Today’s business environment demands more with less. Organizations must deliver better personalization, higher volume, and increasingly complex insights while operating with greater efficiency. The gap between stakeholder expectations and what teams can realistically deliver continues to widen. 

Microsoft’s recent insights on Frontier Transformation address these challenges by embedding AI into the core of operations. Frontier Firms are organizations that treat AI as a foundational capability and are already transforming how they work. 

Frontier Firms don’t simply automate; they adapt. By adding adaptive intelligence to existing systems, they unlock three advantages: 

• Awareness: Systems perceive conditions in real time. 
• Reasoning: They prioritize tasks based on business needs. 
• Interaction: They communicate in natural, intuitive ways. 

Early adopters see small improvements compound quickly. These include faster service, more accurate recommendations, fewer equipment surprises, and clearer insights into peak times and bottlenecks. As agentic AI matures, companies can offer guidance and assistance that feels intuitive. Employees gain more time for high-value work, and leaders gain deeper visibility into operations. 

Frontier Transformation is more than a technology upgrade. It represents a shift in operating model. Organizations that treat AI as a foundation will lead the next wave of business innovation. 

Agentic AI is reshaping customer experience 

This shift is already visible in retail, where agentic robots are transforming customer experience and improving operational performance. Customers expect fast, personalized service, yet retailers often face staffing constraints, training gaps, and unpredictable demand. 

Industry studies show: 

• 75% of consumers are more likely to purchase when recommendations feel relevant. 
• Nearly 40% of in-store complaints relate to wait times. 
• Inventory inaccuracies account for 4–8% of lost sales. 

These challenges reflect a broader pattern across frontline-heavy industries. Customer expectations continue to rise, and employee workloads grow more complex. 

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reinforces this dynamic. Frontline employees say AI tools that reduce repetitive tasks, surface real-time information, and streamline customer interactions have the biggest impact on satisfaction and performance. As organizations integrate adaptive intelligence into daily workflows, these benefits build on each other and help accelerate Frontier Transformation. 

Recent industry research shows that retail and consumer packaged goods organizations are generating significant business value from generative and agentic AI, with early deployments consistently delivering multi-times ROI and accelerating impact across frontline operations.

Agentic AI creates new possibilities for stores. Instead of relying on rigid automation, it blends environmental awareness, adaptive reasoning, and conversational interaction to help teams respond in real time. 

ADAM: From beverage service to customer care 

Richtech Robotics’ ADAM beverage robot illustrates how quickly agentic systems can enhance the customer experience. Richtech, based in Las Vegas, designs and commercializes autonomous robotic solutions for hospitality, retail, logistics, and manufacturing. Through a close, hands-on collaboration between Richtech’s engineering team and the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labs, the two companies jointly developed new adaptive intelligence for ADAM—transforming it into a conversational, context-aware assistant powered by Microsoft Azure AI. These enhancements enabled ADAM to move beyond routine beverage preparation and support richer customer interactions.

Today, ADAM: 

• Adjusts recommendations based on weather, time of day, and promotions. 
• Responds naturally to customer requests like “less sweet,” “extra ice,” or “what’s seasonal?” 
• Notifies staff about ingredient or equipment issues before problems occur. 
• Uses vision models to maintain speed and quality during busy periods. 

Retailers report smoother operations and better customer feedback. ADAM is context aware, conversational, and reliable—qualities customers consistently reward and areas where AI has historically struggled. 

While ADAM is a retail example, the pattern extends far beyond beverage automation. Across logistics, healthcare, hospitality, and manufacturing, Frontier Firms are adding ambient intelligence and agentic workflows to physical operations and seeing meaningful gains as a result. 

Unlocking retail transformation at scale 

Once retailers see how intelligence enhances a single customer interaction, the next question naturally follows: where else can this help? Building on the advancements made with ADAM, Richtech Robotics is extending these capabilities through its Agentic Store initiative. By applying vision, voice, and agentic reasoning to common in-store tasks, the initiative helps retailers address friction points that slow down the shopping experience. 

Examples under development include: 

• Robots that guide customers to products.
• Systems that detect empty shelves or misplaced items.
• Voice-enabled, in-aisle assistance.
• Real-time adjustments based on foot traffic or local events.

