In a previous blog, we discussed how modern, AI-enabled customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems help drive new, more effective ways of working for employees and more satisfying outcomes for the customers they serve in three key ways: by streamlining operations, by empowering more informed and insightful decisions, and by elevating customer and employee experiences.  

In this blog post, we’re going to focus on the third item: elevating customer and employee experiences by showing how AI-enabled CRM solutions help increase productivity and provide unprecedented levels of personalized service across three key business functions: marketing, sales, and customer service. We’ll also provide insights and best practices for how to help employees get the most from AI, including how they can be empowered to create personalized experiences for their customers.  

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Revolutionizing marketing: How AI-enabled CRM software drives personalized experiences and enhance customer engagement 

Marketing is one area where generative AI is already in active use. According to a Forrester survey of CMOs, more than half (56%) of B2C marketing or advertising decision makers have been using generative AI in three key ways:  

• To help employees minimize tedious tasks, allowing for more time to focus on strategically important work. 
• To summarize insights and enable swift action without the need to dig through data manually. 
• To boost the scale of creative output by generating starter ideas along with visuals and copy.¹

AI is particularly capable of delivering personalized experiences in marketing, where AI-enabled CRM platforms can marry customer data to messaging to create memorable moments and impact sales. One example of a company using AI-enabled CRM solutions to generate marketing content is North Carolina-based sports club NC Fusion, which used Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to help its marketers create personalized messaging tailored to its audience segments, increasing the reach of the brand. Using AI-enabled content ideas, descriptions, and summaries has provided significant time savings, and personalizing campaigns has been more effective with Copilot.²  

“For families, we are able to tailor the message they receive. This means a family will only receive messages that apply to their situation, and not a multitude of emails that have no application to their family situation. With AI-assisted content production, our customer engagement has increased from 10% to 30%.”  

Chris Barnhart, Head of IT and Data Systems at NC Fusion

Empowering sales teams: How AI-driven personalization can transform customer interactions and boost revenue 

Another area where personalization can impact an organization’s bottom line is sales, where making authentic connections with customers at the right time is paramount. Few organizations know this better than superyacht brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has used AI to deliver highly personal sales experiences tailored to the wants and needs of its high-value clients. 

“In this market, we have high-wealth customers who are considering very high-value purchases, and we can’t afford any interactions that leave them feeling anything less than special.”

Keith Perfect, Director of Technoloy & Intelligence at Northrop & Johnson 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Copilot provide Northrop & Johnson sales teams with comprehensive and timely data for each client, which helps them deliver personalized conversations at precisely the right time to engage. 

“Clients at this level want to know they are taken care of. And when you must make an impact in minutes, which is all you have with these busy clients, you need to be very attuned to them. Otherwise, it could cost you the sale. So, having a solution at your fingertips that connects the entire journey is huge for our sales team.” 

Daniel Ziriakus, President & Chief Operating Officer at Northrop & Johnson

Sales teams using AI-enabled CRM software also realize significant time savings as salespeople assign more tedious tasks to their AI assistants. In fact, according to new Microsoft research, 79% of Microsoft Copilot for Sales users say it reduces the amount of administrative work they have to do, 67% say it helps them spend more time with customers, and 64% say it allows them to better personalize customer engagements.³  

Transforming customer support: How AI-driven assistants enhance productivity, satisfaction, and retention 

Customer service is still another area where AI-enabled CRM platforms can make an immediate impact. According to a November 2023 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), customer service agents using a generative AI-based conversational assistant were able to increase productivity—specifically measured by the number of issues resolved per hour—by an average of 14%. The effect was even more pronounced with novice and low-skill workers, who experienced productivity increases of 34%. Researchers also found that AI assistance improves customer sentiment and increases employee retention.⁴ 

One company using an AI-enabled CRM solution in customer service is Microsoft. We operate one of the largest customer support teams in the world and process more than 145 million contacts per year. We use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help utilize the full expertise of the engineers on staff and provide better resolution of customer issues across the board.⁵  

“The challenge for every support engineer is to connect with the human being on the other end of the call who has a problem that needs solving. You want to connect with them, but you also need to be able to pull in a great deal of technical information. Copilot provides us the support to offer the customer understanding while also sorting out their technical problems.” 

Ric Todd, Director of Support Strategy at Microsoft

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Bringing AI to your organization  

For leaders looking to roll out AI solutions in their organizations, we have some encouraging news: people new to AI begin recognizing its value quickly. Recent Microsoft research shows it takes a time savings of just 11 minutes per day for most people to see its usefulness (a key factor in getting new work habits to stick). ⁶  

Encouragingly, most respondents report having saved more than 11 minutes. The most efficient among them are saving up to 30 minutes per day—the equivalent of 10 hours per month—and the average person is saving 14 minutes per day for a time savings of almost five hours per month. 

What’s more, the breakthrough moment by which respondents report seeing improvements in productivity (75%), work enjoyment (57%), work-life balance (34%), and the ability to attend fewer meetings (37%) happens within one business quarter—11 weeks.⁷  

While personal productivity gains from Copilot are real and significant, building an AI-powered organization requires committing to working in a new way. Some best practices to consider include:  

• Encourage daily use. Realizing productivity gains from AI will take intentional everyday practice. Those who start building the habit early will pull ahead. And don’t forget—11 weeks is all it takes for people to recognize the effect.  

