This post was co-authored by Michael Mendoza, Director of Service Transformation, Hitachi Solutions.

The era of AI came upon us quickly, and many business leaders are scrambling to determine AI strategies that provide the best way forward for their employees and customers alike. The 2024 Microsoft Work Trend Index shows that 79% of leaders agree that their company needs to adopt AI to stay competitive; however, 60% of leaders worry that their organization lacks a plan and a vision for implementing AI.¹

Many leaders in service organizations see AI as a boon for providing capabilities that can help them improve operations and serve customers better. After all, these days, high service quality is absolutely critical to driving greater revenue and customer satisfaction. But having a vision for AI and implementing that vision are two different things. Service leaders want to implement AI solutions in the most impactful way possible to ensure that service agents and field technicians alike feel confident using the solutions to help them be more productive throughout the day. And they also want to ensure that customers reap the benefits of these AI solutions as well through more positive and efficient interactions with agents and technicians and faster resolution times.

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The promise of AI for field service organizations

Enabling quick, first-time resolution of customer issues in the field is critical to ensuring the efficiency of service operations and providing the best possible experience for customers, to help build loyalty and grow revenue. Arming field technicians with intuitive, AI-powered solutions that combine capabilities such as workflow automation, scheduling algorithms, and mobility can significantly enhance service outcomes. Research shows that high performing field service organizations have been early to embrace AI and automation to help improve job performance—and 93% of mobile workers in high performing organizations also report job satisfaction as a significant benefit.²

A key area for modernizing field service and improving operational efficiency is automation. Over 60% of frontline workers like service agents and field technicians struggle with having to do repetitive or menial tasks that take time away from more meaningful work. According to a recent McKinsey study, service organizations have the potential to use AI-powered workflows to help automate tasks that currently take up to 70% of field service employees’ time.³ This means that both agents and technicians can get back time that lets them focus on servicing more customers.

And all of this is good news for business: more than 55% of GDP gains by 2030 are expected to be driven by improved labor productivity powered by AI.⁴ Smart service organizations know that strategic implementation of AI-powered solutions helps agents and technicians find information and experts, personalize service, and automate mundane tasks. So the question is: Where to begin?

Preparing field service for AI

The benefits of AI—improved service, increased efficiencies, and deeper business intelligence—to name a few—are clearly compelling. But successfully implementing AI solutions and making them part of the organization’s work culture requires careful planning and certain key steps.

We’ve identified five critical steps to help field service organizations prepare for implementing AI solutions in a way that benefits employees and customers alike.

Step 1: Focus on a framework for capturing and proving business value

Proving business value is absolutely critical to the success of any AI strategy. Field service leaders must identify their overall goals for adopting AI solutions, ensuring they are relevant and aligning them with the organization’s overall priorities for the business. They must consider the specific goals, whether they include optimizing processes for faster service resolution, improving customer experience by enhancing key customer touchpoints, or increasing overall revenue by servicing more customers. Then, they can identify their key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with these goals, such as resolution rates, customer satisfaction scores, or revenue goals.

Step 2: Evaluate the use cases for AI applicability

Once the high-level objectives are clear, field service leaders should take a closer look at daily operations to understand where AI solutions can most help them improve. For example: Do service agents waste a lot of time responding to and managing customer email, or searching for customers’ service history? What processes are they using to schedule field technicians? Do they need help automating scheduling and filling gaps for service? In the field, do technicians need better access to service manuals or technical experts that can help them resolve issues quickly?

Identifying these use cases can help field service leaders understand which areas could benefit from AI-powered solutions most quickly to gain quick wins, and which AI use cases might take more time and training to implement.

Step 3: Enable innovation and collaboration early on

The whole idea behind adopting AI-powered solutions for field service is to help break down information and communication siloes and improve processes to increase efficiency and keep customers happy. The right AI tools provide clear visibility into processes, surface experts and other critical contacts, and enable collaboration to resolve customer issues—all within the flow of work.

Step 4: Design for iteration, feedback, and agility

Empowering field service organizations with AI-powered, low-code solutions provides the opportunity for field service teams to develop and test new apps and processes quickly. This keeps the service organization agile and helps it do a better job of both meeting the demands of the business and improving customer experience. For example, the ability to tweak a new automated scheduling process based on real-time feedback from field technicians could show immediate benefit in helping technicians reach more customers and resolve more issues each day.

Step 5: Ensure training and enablement to drive adoption

While resistance to change can sometimes be a barrier, the latest Microsoft Work Trend Index shows that when it comes to AI, employees are ahead of employers when it comes to being ready. However, even the most exciting technologies can end up on the shelf—so to speak—once the novelty has worn off. That’s why field service leaders need a clear plan for driving adoption and training for AI solutions. Selecting an AI solution provider that provides training resources, along with developing internal champions within the field service organization, can help employees feel more confident about when and how to use AI solutions in their daily work.

Making the AI vision a reality

AI has the power to drive new levels of productivity and efficiency in field service, so it’s critical to take the right steps to ensure your organization has the most effective approach to adopting—and gaining the most value from—AI solutions. If you want to learn more about how to turn your AI vision into a reality, register for our upcoming webinar. 

Sources:

1 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part, May 2024

2 ZDNET, AI improves field service quality and customer experience, January 2023

3 McKinsey Digital, The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, June 2023

4 PwC, Sizing the prize: What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise?

The post 5 steps for becoming AI-ready in field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This April at Hannover Messe, the world’s leading industrial trade fair, organizations across engineering, digital technologies, energy, and more will gather to demonstrate solutions for high-performance, sustainable industries. Microsoft is honored to attend this year’s event to showcase how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers: 

• Modernize service operations with AI to close work orders faster.
• Deliver end-to-end personalization to customers and improve efficiency.
• Increase visibility into your product genealogy across steps in the supply chain.

Modernize service operations with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service  

New Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enhance data insights, boost productivity and deliver more customization for field service managers. These capabilities are generally available today.