This approach does not require heavy hardware investments. These workflows are software-driven and build on existing store infrastructure. It reflects how Frontier Firms drive transformation by spreading intelligence across the ecosystem rather than upgrading a single process at a time. 

Retailers gain clearer visibility into peak demand, customer behavior, product movement, and service quality without increasing manual tracking. As one store manager described it, “it feels like having a second set of eyes that never gets tired.” 

Convenient, high-quality service becomes a blueprint for store-wide intelligence. In the coming years, a clear difference will emerge between retailers that treat AI as a tool and those that treat it as a foundation. The latter will set the pace for the industry. 

Steps toward Frontier Transformation 

Agentic AI gives retailers a practical and achievable path forward. It elevates customer experience, reduces operational strain, and creates the foundation for smarter and more adaptive stores. Organizations that embrace Frontier Transformation position themselves as Frontier Firms, ready to scale faster, work more intelligently, and unlock new value through the combination of human judgment and AI-driven insight. 

The journey begins with small, strategic steps and a bold vision for what is possible. To explore the broader business impact of AI across frontline and customer-facing roles, review Microsoft’s Work Trend Index: The year the Frontier Firm is born.

Explore how organizations are transforming with AI, and learn how you can build your own generative AI proof of concept with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labs.

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It’s no secret that India is well-positioned to be a global leader in the AI era, having embraced the power of AI to reshape industries, drive innovation, and unlock new opportunities across the nation. Boasting a vast talent pool, proactive government initiatives, and a thriving startup ecosystem, India is uniquely equipped to leverage AI to solve pressing societal and business challenges and optimize operations across a wide array of civic and business verticals.

A long-standing partner in India’s technological growth, Microsoft has solidified its commitment with a US $3 billion investment to expand AI and Azure cloud infrastructure in the country. This initiative is designed to accelerate AI adoption across industries, empower businesses to integrate AI into critical processes, and nurture local talent to meet the evolving demands of the tech ecosystem. These efforts underscore Microsoft’s confidence in India’s position as a global leader in AI innovation and technological advancement.

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Local ingenuity was on full display during the Microsoft AI Tour stop in Bengaluru and New Delhi, where organizations showcased how they are leveraging AI to tackle complex challenges, streamline workflows, and drive transformative efficiencies across industries.

MakeMyTrip powers the future of travel with AI

MakeMyTrip (MMT), India’s leading online travel company, is at the forefront of enhancing the travel shopping experience with generative AI. Over its 24-year journey, MMT has served more than 77 million users, offering comprehensive travel booking services. A standout feature powered by generative AI is Myra, their conversational bot. MMT is integrating an AI-powered workflow within Myra to assist users seamlessly at every stage of their travel journey—from pre-trip planning to in-trip support and post-trip follow-up. Built using large language models (LLMs) and orchestrated via Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, these services ensure smooth assistance throughout the travel process. As one of the early adopters of generative AI in travel tech, MMT is leading the next generation of travel experiences.

Persistent Systems improves contract management with AI-powered agent

Persistent Systems, one of the world’s fastest-growing digital engineering and enterprise modernization service providers, faced recurring challenges surrounding their contract management: inefficient workflows and lengthy negotiation cycles were causing bottlenecks in an otherwise agile organization. Persistent turned to the power of generative AI and Microsoft’s technology stack to reimagine their approach to contract management, developing ContractAssIst, an AI-powered agent built using generative AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot, to transform collaboration and streamline internal contract negotiations. Built to help ensure security and access controls, the tool helps to enhance collaboration, streamline workflows, and accelerate decision-making. 

As a result, ContractAssIst has reduced emails during negotiations by 95% and cut navigation and negotiation time by 70%, a task that currently takes approximately 20 to 25 minutes. Persistent has deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to nearly 2,000 users and plans to extend it to a broader audience.