• Help people manage their new assistants. Employees taught to treat their generative AI tools as assistants, not search engines, will get the most value. Teach team members to manage their new assistant and to recognize when to delegate a task to AI and when to apply their human intelligence, judgment, and skill. 

• Find good use of reclaimed time. Help your team take advantage of time savings to focus on the higher-order and creative tasks only people can do. Salespeople can devote more time to building relationships with customers and closing deals. Marketers can carve out time to dream up new solutions. Customer service teams can focus on solving problems, and managers across the organization can spend more time coaching and caring for their teams. 

Taking the next step forward 

Take the next step in your AI adoption journey by learning more about Copilot and other AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Discover how to keep your organization on the cutting-edge by realizing that a new paradigm of customer engagement through AI-enabled personalization empowers both customers and employees.  

Join us at a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Virtual Training Day to gain the skills needed to help your organization sell, service, and deliver on the customer expectations of tomorrow. Register for free, in-depth training events, where you’ll uncover new efficiencies of scale, discover smarter connections, and utilize built-in intelligence for deeper insights into your business. Register now! 

Sources

1.  Leap Now, Not Later, into a Responsible Generative AI Strategy for Marketing (July 5th, 2023) 
2. Microsoft Customer Story-NC Fusion expands youth marketing outreach, taught kids leadership and life skills with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
3. What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com) 
4. Working Paper 31161; Generative AI at Work; NBER 
5. Microsoft Customer Story-Microsoft empowers support engineers to shine brighter with Dynamics 365 Customer Service 
6. AI Data Drop: The 11-by-11 Tipping Point 
7. AI Data Drop: The 11-by-11 Tipping Point 

The post Elevating experiences with AI, from productivity to personalization  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On July 16, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. These plans are a compilation of the new capabilities planned to be released between October 2024 to March 2025. This release introduces a wealth of new features designed to enhance customer understanding and improve overall user experience, showcasing our dedication to driving digital transformation for our customers and partners. 

The upcoming wave is centered around utilizing advanced AI and Microsoft Copilot technologies to enhance user productivity and streamline operations across diverse business applications. These enhancements include intelligent automation, AI-powered insights, and immersive user experiences that are designed to break down barriers between data, insights, and individuals. Watch a summary of the release highlights. 

Discover the latest features that empower organizations to operate more efficiently and adaptively. From AI-driven sales insights and customer service enhancements to predictive analytics in supply chain management and autonomous financial processes, the new capabilities enable businesses to proactively address challenges and capitalize on opportunities. 

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to enhance customer understanding and boost sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. In this release, we are focused on including natural language copilot for summarizing information, creating a new full-screen Copilot Home with curated insights and role-specific actions, and using AI-powered insights to find leads. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features included in this release wave. 

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales-specific workflows, data, and actions. We will focus on using AI-powered insights to create leads, deepen the integration into Copilot in Microsoft 365, and use natural language capabilities to allow sellers to ask data-related questions of their CRM. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through new copilot capabilities such as proactive prompting, ability to access data from external systems securely with plugins, email enhancements, and AI-infused routing. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Customer Service can benefit your business. 

Microsoft Copilot for Service is now generally available, bringing new capabilities to enhance user experiences. These features will be integrated across Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Chat, and Copilot embedded in third-party CRMs. View this video about the features launching in this wave for Copilot for Service. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center will add new features for voice, messaging, Copilot, AI-infused routing, and contact center operations including out of box support for additional CRMs. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Dynamics 365 Contact Center this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables a shift from reactive to proactive and predictive service, empowering digital transformation and innovative business models. Using Copilot, frontline workers will be able to retrieve critical information and initiate mixed-reality remote assist calls within Teams through Copilot. Managers will be able to create, update, and manage work orders effortlessly across web, Outlook, and Teams interfaces. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues its journey of leading in autonomous finance, using AI to transform common end-to-end financial processes. This release focuses on in-app copilot capabilities, immersive persona-based user experiences, expanding country coverage, electronic invoicing enhancements, business performance analytics and planning enhancements, and autonomous reconciliation capabilities. Discover how the latest enhancements to Finance can benefit your business in this video. 

Microsoft Copilot for Finance is expanding data reconciliation capabilities in Excel with assisted data sanitization and preparation routines. Extending variance analysis capabilities with support from additional data sources and enabling collaboration on findings with stakeholders will also be a focus in the upcoming wave. Additionally, the Teams integration will facilitate collections calls with suggested scripts and automated recording of action items in the financial system. Check out this video to see the exciting new features releasing in Microsoft Copilot for Finance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is advancing along the path of an autonomous supply chain by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics into every facet of business procedures, thereby improving user productivity and enhancing organizational adaptability. In this update, the spotlight is on improving order-promising capabilities for manufacturers. Demand planning is upgraded to incorporate forecasting with external signals, and the inclusion of Copilot weaves insights and analyses directly into workflows, identifying trends and irregularities, while also allowing for specific data inquiries at the cell level. Additionally, Traceability Copilot keeps track of actual products in production and compiles a comprehensive historical record of related activities. Watch this video to discover the exciting features launching in this release wave. 

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 AI-assisted core functionality improvements in estimation, proposal generation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities and scale improvements to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Project Operations this wave. 

Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities will continue to invest in capabilities applying to Finance, Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and Project Operations. We are infusing copilot experiences across applications, including natural language chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for copilot scenarios. We will also bring more value and insights to finance and operations apps data and enhancements to ensure continued enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to build intelligence, develop automation and analytics around the hire-to-separate process, increase user productivity, and empower business agility. We are enhancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and offer management, improving experiences for employees and HR business partners in benefits and performance management, and advancing analytics, insights, and planning through business performance planning and analytics capabilities. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to empower retailers to streamline their operations and drive increased customer loyalty and conversions. With Copilot, retail managers, sales associates, and merchandisers will gain new AI-powered insights into customer buying patterns and preferences, recommendations for positioning and selling products, and business intelligence on store performance. Improvements to the self-checkout POS make customer checkouts more efficient, and user experience updates to Store Commerce app streamline daily tasks for faster, more efficient sales and service. Watch this video to see the new features releasing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is focused on maintaining service reliability performance and security standards. We’ll continue enhancing productivity by optimizing core processes with Copilot, expanding to cover more than 170 countries, and offering enhanced reporting with more than 80 Microsoft Power BI reports. Additionally, integration with Field Service will be expanded, along with new financial management features. We will also enhance development tools and governance, along with improved data privacy and compliance management. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist will bring significant improvements to the quality of Mixed Reality (MR) annotations in Teams mobile for both iOS and Android users. The update will enhance the accuracy of MR ink on irregular and complex surfaces, making it easier for remote experts and technicians to collaborate seamlessly. Mixed Reality annotations in Teams mobile will be generally available in the next wave, along with ongoing investments in stability, performance optimization, and usability improvements across HoloLens 2 and iOS and Android applications. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, leveraging it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. This release enables you to streamline data integration by using Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric, attach your data in OneLake to Customer Insights, accelerate time to insights with data in Data Lake format, increase control when attaching to data in Dataverse, and seamlessly generate insights from marketing. Discover how these latest enhancements can benefit your business in this video. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys brings the power of AI to redefine the workflow for marketers, enabling them to be more productive than ever before. Businesses can optimize every interaction with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, you will have more flexibility and control when it comes to journeys, managing your web forms and tailoring Copilot to your business. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in this wave. 

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

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Watch this video to explore the exciting new features releasing across Microsoft Power Platform. 

Microsoft Power Apps will continue to transform app experiences with infused intelligence, enabling users to be more productive by using Copilot to work with data, get insights, and improve their apps. Makers will continue to benefit from AI-assisted development, enabling rich and complex applications to be built with monitoring, control, and unmatched governance for admins, ensuring organizations can adopt low-code and AI transformation at scale. 

Microsoft Power Pages will expedite site building for a low-code maker or pro developer to build intelligent sites that reimagine the way you interact with your employees, customers, and partners. 

Microsoft Power Automate will continue to make it easier to build flows by using natural language and multi-modal generative AI capabilities across cloud flows and desktop flows, troubleshooting runs, and managing your automation estate with an end-to-end view. This, along with improvements in process mining to jumpstart creation of automation through Microsoft 365 integration and ongoing improvements to scaling, means it’ll be easier than ever for new users to get started and scale. 

Microsoft Copilot Studio is advancing copilot capabilities and IVR support with Customer Service and will expand geographically to the United Arab Emirates and Germany. Additionally, the team is improving software lifecycle management capabilities with topic-level import/export and role-based access control (RBAC), as well as enhancing governance and administration functionalities. 

AI Builder is investing in Prompt Builder for creating and deploying GPT prompts with enterprise data to enhance flows, apps, data tables, and copilots. We are also enhancing Intelligent Document Processing with a new validation station in Power Automate, application lifestyle management (ALM) support, and pre-built AI models for translation, classification, and personally identifiable information (PII) detection. Lastly, we’ll improve AI governance through capacity management, data policies, and including AI Builder capacity in the Power Apps developer plan. 

Microsoft Dataverse is enhancing the maker experience by boosting app building productivity with Copilot, ensuring seamless connectivity to external data and knowledge sources, and integrating AI-powered Enterprise Copilot in Microsoft 365. These investments aim to streamline development and use AI for more efficient and intelligent solutions. 

Governance and administration continues to advance via tools and insights that empower Microsoft Power Platform admin to easily get their job done. This wave focuses on governing Copilot adoption and easily securing low-code assets, helping enterprises boost adoption of Microsoft Power Platform solutions in their organization while keeping their digital environment safe. 

Early access period 

Starting July 29, 2024, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by October 2024. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2024 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information. 

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 2 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 2 plan. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform. 

The post 2024 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform now available  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The world is getting noisier, which makes it harder to earn customer attention. We’ve previously described the importance of hyper-personalization to break through the noise and enable customers to explore brands and products on their own terms. Regardless of whether they are consumers or business-to-business (B2B) buyers.

At Ignite 2023, we announced a unique Copilot-powered real-time web personalization solution in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in partnership with Optimizely*. Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of this solution in preview to customers worldwide. Current Customer Insights customers can sign up now to access the public preview.

_{*To use Optimizely with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights you need to acquire a license for Optimizely Web Experimentation}

The state of web personalization today 

According to recent research from Econsultancy, 93% of businesses see an uplift in conversion rates because of personalization. Yet only 6% of businesses believe they are doing it well. They face three main challenges.

