early start with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Prada Group, a global leader in luxury brands, is using Copilot to improve experiences for its discerning customers. “We’re excited to be one of the early adopters of the new Dynamics 365 Copilot AI tool,” shared Francesco De Giampaulis, Global Client Service & e-Commerce Payment Gateways and Anti-Fraud Manager, Prada Group. “By integrating it with our Knowledge Base and other internal sources, Copilot will assist our Client Service Advisors speeding up the onboarding process, offering a fast and smooth assistance to our customers, saving time searching for answers and focusing on providing a great experience, including suggestions for the right product or look.”

One of the leading investment management and advisory services, Vanguard Group, shared its initial experiences with Copilot. “Vanguard is utilizing Dynamics 365 Customer Service to support its agents in client service and knowledge management scenarios, as well as a custom bot to manage customer inquiries via its website,” explained Grant Pharez, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Specialist at Vanguard. “We are seeing promising results in testing the generative AI capabilities in these applications to help our customer care teams and self-service customer applications deliver exceptional service.”

Sellers reach new levels of productivity with Microsoft Sales Copilot

Concurrent to the Microsoft Support team’s experience, Microsoft deployed Microsoft Sales Copilot (previously Viva Sales) to 10,000 sellers within its sales organization. Early results show that 85 percent of surveyed sellers report completing one or more tasks faster, and 70 percent claim that Microsoft Sales Copilot helps them improve productivity.

Organizations like Securitas, a leading provider of custom security and guarding solutions, are noting the ability for sellers to focus time on what matters most. “Opportunity summary in Microsoft Sales Copilot is a huge and important leap in our direction to save more time for our sales personnel,” said Philip Eklund, Vice President, Client Engagement Services, Securitas. “With this capability in the hands of our sellers, they can spend more time equipping organizations with best-in-class security solutions to help make our world a safer place.”

Sellers using Microsoft Sales Copilot benefit from AI capabilities that help streamline the workday. Features slated for general availability in September and October include AI-generated preparation notes for customer conversations and opportunity and lead summaries. In addition, Microsoft Sales Copilot improves teamwork and knowledge sharing, providing sellers with collaboration spaces in Teams that integrate with CRM data and contact cards that surface CRM records directly in Microsoft 365 apps. View the release notes for Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot for details. Get the e-book, “The AI Advantage: Driving Sales Performance with Next-Generation Tools”, which details how AI supports sales teams throughout the day. 

Marketers surface deeper insights, optimize customer journeys with Copilot

Like sales and service professionals, marketing teams using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights report tangible business benefits. TTEC Digital, a global customer experience (CX) technology and services company and Microsoft Gold Partner, shared how Copilot democratizes marketing tasks. According to Karl Phenix, VP at TTEC Digital, “Copilot in Customer Insights makes marketing employees more comfortable in doing complex tasks such as segmentation, which previously required specialists such as data scientists.” Karl added that “Copilot frees up time by generating emails in minutes, so marketing employees can do more to drive sales activities and accelerate the pipeline.”

Copilot features now generally available help marketers to deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience. Marketers can craft email content by prompting Copilot to curate content, change the tone and voice, or adjust the length of the copy. Available in preview, marketers can also create customer journeys simply by describing actions at each step, such as: “When a contact registers for an event, send a thank you email.” In fact, 59 percent of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers* have used Copilot when creating segments and 36 percent of customers used Copilot to ask questions to uncover customer and business insights. View the release notes for more details.

Start transforming customer experiences with Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is a complete suite of CRM and ERP applications that helps you manage your businesses across sales, marketing, service, finance, and supply chain.

Dynamics 365 Copilot is the world’s first AI copilot integrated into CRM and ERP applications in the cloud. Unlike other solutions, generative AI features are included in Dynamics 365 subscriptions for enterprise customers at no additional charge.

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 applications and get started today with a free 30-day trial.

View the Dynamics 365 licensing guide to choose options that suit your business, and contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

If you are a Dynamics 365 customer, use Copilot capabilities today. Visit the Dynamics 365 release planner to view features coming soon and available to try now.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.

Read how

*Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers that have access to copilot capabilities, US only, based on telemetry data.

The post From Microsoft to global brands, Dynamics 365 Copilot is helping transform customer experiences across service, sales, and marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This post is authored by Gerry Murray, Marketing and Sales Technology Research Director, IDC; and coauthored by Carlena Neely, Product Marketing Manager, Business Applications, Microsoft.

Dynamics 365 AI

Learn about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Sales Copilot.

Read more here

Delving into the realm of customer-centric strategies, IDC analyst Gerry Murray casts a visionary light on the transformative influence of generative AI (Gen AI) on sales and service. Murray’s perspective resonates powerfully with the groundbreaking nature of Gen AI, which is reshaping customer interactions into a new era of efficiency and effectiveness.