Managers can now interact with Copilot to find pertinent information about work orders, prompting Copilot using natural language for details and insights, right from the Dynamics 365 Field Service web app. By simplifying data retrieval and minimizing time spent searching for information, managers can boost the efficiency of work order processes.

In addition, Copilot can provide work order summaries, reducing time spent reading through lengthy work orders to quickly get an overview and understanding of key points of the work to be done. Organizations now have more control to include specific data in the summaries for their users, which can lead to more useful and actionable summaries.

To help ensure smooth communication flows when using the Dynamics 365 Field Service Outlook add-in, field service managers can ask Copilot to compose clear and concise email content recapping details of scheduled work orders, which can then be edited or further customized before sending. And with the Dynamics 365 Field Service plugin for Copilot, field service managers and technicians can find key information about work orders and Dataverse records from within a Microsoft Teams chat using natural language. Starting today, technicians can also ask Copilot to search through lengthy product manuals to find answers to help resolve product issues faster. 

Also starting today, technicians can easily launch a Dynamics 365 Remote Assist call natively within Microsoft Teams mobile to increase first-time fix rates. Access to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is available with Dynamics 365 Field Service, at no additional cost, and licensed customers can try out the mixed reality tools available in preview starting today within their Teams mobile app for iOS. 

Dynamics 365 Field Service users with the Field Service app in Teams can now share links to work orders that automatically expand to provide key details. This link unfurling capability eliminates the need for technicians to switch between apps. Visit Modernize Service Operations with AI booth at the Hannover Messe expo, Hall 17, Stand G06 to discover new ways to transform your service operations with generative AI and mixed reality.

Deliver end-to-end personalization to customers and improve efficiency 

At Hannover Messe, we’ll highlight the end-to-end customer experience for manufacturing teams. At our booth and across multiple sessions, we’ll showcase how manufacturing teams across sales, service, and marketing can leverage the power of Copilot and Dynamics 365 to enhance their customer interactions and deliver personalization at scale by refining internal workflows.

Harnessing the end-to-end, unified platform of Dynamics 365 across the teams enables better visibility and deeper personalization. A prime example is Sonepar, a leading global electrical distributor. They’re now leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.

“With this platform, we are able to transfer data regarding customer needs and requests between teams, measure the service provided to our customers and the time taken to resolve problems”.

Denis Ravel, CRM Director, Sonepar

Learn more about their recent transformation and see how Dynamics 365 helped to empower a new standard of excellence at Sonepar.  

Improve visibility into product genealogy with traceability 

Today, we’re announcing the upcoming preview of traceability for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Traceability allows you to increase visibility into product genealogy through the different steps of the supply chain. You can track events and attributes throughout supply chain processes, and query and analyze the data with an intuitive interface. This capability supports you in meeting industry-specific regulatory requirements, tracking the achievement of sustainability and ethical supply chain goals, and gaining deeper insights into how supply chain events impact product quality and customer satisfaction.  

Traceability is designed to work seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, using the data already tracked in Dynamics 365. This removes the need to purchase or integrate a separate traceability solution, which can be costly and complex. Now, you can benefit from the simplicity and performance of using the built-in capabilities. Check out traceability at Demo L in the Microsoft booth at Hannover Messe.  

Join us at Hannover Messe 

Visit us at the Hannover Messe expo, Hall 17, Stand G06, to explore demos of new capabilities announced today, and learn about our end-to-end, AI-powered solutions for manufacturers across industries.

Hannover Messe 2024

Join is at the world’s leading industrial trade fair.

Visit us at the expo

The post Microsoft unveils AI features for manufacturers at Hannover Messe 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we launched the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a rollout of new features and enhanced capabilities slated for release between April and September 2024. These updates include new Microsoft Copilot capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform—as well as role-based extensions of Copilot for Microsoft 365—that transform business processes with natural language processing, AI-generated insights, and assistance with time-consuming tasks.

This morning’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, available to view on-demand, includes highlights and demonstrations of features from the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Lenovo, Sonepar, Ford, Omnicom Group, and G&J Pepsi are using these capabilities in transformative ways.  

Extend Microsoft 365 with role-specific Copilot capabilities

The central theme across this release wave is how, across the business and productivity applications organizations depend on, Copilot is helping to better empower employees, improve business processes, and engage customers. In fact, 68% of surveyed Copilot users told us that it helps them jumpstart their creative process, and 70% said Copilot made them more productive so that they could do their job faster and easier.¹

Since each role is unique, we have extended Copilot for Microsoft 365 even further to tailor Copilot experiences for specific business functions. This includes Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Service and the recently announced Microsoft Copilot for Finance—all integrated with the apps and data you use every day so that you can spend less time searching for data and more time engaging with customers and driving a strategic agenda for your organization.

Underpinning these Copilot extensions is Microsoft Copilot Studio, which makes it easy to customize and build your own customer and internal-facing copilots using your data and workflows. We are excited to dive deeper into Copilot this release wave and help you use it to transform your business.  

Business Applications Launch Event

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Watch here

Transforming customer and field service with generative AI 

Release wave 1 introduces new Copilot capabilities to help customer service agents and frontline workers boost efficiency, reduce training costs, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Copilot for Service—which infuses generative AI into your existing contact center and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—include Copilot-drafted knowledge articles to streamline the knowledge creation process, as well as proactive Copilot responses for conversations with customers. 

At the launch event, we shared how Lenovo is integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Service, third-party solutions, and custom bots to scale its innovative service delivery solution, Premier Support Suite for PC devices. Thousands of agents can now provide omnichannel support to customers in 200 regions and in more than 40 languages globally.   

We also spotlight how G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler in the U.S., has reduced operating costs by 6.6% and increased revenue by 8% with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Power Platform. They expect Copilot to further streamline work order management and enhance their best-in-class service by giving the field service teams access to a complete picture of their accounts in real time.   