First, traditional tools for personalization have limited data about your customers. It’s no longer sufficient to show content based on a customer’s browsing history, location, and other derived signals alone. The shift away from 3^rd party cookies further exacerbates this problem.

Second, even the companies that have collected a wealth of data through their Customer Data Platform (CDP) often struggle to synchronize the customer identity and data between their CDP and personalization tools. This synchronization is essential for real-time personalization. It enables companies to use comprehensive customer understanding from all data sources unified in CDP to tailor experiences based on both current behavior and predicted actions.

Third, personalization is disconnected across channels due to the fragmentation of marketing and web technologies and the data silos within each tool. A customer might see one offer option on the web but get a different message in an email or through an ad on social media. With companies expanding the channels through which they engage with users, it becomes increasingly challenging to connect the dots of a customer’s journey.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to the rescue

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely* enable organizations to deliver hyper-personalized omni-channel experiences across web, social, email and offline channels without writing custom code. Marketers and web admins can seamlessly collaborate to create personalized campaigns using unified data from Customer Insights. This enables companies to:

1. Go beyond browsing history by using comprehensive data from Customer Insights to personalize experiences. For example, leverage the predicted lifetime value of a customer to create targeted experiences.
2. No-Code Personalization using segments from Customer Insights in Optimizely. For instance, create a segment for high-churn customers in Customer Insights and use it in Optimizely to increase engagement when they visit the website next.
3. Ensure uniform personalization across all channels with bi-directional integration between Customer Insights and Optimizely. For example, an audience in Optimizely can be created using the predicted lifetime value from Customer Insights and repeat browsing history from Optimizely. This audience can then receive targeted monetary offers. Marketers can also show the same offer in messages sent via a customer journey in Customer Insights, using Optimizely’s signal (activity) on which treatment they received earlier. This can be done through segments refined based on customer activities or real-time triggers based on specific customer actions.

4. Activate audience across channels in journeys to further target the original visitors with the same offer if the prior web and message touchpoints failed to convert them and export the segments into advertising and social platforms for re-targeting.

There are even more possibilities for customer experience teams. They can, for example, use defined audiences to create ‘lookalike’ segments on social media platforms. This strategy helps them identify and engage new potential customers who share characteristics with their existing audience, expanding their reach and intensifying customer engagement efforts.

“Copilot in Customer Insights and Optimizely not only enable hyper-personalization but democratize it-any marketing or Customer experience team can now deliver such a campaign quickly and without requiring specialized skills – creating segments, journeys and content with the help of Copilot and then setting up the experiments with Optimizely’s market-leading capabilities.”

Kevin Li, VP of Product Strategy at Optimizely.

Leveraging website personalization to accelerate B2B sales

Web personalization can boost B2B sales by showing the right product to the right customer at the right time. CommScope, a leading telecommunication and wireless network company, uses web personalization to increase purchase intent for web visitors and then routes them to a seller based on their cross-channel engagement. This way, CommScope can generate higher quality leads and revenue from its website.

“Customer Insights and Optimizely enable us to personalize each customer’s experience in real-time with consistency across website and email marketing, enabling self-exploration and demand generation, while also accelerating our sales pipeline by empowering our reps to identify the highest intent leads at the right moment.“

Bob Vonderheide, Director of Customer Experience Technologies at CommScope.

What’s next 

This is just the beginning, and there’s much more to come. Working with early adopters, we know that our customers often rely on their marketers and developers collaborating to add scripts to their websites and mobile apps. We will facilitate this collaboration with a developer portal that gives developers tools to test and verify that the script has successfully been added and functioning as the marketer intended. To enable bespoke scenarios such as personalized e-commerce product pages, we will enable collection of custom events including data such as product details, category, and price. Finally, we will reduce noise from unwanted events through filtering based on pages, location, and other attributes. You can follow the release plans to stay updated on when these features become available.

Meanwhile, we will continue to work with customers as part of the preview to measure and optimize real-world latency and performance. We estimate general availability beyond 2024 wave 2 with the enhancements outlined above.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

• To learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights explore Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Watch the video to discover how Optimizely enable web personalization with our Contoso scenario.
• 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 2024 release wave 1 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Get Optimizely Optimizely is a third-party app which requires a subscription.

The post Omni-channel real-time personalization with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to announce unlimited application installs when starting with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an improvement to our license definition and installation management experience. As of June 30, 2024 we’ve removed application installation limits for Customer Insights–Journeys (real-time journeys only) and Customer Insights–Data. Previous application installations had restrictions of four per base license of the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license launched September 2023, and one if using the older, standalone Marketing license.  

Unlimited application installations: What it means for you

 After June 30, 2024, as an admin, you have unlimited application installs with Customer Insights – Journeys (real-time only) and Customer Insights – Data on as many production and sandbox environments in the Power Platform Admin Center as you’d like. Admins with a paid Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license on their tenant (i.e. production or sandbox environments) will no longer see the application installation counter and limits. See details on how to install Customer Insights. Customer Insights –Journeys, application install limits still apply to additional installations of legacy outbound marketing solutions. (This accommodates the high cost of the background services.) For customers using only real-time Journeys, there is no installation limit.