LTIMindtree unlocks data management with Microsoft 365 Copilot

LTIMindtree, a global technology consulting and digital solutions company with more than 84,000 employees in more than 30 countries, is leveraging AI in innovative ways to drive digital transformation and enhance business and IT operations. They have demonstrated how Microsoft 365 Copilot technology and AI agents are transforming their critical business functions, such as pre-sales, resource management, and cyber security. For example, custom built AI agents assist the resource management teams to quickly find the right employees with relevant skills and match them to specific projects; and help pre-sales and account managers create high-quality responses using historical data to incoming requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for information (RFIs). They are also using Microsoft Security Copilot to create a unified command center for investigations, threat intelligence, and incident response, empowering them to build a next-gen Security Operations Center (SOC). As a result, LTIMindtree has seen a 30% increase in overall employee efficiency, with 20% less time spent on emails and day-to-day task allocation.

Streamlining health claims with ICICI Lombard’s AI-powered solution

ICICI Lombard, a leading private insurer in India, has developed an innovative solution to streamline health claims processing. Traditionally, claim adjudicators manually filed claims, a time-consuming process involving the review of 20 pages of documents. Leveraging Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Document Intelligence, and Azure AI Vision OCR service, ICICI Lombard’s new solution extracts relevant information from these documents, providing adjudicators with a consolidated view of the diagnosis and treatment. This innovation has reduced the time required to process claims by more than 50%.

eSanjeevani transforms healthcare access with innovative AI solutions

eSanjeevani, India’s National Telemedicine Service by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, has integrated AI-enabled tools to enhance care quality and streamline teleconsultations, promoting equitable access to healthcare across the country. Powered by Azure, it offers secure, scalable, and accessible doctor-to-doctor and doctor-to-patient teleconsultations. eSanjeevani is advancing its AI journey with Microsoft AI, enhancing productivity, data analysis, and user experience. These innovations are helping eSanjeevani set new benchmarks in telemedicine and digital healthcare services. It is also developing a proof of concept with Microsoft Copilot to transcribe doctor-patient conversations in real time for advanced speech analytics, aiding data-driven decisions. Serving more than 330 million patients, 98% from rural areas, eSanjeevani is today the world’s largest telemedicine initiative in primary healthcare.

AI for everyone in India

India’s AI journey is not just about innovation, it’s about transformation across industries and lives. From travel to healthcare, banking to engineering, the case studies showcased here demonstrate the immense potential of AI when paired with the right tools, partnerships, and vision. Microsoft’s investments and technologies have enabled organizations in India to tackle challenges, streamline processes, and unlock new levels of efficiency and growth. As India continues to lead in the global AI revolution, these examples serve as a testament to how AI can create meaningful impact, fostering a future where innovation drives progress for everyone.

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Now you can get help with all of this and more by simply asking an AI agent to take care of it — while you drink a second cup of coffee and focus on your team’s long-term strategy.

An agent can tackle certain tasks with you or for you, from acting as a virtual project manager to handling more complex assignments like reconciling financial statements to close the books. Microsoft 365 Copilot is already a personal assistant that helps with everything from tedious daily duties to jumpstarting creative projects. Using it to interact with various agents brings a new world of possibilities for organizations to empower their employees, drive business and accomplish even more.

Agents can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors. They can reason over reams of product information to give field technicians step-by-step instructions or use context and memory to open and close tickets for an IT help desk.

“Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world,” says Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work. “We’re rapidly adding new capabilities to tackle individuals’ biggest pain points at work and drive real business results.”

What are agents, anyway?

An agent takes the power of generative AI a step further, because instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf. Agents can do a range of things, from responding to questions to more complicated or multistep assignments. What sets them apart from a personal assistant is that they can be tailored to have a particular expertise.

For example, you could create an agent to know everything about your company’s product catalog so it can draft detailed responses to customer questions or automatically compile product details for an upcoming presentation.

Other agents can do even more, acting on your behalf, like one that helps fulfill sales orders — freeing you up to focus on building new customer relationships. Having agents handle some of these routine needs can boost productivity across industries, from manufacturing and research to finance and retail, helping businesses save time and money.

You can use ready-made agents in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, or build custom agents to help with more specific needs in Copilot Studio.

Imagine you’re a salesperson with big quarterly goals to meet. Copilot acts as your personal assistant, drafting emails, recapping a meeting you missed and helping you design a polished sales presentation. Meanwhile, an agent specialized in sales lead generation works autonomously in the background to find new prospects you can follow up with later in the week. Copilot partners on daily tasks, and your purpose-built agent uses its customized skills to help you meet your end-of-quarter goals.