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot for Service, and Dynamics 365 Field Service.  

The future of enterprise resource planning (ERP)

ERP is going through a once-in-a-generation transformation. For decades, employees across the globe have manually completed a significant amount of ERP processes daily to keep their companies running. Microsoft is pioneering a new vision for ERP—a world where ERP solutions powered by AI operate more independently, continually adjusting to evolving circumstances, involving users when necessary, and opening new possibilities for businesses.  

At the launch event, we spotlighted how Omnicom Group, a global leader in marketing communications, envisions leveraging Dynamics 365 for a new, autonomous ERP model that will help it to accelerate growth, become more efficient, and power its ability to innovate. They can use the new Copilot to optimize their strategic decision-making and transform their operational processes, such as prompting Copilot to identify opportunities for growth expansion and gauge the performance of initiatives.  

We also introduced new Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that help small and medium businesses to automate processes and complete tasks faster. A new Copilot chat pane allows users to quickly find and go to data, reveal insights, and get help with tasks. Users can prompt Copilot to create sales lines, match e-invoices with purchase orders, answer questions about data analyses, help with repetitive tasks, and more.  

Other updates include sustainability tracking, the ability to connect Business Central with Shopify B2B (business-to-business), and developer tools for Copilot.  

Explore the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Copilot for Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.  

Accelerate development with Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform is the rapid modernization platform of choice of hundreds of thousands of organizations, providing AI-first, low-code tools to build enterprise-wide solutions and automations. Copilot is seamlessly integrated across Microsoft Power Platform, empowering you to create applications, automations, and analytics through simple, natural language and conversational interactions.  

At the launch event, we demonstrate how Ford is leveraging Copilot to produce connected services to enhance the driving experience. Like Ford, organizations can take advantage of new Copilot capabilities in this release wave to transform workflows. Microsoft Power Automate introduces new ways to create cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining using natural language prompts. Microsoft Power Apps accelerates app development with enhanced user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. Microsoft Copilot Studio enables organizations to build custom copilots, with new ways to build custom prompts and generative actions, along with access to OpenAI’s custom GPTs and AI Builder models for extended scenarios.   

Explore the release plans for Power Apps, Microsoft Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI, and Copilot Studio.  

Deliver more personalized customer experiences  

Buyers expect businesses to cater to their unique set of needs. To do so, marketing and sales teams need a unified understanding of the customer and the ability to orchestrate experiences across marketing, sales, and service.  

Sonepar is leveraging Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to become the first global B2B electrical distributor to provide a fully digitized and synchronized omnichannel experience to every customer. With Copilot alongside sellers, Sonepar can personalize marketing content, improve the quality of leads, and enhance every engagement with customers.  

New Copilot capabilities in release wave 1 provide recommendations, summarize data, retrieve information, and perform actions in context and within the flow of work—so they can stay productive and focus time on engaging customers.  

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event  

We invite you to tune into the launch event on-demand for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.  

Be sure to read the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan in the release planner.  

Sources:

¹ Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report: What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com) 

The post 2024 release wave 1 kicks off with hundreds of AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers, service agents, and supply chain professionals share a common goal: delivering quality goods and services to customers on time, every time. Today, we are announcing new experiences for Microsoft Dynamics 365 that help professionals across business functions to collaboratively solve challenges, streamline workflows, and focus on what matters most—key factors for transformative customer experiences. These new products and capabilities join hundreds of other features launching between April and September as part of the 2024 release wave 1.

Innovations announced include:

• New AI demand planning capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium, a new product offering that’s now available.
• New AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations to improve operational processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences, from sales to service.
• Updates to Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service, extending Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions that integrate with your existing contact center, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and productivity apps.

New AI capabilities with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium

In October 2023, we announced the public preview of new demand planning capabilities for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. These capabilities are available today in a new product offering, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium. The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. By combining insights with streamlined collaboration, planners can have an increased level of trust for a more reliable forecast. Customers like Poloplast, an Austrian pipe manufacturer, is using Dynamics 365 to enhance its demand planning and forecasting.      

“The storage space allocation of our goods has improved because it is now based on statistical methods surfaced in Dynamics 365 … . We have seen a measurable reduction in external storage costs as a result, significantly less than what we used to require.”

Holger Kreisel: Head of Enterprise Resource Planning, Poloplast

With general availability, we are also adding several new capabilities that significantly enhance demand planning. Users can engage with Copilot-provided data insights that bring a new level of intelligence and automation to demand forecasting, and allowing for more accurate and data-driven decision-making. The new product phase-in-phase-out process helps support smoother transitions in product life cycles, minimizing disruptions and optimizing inventory levels. The introduction of row-level security enhances data protection, allowing for granular access control and safeguarding of sensitive information. Moreover, the new cell-level commenting feature complements the existing plan-level commenting, providing users with the flexibility to annotate specific data points. This fosters a more detailed and collaborative planning process, where insights and context can be shared directly within the demand planning workspace.

New AI capabilities help boost seller productivity and close deals faster

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to bring new capabilities that extend customer insights and boost sales through intelligence, collaborative selling, and Copilot-enhanced sales processes. A new proposal summary feature recaps important details within lengthy customer proposals associated with a specific contact, opportunity, lead, or account. The summary briefs sellers on the budget, authority (decision maker), need and timeline gleaned from the proposal or agreement documents, and recommends next best steps.

Additionally, sellers can access enhanced AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations in the flow of work, including in the immersive Copilot homepage, helping them stay on top of active customer email conversations and post-meeting actions to move deals forward faster.

New lead qualification enhancements enable sellers to assign opportunities to the right seller, view an AI-generated lead qualification summary, and create multiple opportunities from a single lead. These features will be available in public preview in mid-May 2024.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales introduces new generative AI capabilities that enable sellers to access sales-specific skills, data, and actions from within Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook and Microsoft Teams. With the new conversation intelligence platform, managers can measure and guide their sellers’ activities without physically shadowing them. Sales managers can use this dashboard to coach sellers to improve their sales interactions, understand customers and analyze market trends, and get insights which will help you build a sales strategy. You can download the public preview here, available since March 15.