• Access the installation management page by going to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com -> Resources -> Dynamics 365 apps -> Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Marketing -> … -> Manage. Because it’s no longer restricted, the meter doesn’t display the count of paid application installations you’re entitled to or have used. However, trials are still limited to one per license.
• If your tenant has used outbound marketing solutions, you see a meter monitoring your entitled and installed instances of outbound marketing. We count outbound marketing instances based on the previous application logic. For Dynamics 365 Marketing standalone licenses and application add-on licenses you get one install per license. For the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combined license launched September 2023, you get four outbound marketing installs per base license. Learn more about who can enable outbound marketing.

Enhancing your applications installation experience

While making this change, we took the opportunity to simplify the user experience further with the following small changes:

• We removed the little gray “i” icon with the environment URL. Find the environment URL in the green checkmark.

• If your tenant does not have any Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Marketing licenses, you see a view which offers you links to learn how to buy.

We hope these license definition and user experience improvements simplify your experience installing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

The post Announcing unlimited application installs in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In this extraordinary age of AI, we find ourselves on the brink of a profound revolution. Companies are looking for generative AI to solve longstanding problems around customer connection, loyalty, and seller productivity. Businesses are on a journey to become a digital-first business, not only to connect with customers, but to benefit from the advances in AI. 

Both winning and retaining customers requires a unified customer understanding and ability to orchestrate experiences across sales, marketing, and service. To deliver exceptional experiences, businesses need a solution that breaks down data silos between applications and departments so sellers, marketers, and service agents can get the right information in the right interface at the right time.

Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1

Release wave 1 brings new innovations and capabilities to transform your business. 

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Imagine if your sellers could effortlessly collaborate with contributing stakeholders and had the exact right information at the exact right time to make a persuasive sales pitch that speaks to the needs and wants of each individual customer to cement the sale.

Imagine if your marketing team could create the perfect end-to-end campaign, one that aligns input across departments, that pulls in the perfect target audiences, that includes campaign assets aligned with your brand identity. And instead of doing so in months, being able to create a good draft…in minutes.

Imagine if each time customers interacted with your company, no matter what department or touchpoint they engage with, they felt known, and each interaction built on the last.

With generative AI and our Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience solutions, these “imagine ifs” are reality.

The innovative capabilities that are coming to you in Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation, optimize the buying journey with the power of data, and personalize every customer interaction.

Elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation

A recent study of sales professionals showed that up to 70% of their time is used for administrative and non-selling tasks that reduce the quality of their interactions with customers.

With Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365 Sales, we enable innovative AI-enriched experiences to support sellers as they move through the sales process. We help transform sales teams from just following leads and opportunities into being trusted advisors who can predict and support customer needs.

Copilot for Sales is designed to be an invaluable assistant helping drive productivity and improve sales efficiency. It combines all the unique role-based sales capabilities with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to deliver a unified and highly relevant seller experience right within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, keeping the seller in their flow of work. Sellers can use chat to identify answers to top sales questions, whether it’s to find out more about an account or opportunity, or to view the sales pipeline. We deliver relevant sales context using natural language and prompt-based actions.

Let’s look at some of the newest features within Copilot for Sales, an application for sellers who use either Dynamic 365 Sales or Salesforce but prefer to work within their Microsoft 365 productivity apps to manage their day:

• Enhance email summaries and replies to minimize app switching and provide a response that’s aware of the customer context. Insight related to sales such as buying intent is emphasized, and suggested changes such as updates to sales stages, opportunity budgets, or estimated close dates appear in the side panel allowing instant updates.
• Easily create meeting preparation reports that give you the information you need to engage your customers confidently. You can share the meeting prep with your team members so everyone can be on the same page with knowledge about the customer and the account. Using the power of Copilot in Word combined with Sales insight from your customer relationship management (CRM) application.
• Get immediate AI-generated tips, suggestions, and advice in Microsoft Teams meetings to help sellers concentrate on the meeting dialogue and ensure they can respond quickly to requests and possible challenges, such as competitor references, by surfacing relevant information when and where they need it.
• Generate post-meeting follow-up quickly and easily allowing sellers to follow-up with tasks and notifications that are generated from the Teams intelligent recap screens and review the key questions that need to be answered. Follow-up work with their team members can be managed using deal rooms and planner activities to review task suggestions and assignments ensuring no follow-up is missed.
• Keep systems up to date without the pain of manual effort. Copilot for Sales allows for quick creation of records, such as leads and opportunities, right in the Microsoft 365 surface area. In the Copilot side panel, create new records and update fields using pre-filled suggestions without leaving the screen.

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to be our market-leading CRM solution designed to streamline sales processes, cultivate customer relationships, and expedite deal closures for businesses of all sizes. We bring the power of generative AI right inside this surface area and help sellers transform their CRM interactions to support customer conversations and land deals. With the latest release we’re helping sellers to:

• Transform the CRM sales experience by using the immersive full-screen Copilot view right in Dynamics 365 Sales. Get all key information in one place including pipeline, suggested actions, deals in progress, and real-time insights on key accounts. Sellers can query that information to get further details and insights using natural language and suggested prompts. Use it to get started every day as a homepage for all sellers using Dynamics 365.
• Make the best use of prospecting time with intelligent lead management to make sure that sales development teams are using their time wisely and focusing on leads that have a higher chance of closing quickly. In this release, we’re adding qualification criteria that incorporate signals to help show how interested the customer is. The distribution of those leads is then improved based on seller capacity and our new notification alerts make sure that sellers don’t lose the opportunity to interact when the timing is right.