AI agents are not only a way to get more value for people but are going to be a paradigm shift in terms of how work gets done.

Agents are not new. Microsoft has done extensive research in the area and even created a multi-agent library last year for developers around the world, work that helped shape what agents can do today.  They’re getting more attention now because recent advances in large language models (LLMs) help anyone — even outside the developer community — communicate with AI. That agent-LLM duo makes AI tools more tangibly useful.

“People expect AI to do things for them,” not to just generate language, says Ece Kamar, the managing director of Microsoft’s AI Frontiers Lab. “If you want to have a system that can really solve real world problems and help people, that system has to have a good understanding of the world we live in, and when something happens, that system has to perceive that change and take action accordingly.”

Agents are like layers on top of the language models that observe and collect information, provide input to the model and together generate an action plan and communicate that to the user — or even act on their own, if permitted. So both agents and models are equally important pieces of the puzzle, as far as generative AI tools go.

Agents will become more useful and able to have more autonomy with innovations in their three necessary elements: memory, entitlements and tools.

Memory helps provide continuity so that each time you ask for something, it isn’t like starting from scratch.

“To be autonomous you have to carry context through a bunch of actions, but the models are very disconnected and don’t have continuity the way we do, so every prompt is in a vacuum and it might pull the wrong memory out,” says Sam Schillace, Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer. “It’s like you’re watching a stop-motion animation, one isolated frame after another, and your mind puts it into motion. The clay model doesn’t move on its own.”

To build up the memory infrastructure to address this, Schillace and his team are working on a process of chunking and chaining. That’s essentially what it sounds like: They’re experimenting with dividing up interactions in bits that can be stored and linked together by relevance for faster access, akin to a memory — like grouping conversations about a certain project so an agent can recall those details when you ask for a status update and not have to search through its entire database.

The work with entitlements and tools is making sure agents have secure access to, or are entitled to, information they need in order to accomplish things for you, with your permission — like who your boss is, for example — and to the computer programs they need to take action on your behalf, like Teams and PowerPoint.

How to use and build agents for work

You can already create and publish agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot that can help you in your daily work as easily as you’d create a spreadsheet or presentation — no coding skills required.

You don’t need to be a developer to build agents using Copilot Studio, either. Anyone can connect them to relevant business data such as emails, reports and customer management systems so they can perform tasks and provide insights.

And you’ll soon be able to enlist new agents in Microsoft 365 to help with common workflows and tasks. Interpreter in Teams will provide real-time speech-to-speech translation during meetings, for example, and you can opt to have it simulate your voice. The Employee Self-Service Agent will simplify human resource and IT help desk-related tasks like helping workers resolve a laptop issue or find out if they’ve maxed out certain benefits, and it can connect to company systems for further customization in Copilot Studio.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 will have agents as well for a range of common business workflows across sales, supply chain, finance and customer service functions.

And every SharePoint site will soon come equipped with an agent tailored to your organization’s content that allows employees to quickly tap into these vast knowledge bases and find exactly what they need in seconds, whether it’s project details buried in a workback schedule or a summary of a recent product memo.

Developers have even more options. With the new Azure AI Agent Service, you’ll be able to choose from small or large language models to orchestrate, develop and scale agent-powered apps to streamline and automate complex workflows like order processing and customer data synchronization. It provides a software development kit with tools for developing agents, allowing you to efficiently integrate agent capabilities using Visual Studio Code and GitHub.

One type of model, OpenAI’s recently announced o1 series, can bring more advanced reasoning capabilities to agents, allowing them to take on more complicated tasks by breaking them down into steps — like getting the information someone on an IT help desk would need to solve a problem, factoring in solutions they’ve tried and coming up with a plan.

You can also use the power of agents in LinkedIn; the platform’s first agent can help recruiters with hiring.

Assessing risk for autonomous action

There are extra safety considerations with agents that can act autonomously, and Microsoft is focused on making sure agents only access what you want them to, says Sarah Bird, the company’s chief product officer of Responsible AI.