Activity orchestration across various accounts and activities is one of the biggest challenges for sellers. When sellers work in a collaboration space in Teams, Copilot will monitor conversations and suggest tasks based on the selling team’s activities. Once accepted, the tasks are automatically generated with assigned owners. Sellers can add a tab in the collaboration space to access and view the status of tasks assigned to team members. This capability will be generally available in mid-April 2024.

New AI innovations continue to boost agent productivity and deliver personalized experiences

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to deliver innovations that empower agents to accelerate case resolution and provide exceptional customer experiences. Agents can now get a succinct overview of the most recent and significant updates related to any record in the Dynamics 365 timeline, and swiftly catch up in just a single click. Copilot generates the streamlined timeline highlights, summarizing key developments from various activities, such as those in emails, notes, and conversations, enhancing agent productivity by minimizing unnecessary clicks and lengthy scrolling. This helps agents to have faster and clearer interactions with customers to meet their expectations.

Agents can also conveniently use Copilot inline right within the email editor, in addition to the side panel, to generate contextual draft email responses. They can refine their existing drafts with follow-up custom prompts and single-clicks, using Copilot without requiring any knowledge articles. Together, these enhancements make navigation in the workspace more flexible and deliver an easier email authoring experience. The capabilities will be generally available in North America this month with a subsequent planned rollout for other regions.

In addition to currently supported knowledge sources such as Microsoft SharePoint, Copilot can now be extended to access customer, product or case data in Microsoft Dataverse, with prompt plug-in support. Agents can get a unified experience using these plug-ins, as they no longer need to switch to other tabs and tools to connect to information residing in Microsoft Dataverse. Agents save time as well, as Copilot can automatically identify the right prompt plug-in needed, based on the question being asked and through a deep understanding of the intent implied by the question. Available in public preview later this month, support for prompt plug-ins created in Microsoft Copilot Studio helps agents deliver faster resolution and increased customer satisfaction.

AI innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel capabilities also significantly uplevel self-service automation, redirecting more cases that would be typically escalated to an agent. Customers can engage with a robust conversational AI driven experience, with IVR enhancements that now include fine-tuning speech for optimized authoring, improved speech recognition accuracy, and an overall better customer experience when dealing with interrupts, latencies, and information collection.

Additionally, Copilot for Service features previously available in preview status will reach general availability later this month. These include the ability to use Copilot in Outlook and Teams to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and more. Download the Copilot for Service app to experience Copilot for Service in Teams and Outlook.

In May, we will introduce in preview the ability for agents to ask Copilot for answers to questions about CRM data—such as case, contact, or knowledge details, as well as use Copilot to summarize case details.  

Be sure to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan, in the release planner.

Business Applications Launch Event

Learn about new features and capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Register today

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in to the Business Applications Launch Event this Wednesday, April 10, at 9 AM Pacific Time for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.

The post New Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot innovations for supply chain, sales, and service join the 2024 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The potential for AI at work is practically endless—and understanding how your teams can accomplish more with generative AI is more important than ever. Every day, more companies are turning to AI features to help their employees work more efficiently, provide positive customer experiences faster, and stand out among competitors.  

Join us on Wednesday, April 10, 2024

See what's new at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Register now

Redefine what’s possible with AI 

Join Microsoft product leaders and engineers on April 10, 2024, for an in-depth look at the latest AI features and capabilities in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You’ll learn how advances in AI and Microsoft Copilot can help you connect teams, processes, and data, and respond to changing business needs with greater agility—and see how organizations across several industries already take advantage of the newest AI features to streamline business processes and accelerate low-code development.  

Register now to see key presentations from Microsoft leaders, including:  

• Business Applications Launch Event—2024 release wave 1. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, will provide opening remarks and shed light on the strategy and vision behind new Copilot and core platform capabilities in 2024 release wave 1. 

• Amplifying contact centers and field service operations with AI. Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, will share how Copilot is transforming the customer service landscape, boosting efficiency, reducing training costs, and ultimately delivering exceptional experiences for agents, frontline workers, and customers.  

• Streamline sales and marketing with Copilot. Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing, will discuss how sellers can close more deals by optimizing sales and marketing strategies and increasing productivity. 

That’s just a small sample of what we’ve got planned. You’ll also hear directly from other Microsoft leaders about their vision for AI, customer service, and operations, and get timely tips on how to use these new technologies to take on your business’ toughest challenges. If you have questions about new AI features, how Copilot experiences work, or what’s new in low-code tools, take advantage of the live Q&A chat with Microsoft experts throughout the event. 

Explore new AI features and capabilities for Dynamics 365 

We’re excited to share the latest AI features for Dynamics 365 spanning across end-to-end customer experiences, sales, finance, supply chain, commerce, and other areas. Here are just a few of the new features in 2024 release wave 1: 

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales features include recommended content for documents, insights from past successful deals, and summaries of account details—including customer buying behavior, recent activity, and more.   
• Microsoft Copilot for Sales helps teams deliver more seamless experiences within Microsoft Teams and Outlook. New features include suggested updates to customer relationship management (CRMs) systems as sellers work and suggested responses based on customer questions across platforms. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. New features now make it easier and faster to ingest and manage data, while AI enables quick insights and easier access to analytics. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance includes more autonomous finance features, building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process. This release adds AI-powered experiences to ease setup of financial dimension defaulting. 

See what AI can do for you  

Microsoft customers are already doing amazing things with the new AI features in Dynamics 365, and we can’t wait to inspire you with their stories. Register now and join us to see what’s new in the 2024 release wave 1.   