Optimize the buying journey with the power of data

It all starts with data. Generative AI takes what used to be specialized and trained roles and democratizes them so customer experience (CX) professionals can use and take advantage of the data, insights, and workflows from their CRM system. Generative AI will autonomously assist customers and sellers in their day-to-day experiences to:

• Elevate customer experiences in real time: With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, CX professionals can now ensure customer profiles and associated insights are updated in real time based on data signals, allowing them to provide the most targeted and personalized experience as they engage with your website or mobile app, which will foster loyalty, increase engagement, enhance satisfaction, and drive higher conversion rates.
• Know your account better with AI-generated account summaries in Dynamics 365 Sales: With integrated data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, sellers can now quickly access a comprehensive overview of each account, enabling them to prioritize their work effectively and engage with customers in a more personalized and targeted manner.
• Maximize sales success with AI-suggested past successful deals: In Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers now have the ability to use the collective intelligence from past successful deals to identify and pursue similar opportunities effectively. This AI-driven feature simplifies the decision-making process and increases the likelihood of closing deals quickly. By analyzing personal success stories and industry-specific data, sellers can make well-informed decisions that enhance sales effectiveness. The strategic use of AI suggestions not only improves efficiency but also significantly raises the chances of winning deals, thereby boosting overall sales performance.

Personalize every customer interaction

Marketers and CX professionals are being empowered to go beyond automated spam to creating cross-channel cohesive, conversational experiences that drive loyalty and retention. The innovative capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that are releasing in this wave enable CX professionals to:

• Take campaigns from concept to launch in minutes using Copilot in Customer Insights Journeys: With Copilot, instead of breaking down a series of fragmented work items, the team begins by telling Copilot the outcome they want to achieve. In minutes, they’re presented with the new project board, curating ideas for every component central to the campaign: such as segments, content, and journeys, all ready for review. It’s fueled by unified data from all sources of customer data, brand guidelines, past campaigns, and creative briefs.
• Generate unique on-brand creative assets in minutes: No more scouring media libraries or resorting to use of stock images. You can ensure images are on brand and personalized for each audience, generated by Copilot using the new Typeface integration. Copilot allows you to generate variations that then can be used for personalization—no special photo editing abilities required.
• Personalize omnichannel experiences with no code using Optimizely: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely now unlock omnichannel personalization and experimentation capabilities, enabling marketers and citizen developers to personalize every customer touchpoint with no code or prior expertise required. By combining insights and segments from Customer Insights with Optimizely audiences, you can create experiences that are tailored to your customer’s browsing activity, their loyalty, past engagement history, and other real-time signals. Moreover, you can continue the conversation or re-target your visitors by delivering the same consistent experience through customer journeys, based on which Optimizely treatment cohort the customer was part of.

With generative AI and Copilot, we’re revolutionizing the workflow for sellers and CX professionals. First, sending personalized content at every stage of the marketing campaign, improving the quality of sales leads, and next, optimizing the productivity of sellers and enhancing every single engagement with their customers, helping them to close deals faster, all thanks to Copilot. There has never been a more exciting and productive time to be a seller or marketer. We can’t wait for you to experience it.

Learn more about 2024 release wave 1 capabilities

The future of customer experience is here, and it’s driven by cutting-edge AI technology that empowers businesses to better connect with their customers, drive sales, and improve overall satisfaction for both customers and employees. This release wave is truly driving transformative change for customer-facing roles, so get your organization set up today.

To see how all of this comes to life, watch the CX overview segment of the Business Applications Launch Event and check out the 2024 release wave 1 plans to read more about these game-changing capabilities.

The post 2024 release wave 1: Transforming experiences with Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to announce a new project onboarding feature is now available in the Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal. The portal makes it easier to deploy Dynamics 365 projects successfully by guiding you from the start of your project to the end, giving you valuable insights and recommendations along the way. All you need to do to get started is create your implementation project in the portal, and the new onboarding wizard makes it easy. Here’s how:

User-friendly interface removes technical barriers. The onboarding wizard’s intuitive and user-friendly interface is designed to make the onboarding process accessible whatever your technical background. It acts as a virtual assistant, walking you through each step of project creation with clear instructions and prompts.

Projects are ready to use immediately. On completion of the onboarding process, your Dynamics 365 implementation project is instantly available, streamlining collaboration and ensuring that stakeholders have swift access to project resources.

Data is protected automatically. If the implementation project targets a tenant other than the one you’re signed in to, the onboarding wizard starts an approval flow. Two reviewers for the targeted tenant must both approve the request before information such as the customer name and telemetry insights are made available. This automatic review process ensures compliance with data protection regulations and builds trust with customers.

Successful Dynamics 365 implementations by design

The Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal is based on Success by Design, a systematic approach for successful cloud deployment that was developed by Microsoft. Success by Design provides prescriptive guidance for designing, building, and deploying your new Dynamics 365 solution. The onboarding wizard represents a pivotal advancement in the journey towards a successful Dynamics 365 implementation. By guiding you through the creation of your implementation projects, facilitating reviews, and offering relevant insights, the Implementation Portal and the onboarding wizard help your business harness the full potential of Dynamics 365 with confidence and efficiency.