Gen AI isn’t just another technology; it’s a strategic leap that orchestrates seamless data and workflows across marketing, sales, and service touchpoints. Gerry Murray emphasizes its potential to eliminate mundane tasks, such as drafting emails and preparing for meetings, while providing real-time support during crucial interactions. It is also extremely exciting to have covered the addition of Microsoft Sales Copilot, providing a more streamlined and AI-powered selling experience.

The true potential of Gen AI infused in tools such as Microsoft Sales Copilot unfolds when it seamlessly integrates with other applications such as CRM systems, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, presenting a harmony that minimizes risks while maximizing benefits. This strategic synergy aligns with industry best practices and fosters an environment of innovation.

Gen AI transcends the realm of ordinary tools; it’s an enabler propelling business toward an era of seamless experiences and unparalleled efficiency.

AI-powered customer and seller experiences

Customers have extremely high expectations for a vendor’s ability to personalize everything about their experiences pre- and post-sale. Consumers expect each touchpoint in their journey to be informed and enhanced by all the previous touchpoints. Business buyers have the same expectations, but they take much more work on the part of sellers to fulfill as everything about the B2B sales process is far more complex than B2C. In both cases, the days of relying on customers to continually explain the context of their situation to the next point of contact are over.

To achieve today’s new level of continuity, the data from every touchpoint needs to be available to every other system within brand and regulatory policy. Giving all customer-facing functions equal insights into behaviors such as social sentiment, sales engagement, purchase histories, late payments, product returns, and support consumption can greatly improve business performance across the board. That improvement requires the underlying infrastructure supporting front-office applications to enable the customer’s data to be available to service them wherever they go next, which is a daunting challenge for large enterprises with fragmented data silos.

Generative AI (Gen AI) for front office applications can manage the data and workflow triggers between customer interactions across marketing, sales, and service enabling these employees to be more helpful faster, which in turn raises customer satisfaction, advocacy, and lifetime value.

Generative AI for sales

AI-powered role-based assistants can help sales reps increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction so they can close more deals. Gen AI can be present in the tools sellers use daily such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems. AI alleviates the tedium and time sinks of endless click loops through menus, drop downs, pick lists, and check boxes. The impact on employee experience will be significant as AI will enable sellers to:

• Get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes.
• Create contextual emails that utilize customer CRM data to pull in product, customer, and opportunity information.
• Prepare for customer meetings with a summary view including account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news, and more.
• Get real-time tips and suggested answers during video meetings prompted by competitor or brand mentions by the customers to stay ready to handle objections.

Augmenting the front office with insight

But AI in and of itself is not enough, as it requires a great deal of data. To help organizations increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalized customer journeys, data infrastructure must offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution and continue investments into real-time marketing.

The most effective way to optimize the benefits of AI and minimize the risks at the same time is to put AI in the context of other applications. This approach makes AI effective at completing repetitive tasks for customer-facing employees in marketing, sales, commerce, merchandising, point of sale, customer service and support, call center, loyalty, and so forth, all functions in which decision quality and cycle time are essential to customer satisfaction. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot can eliminate repetitive tasks such as:

• Drafting messages and project plans.
• Scheduling and summarizing sales calls.
• Creating, testing, and fine-tuning audience segments.
• Matching brand guidelines for emails, forms, and event registration pages using natural language to deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience.
• Orchestrating customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, so customer actions can be responded to appropriately and quickly, generating sales leads or increasing customer satisfaction.

AI significantly impacts customer-facing employees, improving their experience and enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks. It accelerates decision-making, improves productivity, and enhances the coordination of interactions with customers across various touchpoints.

Enhancing business efficiency

Gen AI is new and evolving at warp speed. IDC expects there to be a great deal of innovation in terms of future capabilities and a wide range of use cases across multiple front-office functions. Examples of how Gen AI can enhance work processes for sales and marketing include:

• Additional sales use cases for Gen AI could include request for proposal (RFP) creation and response, upselling recommendations, price optimization, contract generation and review, account planning, territory optimization, and more.
• In marketing, Gen AI can describe their customer segment in their own words to create a target segment with the query assist feature. Marketers can also use Gen AI to get inspiration for email campaign content based on a simple request. Gen AI can make suggestions based on key topics entered by the marketer and the organization’s existing marketing emails, as well as from a range of internet sources to increase the relevance of generated ideas. Additional use cases could include fine-tuned segmentation, send time optimization, content generation, testing and optimization, attribution, media mix modeling, and more.

IDC conclusion

Gen AI is one of the most significant technological advances of the last decade, it is as much of a quantum leap as the graphical user interface, the Internet, and smartphones. Gen AI is a major advancement for line-of-business people who can now explain what they want to do to an AI assistant instead of having to learn how to do it in a graphical user interface (GUI) that might involve hundreds of mouse clicks on menu calls, dialog boxes, drop downs, radio buttons, application switching, and so forth.

Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Sales Copilot on the Dynamics 365 AI webpage.

The post IDC shares how generative AI transforms business processes within marketing, sales, and service  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.