Microsoft Business Applications launch event  

Wednesday, April 10, 2024  

9:00–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

The post Explore the next wave of AI innovation at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In an industry defined by both growth and disruption, retailers are depending on technology to navigate challenges ranging from shifting purchase habits to supply chain complexities. Next week, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show, Microsoft will demonstrate Dynamics 365 solutions powered by AI to help accelerate retail agility and innovation in the next decade.  

Gain valuable AI insights for your business

Learn more at the National Retail Federation Big Show

Register here

In addition to solutions powered by Microsoft Cloud for Retail, this vision for the future of retail is spotlighted by new Copilot capabilities for Dynamics 365 applications, including:  

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, providing retailers with AI-powered experiences to transform daily marketing workflows. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, providing AI powered guidance for demand planning, streamlining procurement, and enhancing supply chain visibility. 

NRF attendees can learn more about the transformative power of AI across the retail industry by attending two Big Ideas Sessions hosted by Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Global Retail, Consumer Goods, and Gaming Industries, and Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Global Industry Marketing. 

Helping retailers personalize customer engagement 

Retailers often tell us that they’re under pressure to get marketing and customer experience projects and campaigns to market faster and are asked to do more with less. Yet, the processes and tools they use haven’t evolved to meet this demand.  

Deploying a project to market requires various roles or specialists, costly third-party agencies, and siloed applications to review data and create content. Monitoring results for optimization also becomes a timely and tedious task, having to track down the right people with the right application and the right data. These challenges not only hinder a campaign’s time to market and employee productivity, but can also result in a disjointed customer experience.

It’s not just our customers who are feeling the burden of these challenges. The market is feeling it too. For instance, 63% of surveyed retailers said they hope they can improve their marketing with AI in the next 18 to 24 months.¹ In the age of AI, shouldn’t it be easier to get your campaigns to market?  

We are announcing new Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that will transform how marketers manage and maintain projects and campaigns, increasing productivity, efficiency, and speed to market. These new capabilities build on Copilot features introduced in the past year, including, but not limited to, the ability to generate content ideas, query customer data using natural language, and create customer segments and journeys using next-generation AI. 

Marketers can kick-start their marketing project by writing their campaign objective in natural language, or by uploading an existing creative brief. The project board is then generated using the prompt or brief, connected organizational data, and previous campaigns in Customer Insights. The project board streamlines and connects all workflows into one place for building and managing marketing assets. 

“These new Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will enable us to focus our time and energy in the right places—better informing us on optimization priorities without the need to dig into details manually. That alone saves so much time.” 

—Hannah Harper, Leatherman, Digital Marketing Manager 

From the project board, marketers can view the campaign’s target audience and segments, as well as recommendations from Copilot for additional segments that may not have been previously considered. Selecting a suggested audience segment automatically generates a complementary customer journey, saving marketers time while also helping them deliver a personalized customer experience. 

End-to-end customer journeys containing personalized touchpoints, such as promotional emails or event invitations, are generated using Copilot. Through our partnership with Typeface and its enterprise-grade generative AI capabilities, marketers can produce brand-authentic images across assets, supercharging personalized content for greater impact—all from within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Additionally, Typeface helps align content to the organization’s brand guidelines, including themes, fonts, and product images—extracted from a central asset library.

“Every aspect of the enterprise is already being redefined with generative AI, from developer to product to sales experiences. By combining Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Typeface’s powerful storytelling engine, we’re fundamentally reshaping campaign workflows with generative AI by starting with just a goal. This means personalizing content at an unprecedented scale, bridging the gap between content and data, and ushering in a new era of marketing creativity and productivity.”

—Abhay Parasnis, Founder and CEO of Typeface 

This is just the beginning; we will be delivering further content curation, journey testing, and metrics monitoring to optimize campaigns. Our vision is that, together, this new AI-first experience will transform how marketers work by reducing the complexities of end-to-end campaign management and enhancing marketer productivity and ROI.

Learn more about our vision in the video below.

Build a real-time retail supply chain 

In 2024, retail supply chains face countless challenges, from labor shortages and increasing costs to complexities across omnichannel retail experiences. Enterprise AI solutions, now readily available for retailers, can power greater efficiency, productivity, and innovation across the supply chain.  

At Microsoft, we aim to deliver new supply chain innovations powered by Copilot to our customers through our open, flexible, and collaborative Microsoft platform; helping organizations to reduce risk, manage inventory, plan with flexibility, and make quick decisions across the whole supply chain.   

New Copilot capabilities to improve demand planning 

A retailer’s success hinges on having the right inventory at the right place at the right time, and that starts with successful demand planning. We recently announced new demand planning capabilities in Dynamics 365 in November 2023 that uses AI, machine learning, and external signals to predict demand accurately, and now we are enhancing it with Copilot. This will help planners understand how a forecast was generated and help them find patterns and anomalies. 

Copilot will also help them make sense of complex relationships across datasets using natural language interactions, and it will also assist with the routine tasks of making demand review reports, saving the planners time to focus on high-priority activities. 

Some of our customers, including Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland, can use the new demand planning capabilities to make smart predictions from the data and insights.

“The demand planning capabilities in Dynamics 365 are helping us make the right decisions to lower wastage, avoid unnecessary deliveries, and be cybersafe.”

—Neha Batra, Head of Business Solutions, Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland

The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. Planners have an increased level of trust and can rely more on the forecast, knowing how it’s generated. The latest demand planning capabilities help reduce excess inventory and increase working capital for retailers.

New Copilot capabilities to improve productivity and proactively mitigate disruptions  

In November 2023, we also announced new Copilot capabilities in preview for Dynamics 365 that enable supply chain teams to take actions based on insights with conversational help while in the flow of work. This helps increase productivity and improved collaboration among employees across the supply chain and other cross-functional teams to proactively mitigate disruptions and further automate their workflows. See the capabilities in action.  

We also added new Copilot capabilities that will enhance inventory visibility and enable businesses to promise orders with improved accuracy, significantly helping brands elevate their consumers’ buying experience.   