Next steps

Sign up for the Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal and read the documentation.

Learn more about the onboarding wizard.

Have feedback or questions about the onboarding wizard or the Implementation Portal? Let us know! Email us at ftd365ip-support@microsoft.com.

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer? Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post Create Dynamics 365 implementation projects easily with the new onboarding wizard 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

Tune into demos of new capabilities, on demand.

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.

At Microsoft, trust is the foundation of everything we do. As more organizations adopt Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, we are committed to helping everyone use AI responsibly. We do this by ensuring our AI products deliver the highest levels of security, compliance, and privacy in accordance with our Responsible AI Standard—our framework for the safe deployment of AI technologies.

Take a moment to review the latest steps we are taking to help your organization securely deploy Copilot guided by our principles of safety, security, and trust.

Copilot architecture and responsible AI principles in action

Let’s start with how Copilot works, how it keeps your business data secure and adheres to privacy requirements, and how it uses generative AI responsibly. Watch this video for a quick overview.

First, Copilot receives a prompt from a user within Dynamics 365 or Power Platform. This prompt could be in the form of a question that the user types into a chat pane, or an action, such as selecting a button labeled “Create an email.”

Copilot processes the prompt using an approach called grounding, which might include retrieving data from Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Graph, or external sources. Grounding improves the relevance of the prompt, so the user gets responses that are more appropriate to their task. Interactions with Copilot are specific to each user. This means that Copilot can only access data that the current user has permissions to.

Copilot uses Azure OpenAI Service to access powerful generative AI models that understand natural language inputs and returns a response to the user in the appropriate form. For example, a response might be in the form of a chat message, an email, or a chart. Users should always review the response before taking any action.

How Copilot uses your proprietary business data

Responses are grounded in your business content and business data. Copilot has real-time access to both your content and context to generate answers that are precise, relevant, and anchored in your business data for accuracy and specificity. This real-time access goes through our Dataverse platform (which includes all Power Platform connectors), honoring the data loss prevention and other security policies put in place by your organization. We follow the pattern of Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG), which augments the capabilities of language models by adding dynamic grounding data to the prompt that we send to the model. Our system dynamically looks up the relevant data schema using our own embedding indexes and then uses the language models to help translate the user’s question into a query that we can run against the system of record.

We do not use your data to train language models. We believe that our customers’ data is their data in accordance with Microsoft’s data privacy policy.  AI-powered language models are trained on a large but limited corpus of data—but prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph and Microsoft services are not used to train Copilot for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform capabilities for use by other customers. Furthermore, the models are not improved through your usage. This means that your data is accessible only by authorized users within your organization unless you explicitly consent to other access or use.

How Copilot protects business information and data

Enterprise-grade AI, powered by Azure OpenAI Service. Copilot is powered by the trusted and compliant Azure OpenAI Service, which provides robust, enterprise-grade security features. These features include content filtering to identify and block output of harmful content and protect against prompt injections (jailbreak attacks), which are user prompts that provoke the generative AI model into behaving in ways it was trained not to. Azure AI services are designed to enhance data governance and privacy and adhere to Microsoft’s strict data protection and privacy standards. Azure OpenAI also supports enterprise features like Azure Policy and AI-based security recommendations by Microsoft Defender for Cloud, meeting compliance requirements with customer-managed data encryption keys and robust governance features.

Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, privacy, and compliance. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. It automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Copilot is hosted within Microsoft Cloud Trust Boundary and adheres to comprehensive, industry-leading compliance, security, and privacy practices. Our handling of Copilot data mirrors our treatment of other customer data, giving you complete autonomy in deciding whether to retain data and determining the specific data elements you wish to keep.

Safeguarded by multiple forms of protection. Customer data is protected by several technologies and processes, including various forms of encryption. Service-side technologies encrypt organizational content at rest and in transit for robust security. Connections are safeguarded with Transport Layer Security (TLS), and data transfers between Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure OpenAI occur over the Microsoft backbone network, ensuring both reliability and safety.  Copilot uses industry-standard secure transport protocols when data moves over a network—between user devices and Microsoft datacenters or within the datacenters themselves.

Watch this presentation by James Oleinik for a closer look at how Copilot allows users to securely interact with business data within their context, helping to ensure data remains protected inside the Microsoft Cloud Trust Boundary. You’ll also learn about measures we take to ensure that Copilot is safe for your employees and your data, such as how Copilot isolates business data from the language model so as not to retrain the AI model. 

Architected to protect tenant, group, and individual data. We know that data leakage is a concern for customers. Microsoft AI models are not trained on and don’t learn from your tenant data or your prompts unless your tenant admin has opted in to sharing data with us. Within your environment, you can control access through permissions that you set up. Authentication and authorization mechanisms segregate requests to the shared model among tenants. Copilot utilizes data that only you can access. Your data is not available to others.

Committed to building AI responsibly

As your organization explores Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, we are committed to delivering the highest levels of security, privacy, compliance, and regulatory commitments, helping you transform into an AI-powered business with confidence.

Learn more about Copilot and Responsible AI

• Trust and responsible AI in Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Copilot in Power Platform 

• Copilot data security and privacy for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform FAQ

• Copilot availability

• Microsoft Responsible AI Standard

• How other organizations are using Copilot to improve operational efficiency and customer experiences

• Responsible AI FAQ for Microsoft Power Platform

• Responsible AI FAQ for Dynamics 365

The post Building digital trust in Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the ever-evolving landscape of generative AI, a copilot isn’t just a companion that makes tasks that you’re already doing at work easier, but it’s quickly becoming a transformative force reshaping the very core of how things are done.