“Agents certainly up the stakes from a responsible AI point of view,” Bird says. “So we have to have much, much lower error rates. And there’s many more nuanced ways in which something could be an error. This is the big challenge with agents.”

But the same responsible AI foundational playbook for other AI applications can be used to assess and mitigate risk with agents, she says.

The new Copilot Control System helps IT departments manage Copilot and agents with data access and governance, management and security controls, as well as measurement reports and tools to track adoption and business value.

Many agents, like those created for Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, include “human in the loop” approvals, where people are required to take the final step of reviewing and sending an email the Sales Order Agent wrote, for example. And for agents developed in Copilot Studio, authors can review the records to see which actions the agent took and why.

The key is to focus on testing and moderating to ensure accuracy, Bird says, and for organizations to choose the right starting point for their needs.

“We will of course make progress by building on the foundation we already have, so we’re starting the journey from a strong place,” Bird says.

Looking back — and into the future

Technologists have long been excited by the idea of autonomous systems working side-by-side with people to help them, says Kamar, who has been working on AI agents since 2005 and even wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the topic in 2010. The hurdle was that “we lacked that general problem-solving power” on the back end, she says.

With LLMs, “we finally have this missing component,” she says. “Now we can bring back a lot of the ideas from our decades of research.”

Going forward, Kamar envisions a new ecosystem or marketplace of agents, sort of like how apps empower people to do more with their smartphones.

Agents already have “the basic building blocks of what it takes to complete a task,” she says. “Like observing, ‘I can see your meeting is taking longer; I should delay the next meeting.’”

They’re getting more helpful as they gain autonomy through the innovations in memory and entitlements. They’re relieving pain points for employees by helping with things like expense reporting, project management and meeting facilitation. And they’re driving exponential impact for businesses by taking on duties like alerting supply chain managers to low inventory and then automatically reordering to help drive sales and keep customers satisfied.

Agents matter because they “open up a whole set of opportunities for working with people for getting tasks done, and that’s what we expect from AI systems,” Kamar says. “AI agents are not only a way to get more value for people but are going to be a paradigm shift in terms of how work gets done.”

And this is just the beginning. Copilot is set to evolve with new capabilities like Copilot Actions, designed to handle routine tasks that can bog down employees like summarizing emails missed during time off, compiling agenda items and generating monthly reports. More capabilities like these are coming over the next year to lift the weight of work for employees and teams.

“Copilot will empower every employee to do their best work in less time, and focus on more meaningful tasks,” Spataro says. “And agents created in Copilot Studio will transform every business process, helping companies streamline operations, enhance collaboration and drive innovation at scale.”

Illustrations by Michał Bednarski / Makeshift Studios

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Today, we’re announcing new agentic capabilities that will accelerate these gains and bring AI-first business process to every organization. 

• First, the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month.  
• Second, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for every sales, service, finance and supply chain team. 

Copilot is your AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain.  

Empowering more customers to build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio 

Earlier this year, we announced a host of powerful new capabilities in Copilot Studio, including the ability to create autonomous agents. Next month, these capabilities are shifting from private to public preview, allowing more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI. Agents draw on the context of your work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric, and can support everything from your IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as a personal concierge for sales and service.  

Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact. Pets at Home, the U.K.’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings. McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%. Thomson Reuters built a professional-grade agent to speed up the legal due diligence workflow, with initial testing showing some tasks could be done in half the time. This agent can help Thomson Reuters increase the efficiency of work for clients and boost its new business pipeline.  

Scaling your teams with 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365  

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value — and are just the start. We will create many more agents in the coming year that will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization. Today, we’re introducing ten of these autonomous agents. Here are a few examples: 

• Sales Qualification Agent: In a profession where time literally equals money, this agent enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities while the agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses. 
• Supplier Communications Agent: This agent enables customers to optimize their supply chain and minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays and responding accordingly — freeing procurement teams from time consuming manual monitoring and firefighting. 
• Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents: A business gets one chance to make a first impression, and these two agents are game changers for customer care teams facing high call volumes, talent shortages and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team. 