In addition, a new copilot capability that helps to streamline procurement is now generally available. Procurement teams can seamlessly handle the purchase order changes in a scalable and efficient manner and assess the impact of changes downstream to production and distribution before making the right decision.   

Generate product enrichment content for e-commerce sites with Copilot 

Informative, story-rich product content can drive customer engagement and sales on e-commerce sites. Creating that content, however, can be time-consuming and challenging. In October 2023, we launched in preview the ability for business-to-business and business-to-consumer online retailers to use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Commerce to generate enriched product marketing content for their websites. This helps to decrease the time it takes to create compelling marketing content, while increasing productivity and increasing the overall number of online orders.

Visit our Microsoft booth at NRF this year to see these innovations in action.  

Discover the future of retail at NRF 2024 

Learn more about Dynamics 365 solutions for the retail industry and retail solutions introduced at NRF 2024. If you are registered for NRF 2024, we invite you to stop by our booth for demos of our solution and attend the following sessions:  

Retail unlocked: achieve more with Microsoft: Hosted by Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Global Retail, Consumer Goods and Gaming industries, Microsoft  

Sunday, January 14, 2024  | 1:00 – 1:30 PM  Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Join this interactive session to hear about one retailer’s AI journey to date. Hosted by Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Retail, Consumer Goods & Gaming Industries, Shelley Bransten, you’ll also learn about new AI-focused findings from Futurum Research and all new AI capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Retail that will help power your AI transformation.    

Unlocking true customer-centricity: optimizing touchpoints across the shopper journey with AI: Hosted by Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Global Industry Marketing   

Monday, January 15, 2024  | 11:45 – 12:15 PM  EST

Generative AI and large language models have captured the attention of executives across industries. While the technology’s use cases seem endless, smart retailers and brands must identify and prioritize the applications of generative AI that will be most valuable to their organization and partner with organizations who will treat their data with the highest privacy standards. Join us to hear how Microsoft is helping organizations large and small maximize their generative AI opportunities safely and responsibly.   

Unify your data to unlock AI opportunities: Hosted by Satish Thomas, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Industry Clouds   

Tuesday, January 16, 2024 | 1:00 – 1:45 PM EST

Retailers are swimming in data all day, every day. Even with sophisticated legacy technologies and cutting-edge data science, the majority of that data goes uncollected. Insights stay hidden—often in plain sight. But that’s starting to change. AI tools are enabling retailers to understand their customers, merchandising, supply chains, operations, and workforces better than ever before. Join us to hear about the myriad insights that retailers are drawing from newfound and increasingly precise data sources to run leaner, smarter stores.    

¹ AI Adoption in Retail Survey, The Futurum Group, 2024

The post Shaping the future of retail with AI and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Copilot presents an opportunity to reimagine the way we work—turning natural language into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. With AI, organizations can unearth value in the mountain of data across productivity tools like Microsoft 365 and business applications.

To this end, earlier this year, we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365, the world’s first AI copilot natively built for CRM and ERP. Since then, more than 130,000 organizations have experienced copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform firsthand. In fact, a survey revealed that 70 percent of the Copilot users were more productive, 73 percent could complete tasks faster, and 68 percent of users improved the quality of their work.¹

Organizations, however, depend on a range of business applications across roles and functions, from customer relationship management (CRM) systems for marketing, sales, and service roles to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for finance, supply chain, and operations departments. At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing new Microsoft Copilot experiences that empower organizations to unlock value from a multitude of systems of record. In conjunction with these copilot experiences, we are announcing new and updated copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 applications.

Microsoft Ignite 2023

Access recordings of keynotes and sessions, including opportunities to learn about the copilot capabilities announced.

Get on-demand access

Announcements include:

• Updates to Copilot for Dynamics 365 to drive efficiency across the organization, featuring capabilities that help marketing, sales, and field service professionals provide exceptional customer experiences.
• Introduction of Microsoft Copilot for Service and Microsoft Copilot for Sales, the evolution of Sales Copilot, bringing together the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions. Both provide flexibility to integrate with an organization’s existing contact center and CRM systems respectively. 

Together, these capabilities empower organizations to harness secure and enterprise-ready, generative AI experiences, helping employees to perform at their highest potential across every role and function. 

Copilot for Service

Boost productivity in the tools already used each day.

In preview soon

Reimagine ways to drive efficiency across the organization with Copilot for Dynamics 365

We’re introducing new and enhanced copilot capabilities for Dynamics 365 that help marketers, sellers, and field service professionals elevate customer experiences.

The following Copilot updates are in addition to recently-announced copilot and demand planning capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, as well as the 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a six-month rollout of new and enhanced capabilities scheduled for release between October 2023 and March 2024.

Copilot delivers answers and information to field service workers in a chat-based conversation

Field service workers depend on quick access to a variety of customer and technical information precisely at the moment it is needed. A recent survey by Microsoft highlighted that not being able to easily find the information they need ranks in the top five disruptive issues faced by frontline workers in their current day-to-day role.² This can significantly affect key performance indicators such as first-time fix rates, customer satisfaction, and retention.

We’re introducing AI-powered experiences for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, available for preview in December, that enable frontline workers to quickly access information on a job site by asking questions in conversational language, directly within Teams.

We’re also announcing the general availability of AI-assisted work order creation and technician scheduling, and the public preview of financial and inventory data flow between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are available at no additional cost.

Explore the full set of updates to Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Reimagining CRM systems with natural language experiences

The innovation and scale of Copilot have established Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as an innovative leader in sales technology, as recognized by Gartner and Forrester. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales enhances seller productivity and effectiveness in their flow of work, enabling them to automate the sales processes and make informed decisions with AI-powered insights and actions. Copilot features help sellers save time, boost productivity, and eliminate mundane workloads to maintain focus on connecting with customers and closing deals.

We’re announcing new copilot experiences in Dynamics 365 Sales that allow sellers to interact with their data using natural language.  

Now in preview, sellers can use their own words to get contextual insights and recommendations for leads and opportunities.