After shipping 13 publicly available Microsoft Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that enable marketing teams to ask Copilot questions about their data, receive ideas for content from key points they want to make, define audiences and journeys in everyday words, understand their data quality, or get a summarized answer from multiple sources on how to use a feature within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (to name a few), we realized that Copilot can help our marketing teams not just with tasks, but can completely change their workflow.  

This workflow in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will enable marketers to deliver unparalleled customer experiences (CXs). This could encompass a myriad of scenarios, from a marketing campaign for a new product or promotion, to managing how companies interact with their customers in key moments at scale.

The new Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

The new Copilot in Customer Insights in now available in preview.

Register and try it

Take for example a theme park—as customers scan their tickets to ride attractions, they can receive personalized messages and notifications across their preferred channels be it: in-app, web, text message, or email. This not only enhances customer experience by making the most out of their visit but also enables the company to maximize customer spending.

Companies often spend a tremendous amount of time building these campaigns and experiences. With the growing demand for digital and mobile experiences, coupled with the need to use customer data from an expanding array of disconnected systems to personalize and trigger the experiences, the time and cost to deliver continues to rise.

Our conversations with numerous companies illuminated a common pain point—the process to deliver a CX project or campaign can extend from 12 to 15 weeks (about three and a half months). There are no signs this will decrease in length.

It’s not surprising why. The current marketing workflow resembles a complex team sport, requiring multiple contributors focused on different aspects—audience, journey, content, and the delivery channel.

Most teams create campaigns starting with a blank canvas; assembling, testing, and going live; then tracking the analytics to ensure everything is going well and any drop-off points are addressed. The complexity and coordination across people affect more than the time to market, it affects the quality and level of personalization delivered to the end customer.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will completely change the game.

“At Campari Group, we’re excited by the opportunities these new Copilot capabilities will bring us to streamline our digital marketing processes—driving collaboration and enhancing our ability to deliver a truly engaging consumer experience, whilst staying one step ahead of the competition!”

David Hand – Global IT Manager, CRM, Campari

Companies have data that ground Copilot in brand styles, tone, language, and imagery. Briefs contain a lot of key information about the intent, success, branding, and key points. Over time, data from prior projects or campaigns will drive the continuous improvement of business results.

Armed with this data, what if you could describe the outcomes you want,
and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights could take the lead?

Our vision has four key areas of innovation:

1. We’re removing complex UIs that are difficult to navigate and use, instead Copilot will provide dynamic user experiences (UX) that come to you based on what you are trying to achieve. Examples of this are the dynamic project board and analytics.
2. Instead of marketers having to start from a word or pixel for every element of the project or campaign, Copilot provides data-driven suggestions that allows you to curate your project instead of having to create every piece. Everything starts connected and Copilot keeps it connected and in sync making any downstream changes saving the marketer time and eliminating a class of errors due to partial changes. Choose from suggested images, emails, audiences, journeys, and more instead of having to create each element from scratch. We don’t believe any of the suggestions will be 100% of what the marketing team needs, what we do know is that even if it’s only 60% the way there, it will save 60% of the time needed to launch the project.
3. We’re removing the constraint of resources limiting the quality of experience and depth of personalization. Instead of personalizing to four cohorts, Copilot will personalize to 64 cohorts or more. But then, you need confidence in what you’re delivering to customers. We are innovating in new UX and Copilot capabilities that will allow marketing teams to review and approve at Copilot scale where instead of having to review 100 variations across the journey, Copilot will tell you the key variations to review and tweak and make corrections on your behalf.
4. Today, after a project or campaign goes live, you need to assign a person to track the analytics and find where customers are dropping off. That person then needs to work with the right people to improve the results. Now, Copilot can track the analytics on behalf of the marketing team and proactively notify of optimizations with suggested options that allow the team to curate rather than create and deliver business success.

We’re partnering with Typeface to deliver this vision, and it plays a key role in enabling scaling on-brand multimodal content personalization in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Typeface understands your brand in depth and utilizes that understanding to deliver text and images that align to companies’ brand guidelines enabling one-on-one personalization with on-brand images at a scale that wasn’t viable in terms of time and cost before.

“Copilot holds the potential to be a real game-changer. Its ability to seamlessly align our business goals with community values has the potential to save us valuable time on internal processes. This efficiency translates to quicker iterations and more frequent connections with our audience. It’s not just shaping up to be a tool but a strategic advantage.”

Martin Nicholson – Digital Engagement Manager,  Rare Ltd.,
Xbox – Sea of Thieves

This innovation is not years away, not months, not even weeks. Today, we’re happy to announce that our first public preview focusing on curation rather than creation is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in English, in all regions. Sign up to be one of the first to preview and experience the new capabilities.

We invite you to explore this transformative journey as Copilot takes the reins, opening a new era in marketing workflows. Join us in redefining how work gets done.

Learn more:

• Register and access Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Watch our latest webinar on Streamlining Marketing with AI in Microsoft Copilot!
• Watch the New Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Read the release note on Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Check the release W1 2024 video for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Discover more about Typeface.
• Read Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

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