In addition, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales has a new full-screen view where sellers can use natural language or prebuilt prompts to gain a quick understanding of customers, deals, meetings, forecasts, and more. The feature is now available in Asia and Europe and will be available in North America in December.

Deliver more personalized customer experiences with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

New capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provide a deeper understanding of target customers and segments, helping to hyper-personalize campaign content and improve engagement.

Available for preview in December, sellers can use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to instantly generate a customer profile summary—including demographic, transactional, behavioral, and analytics data—to uncover key insights on customers. The capability is available for organizations that have both Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise or Premium subscriptions.  

We continue to build capabilities that enable a seamless handoff from marketing to sellers. Now in preview, marketers can qualify their leads using metrics such as engagement scores, ensuring marketing and sales teams maximize the opportunity pipeline and improve win rates.  

Adding to our growing ecosystem, we’re announcing a unique partnership with Optimizely. In preview this December, organizations can use the segments and journeys built in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights directly within Optimizely. This enables Optimizely users to build personalized campaigns in real time without writing any code. Through bi-directional integrations, organizations can deliver hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences across web, social, email, and offline channels.

Bring together the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and business insights and actions

Most organizations depend on a range of applications to manage the business, including CRM, ERP, and supply chain management systems. Integrating innovative technology, like generative AI, into these systems can be challenging—especially when security, privacy, and compliance are a top priority.

Responding to this need, we’re introducing a new category of Microsoft Copilot solutions that tap into data from various applications—including Microsoft 365 and third-party systems of record—to bring a new level of efficiency and automation to business functions across the organization. 

Modernize the contact center with Microsoft Copilot for Service

In a recent Microsoft survey, it was revealed that three out of four customer service agents feel less inspired and motivated by their work. With insufficient focus time, over half of them are struggling to deliver exceptional customer service and efficiently address customer issues.² The surveyed agents express confidence that AI can positively impact their performance, as well as provide, analytical insights, including trend and sentiment analysis. 

We’re meeting the needs of service agents with a Microsoft Copilot solution that integrates generative AI capabilities into the tools and processes that they depend on every day. Microsoft Copilot for Service integrates an organization’s trusted knowledge with the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to boost agent productivity in the tools they already use every day, such as Outlook and Teams; providing AI-guided answers and resources personalized for each customer issue and conversation. 

Microsoft Copilot for Service provides the flexibility to integrate with an organization’s existing CRM and contact center systems. Organizations can train Microsoft Copilot for Service using trusted websites, knowledgebase articles, files, and other critical data sources from their existing contact center to unlock generative AI-powered guidance across all of their data. Microsoft Copilot for Service provides out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, and can be extended to other systems through a vast array of more than 1,100 prebuilt and custom connectors.

Copilot for Service can be further customized with Microsoft Copilot Studio, also announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023. With Copilot Studio, service teams can fine-tune copilot experiences by incorporating their own data, logic, and actions tailored for specific scenarios, frequent conversations, or other unique use cases.

Copilot for Service will be available in preview in early December and generally available in early 2024. Pricing is USD50 per user per month. Learn more about Microsoft Copilot for Service.

Unlock sales productivity in the flow of work

Microsoft Copilot for Sales is the evolution of Sales Copilot, used by leading brands including 10,000 sellers within the Microsoft sales team. A recent survey revealed that 83 percent of Microsoft sellers claim that Microsoft Copilot for Sales helps them improve productivity, with sellers saving an average of 90 minutes per week.² Read our ebook on the AI advantage for sellers for details. 

Copilot for Sales brings together the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in seller workflows, using customer data within the CRM system they already use, along with information in documents, email, and chats from Microsoft 365 applications.

The innovations enabled in Copilot for Sales include a newly integrated experience with Microsoft Word and Teams. Sellers can prompt Copilot to create a meeting preparation brief in Word, automatically populated with customer information such as an account and opportunity summary, names and titles of meeting participants, pending tasks, and highlights from recent meetings and email threads. In addition, meeting recaps in Microsoft Teams can surface action items and tasks, key performance indicators (KPIs), and sales keywords mentioned. These experiences help sellers save time and energy, generate innovative ideas, build stronger customer relationships, and ultimately close more deals.

Like Copilot for Service, sellers can customize AI-assisted sales processes with Copilot Studio, bringing tailored experiences informed by their own data, logic, and actions for specific scenarios.

Copilot for Sales² will be available in the first quarter of 2024 for USD50 per user per month.

Learn more at Microsoft Ignite

Register for Microsoft Ignite to access on-demand recordings of keynotes and sessions, including opportunities to learn about the copilot capabilities announced. You have the opportunity to engage with the global community online, regardless of your location, and participate in live discussions at no cost. To get started, we recommend the following sessions: 

• Becoming an AI-powered organization with Microsoft Copilot (keynote, in-person and online)
• Transform customer experience with Dynamics 365 and next-generation AI (breakout, in-person and online)
• Transforming service organizations with generative AI (breakout, in-person and online)
• ERP in the era of AI: A new face of business efficiency and agility (breakout, in-person and online)

In addition, learn more about what’s possible with Copilot for Dynamics 365 and get started on your journey today. 

¹ Microsoft WorkLab, What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work?

² Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index survey

³ Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers will retain rights to capabilities in Sales Copilot. As today’s news demonstrates, copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales will continue to innovate. To get the full value of the new Copilot for Sales, including access to Copilot for Microsoft 365, customers will work with their Microsoft account representative to upgrade.

The post Introducing new Copilot experiences to boost productivity and elevate customer experiences across the organization  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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.

Achieving supply chain excellence today requires orchestrating complex global operations with agility, adapting to rapid and continuous change, and navigating economic headwinds and ongoing disruptions. Yet only 22 percent of companies have a proactive supply chain network, meaning disruptions or shifts in supply or demand can quickly escalate into significant issues.¹ To truly deliver a proactive, resilient supply chain, Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) need a clear digital transformation strategy that builds on top of existing investments in data to uncover new insights. At the same time, CSCOs must enable the adoption of new productivity tools, such as generative AI, to help organizations rethink the status quo.  

At Microsoft, we recently introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot to bring next-generation AI to every line of business. It can help CSCOs solidify the strategic importance of supply chain functions and its value as strategic business partners. That’s why on May 8 through 10 in Orlando, Florida, at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2023, we’re presenting a deep dive into the practical ways organizations can unlock supply chain productivity with a copilot approach to AI.  

Microsoft Supply Chain Center

Sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Supply Chain Center.

Get a free trial

Attendees can also join us at our booth (#443), where we will highlight how supply chain leaders can utilize Microsoft Dynamics 365 to: 

• Embrace AI-enabled risk mitigation to deliver better business outcomes while improving customer and employee experiences. 
• Generate intelligent insights and rapidly act on recommendations with Microsoft Supply Chain Center. 
• Gain agility and deliver world-class fulfillment experiences like accurate available-to-promise (ATP) and direct store delivery (DSD) for direct-to-consumer (DTC) orders. 

Generate intelligent insights

At the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium, attendees will see how the Microsoft Supply Chain Center empowers supply chain professionals to use AI copilots to generate actionable insights to increase productivity, shorten lead times, and improve overall supply chain performance.  

The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform harmonizes data across legacy and new enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain systems to provide real-time data visibility; facilitate actionable insights; predict supply shortages, potential stockouts, or shipment delays; and improve collaboration across teams and suppliers. The end-to-end visibility possible using Copilot in the Microsoft Supply Chain Center allows leaders to proactively manage supply chain events. 

Customers like iFit have leveraged the intelligent insights from Supply Chain Center to reimagine their distribution network, staging products in locations based on customer demand instead of relying on history. In doing so, iFit increased its efficiency from 30 percent to 75 percent in its forward stocking. Before Supply Chain Center, iFit took two weeks to fulfill customer demand far more than the desired two days. 

Embrace AI-enabled risk mitigation

For most supply chains, particularly those crossing international borders and using multiple transportation modes, disruptions that risk diminishing the customer experience occur regularly. Such disruptions place immense pressure on operation teams to assess the situation, coordinate with various stakeholders, and maintain production momentum. Even simple delays, such as bad weather requiring load rerouting, can cause disruptions with ripple effects of up to two weeks and effecting multiple tiers. Production planners may lack integrated systems, resulting in limited visibility of inbound shipment issues until they experience a delay. At that point, planners contact suppliers and may discover factors, such as weather, causing a two-week production delay. 

The planner now has no choice but to push delivery of sales orders out two weeks, giving the sales team and customers little time to pivot and find solutions. The planner may also spend half a day or more manually evaluating purchase orders to understand the impact on operations. Not to mention any time required to adjust production schedules to accommodate the supplier’s updated delivery windows. 

Using Dynamics 365 Copilot to integrate supply chain data and provide critical insights, the planner in the scenario above would receive a real-time alert about weather issues at the supplier’s location. The system would also generate an email listing all purchase orders affected by the production delay, reducing the planner’s workload from hours to minutes. 

Copilot can also send the planner a list of suggestions that could minimize the impact of the disruptions. Now the planner has time to evaluate alternatives to meet delivery requirements and reschedule production jobs. The result is proactive management of the event, increased agility within the supply chain, shorter recovery times, and, most importantly, mitigating the customer impact in a way that preserves customer relationships and bolsters customer satisfaction. 

The above is one practical application of Copilot, but there is considerably more to share. In our recent blog, Applying next-generation AI to the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, you can take a deeper dive into how Dynamics 365 Copilot is transforming laborious processes, improving efficiency and responsiveness, and enabling enterprise supply chains to optimize operational agility, reduce cost, and improve customer experiences.

Gain agility and deliver world-class fulfillment experiences

Northern Tool + Equipment, a manufacturing and omnichannel retailer with more than 130 stores across the United States, serves a customer base that heavily relies on their tools for their livelihood. Accurate delivery times and product reliability are of the utmost importance. However, Northern Tool + Equipment faced significant challenges due to a fragmented supply chain technology infrastructure, resulting in four to seven days lead times for their extensive product catalog of 100,000 items. This, combined with the complexities of shipping large items like generators and air compressors, made optimizing shipping routes for cost and sustainability difficult. 

To overcome these challenges, Northern Tool + Equipment implemented Microsoft Supply Chain Center, an end-to-end supply chain solution that connects disparate systems and harmonizes data across the supply chain. This solution provides a comprehensive understanding of supply and demand, generating insights using AI to uncover patterns and projections based on historical and real-time inventory and order volumes. 

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands like Northern Tool + Equipment face unique challenges in delivering world-class fulfillment experiences to their customers. With an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and reliability, these brands require agile supply chain solutions that can adapt to continuous change and increasing technology clock speed. Microsoft Supply Chain Center enables DTC brands like Northern Tool + Equipment to gain agility and deliver outstanding customer experiences by offering real-time, highly accurate, available-to-promise (ATP) dates for direct store delivery (DSD) and more. 

Learn more about Northern Tool + Equipment’s success in our recent case study.  

See you at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2023 

As global supply chains continue reimagining what is possible by applying emerging technologies like AI and Copilot, Microsoft remains dedicated to enabling CSCOs with the solutions and timely insights they need to excel. We hope you can join us at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2023, where you can attend our session using the registration link and engage with our supply chain professionals at our booth. In the meantime, we invite you to check out our guided tour of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management or reach out to learn more today.  

Practical ways to copilot with AI and unlock productivity 

Location: Northern Hemisphere C, Booth 443 

Date and time: May 9, 2023, 11:30 AM EST  

Register: Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2023 

End notes

¹Zippia, 2022. 18 Stunning supply chain statistics [2023]: facts, figures, and trends.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.