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be confident that they have robust data governance and security. The agents coming to Dynamics 365 follow our core security, privacy and responsible AI commitments. Agents built in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge and actions. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls — all managed in Copilot Studio. These include data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols and more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. 

Microsoft’s own transformation  

At Microsoft, we’re using Copilot and agents to reimagine business process across every function while empowering employees to scale their impact. Using Copilot, one sales team has achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals(2). And thanks to Copilot, one team is resolving customer cases nearly 12% faster(3). Our Marketing team is seeing a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers(4). And in Human Resources, our employee self-service agent is helping answer questions with 42% greater accuracy(5).  

With Copilot and agents, the possibilities are endless — we can’t wait to see what you create. Start building agents in Copilot Studio today. Read more about autonomous agent capabilities on the Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 blogs. Head to WorkLab for more insights on Microsoft’s own AI transformation.

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We’re already seeing how Microsoft Copilot can help turn “I can’t” into “watch me” for people around the world in their everyday lives. But for business leaders, Microsoft Copilot is just the start—there are so many additional ways you can bring this transformative technology into your organization. Understanding your options—and the business scenarios best suited for each—is critical. Read on to learn how you can approach making these decisions for your organization.

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Establish your business objectives

Before you think about how you’ll deploy AI solutions, you have to start with why. Aligning your AI investments with a clear business strategy is imperative, as my colleague Susan Etlinger explores in this blog post.

With specific goals in mind, you can prioritize use cases based on their potential for impact and scope your solution based on data and infrastructure requirements. This will help you make decisions aligned with your business objectives and drive your company forward.

Once you’ve identified your why, there are a few common pathways we’re seeing for how to apply AI to reach those goals—from buying off-the-shelf software as a service (SaaS) solutions to building a custom solution that meets your specific needs. Let’s explore the options.

Use Microsoft Copilot to boost employee productivity

If your priority is employee productivity across your business, Microsoft Copilot should be one of the first solutions you consider. If you’re already using Microsoft Entra for identity management, your employees can sign in using their work or school account and get commercial data protection for free—which means chat data isn’t saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data isn’t used to train the models.

Copilot helps your people to get the answers and time-saving assistance they need from powerful AI models without putting your company data at risk. But that’s just the start.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is our best Copilot experience for organizations. It gives you priority access to the very latest models—starting with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo. You get Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams—combined with your universe of data in the Microsoft Graph, including data you bring in from external sources through Microsoft Graph connectors. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has enterprise-grade data protection, which means it inherits your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies. It also includes Copilot Studio to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots—more on this in a minute.

Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is designed to be enterprise-ready, helping employees in every part of your business unlock productivity and unleash creativity.

And with Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance, we’ve added role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and content generation to the applications professionals use the most. With built-in integration across business systems—whether Dynamics 365 or a third-party customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or contact center applications—sellers, service agents, and financial professionals can be more effective and efficient as they work, guided by Copilot. 

When you’re thinking about boosting employee productivity in common business scenarios, an out-of-the-box solution like these can deliver incredible impact. But a solution like this may not be the right fit—so let’s look at the next pathway.

Customize Microsoft Copilot to serve the unique needs of your business

No two organizations are alike, and neither are the apps, data, and workflows that drive your business. Microsoft Copilot can help boost employee productivity in the usual functions of every business, but you may also need solutions customized for your own business processes. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool, you can tailor and extend Copilot for Microsoft 365 or build standalone copilots specific to your needs.

For example, within Copilot for Microsoft 365, you may be looking to add specific plugins to address nuanced topics like legal, finance, or human resources (HR). You may want to create and call new workflows within Copilot or connect Copilot with data that lives outside the Microsoft Graph. These customization capabilities are included with Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Create your own copilots to deliver transformational experiences

Now let’s take this a step further. Instead of building on the foundation of Microsoft Copilot, you may be looking to bring copilot experiences into your own applications with other data sources. The new copilot category is not limited to internal productivity and employee-facing applications, but can extend into external, customer-facing experiences that differentiate your business and drive growth.

With your customized copilot solution, you can bring generative AI to your own unique business processes like supply chain management, manufacturing line operations, or quality control. You can engage customers and users with more personalized experiences and recommendations. The potential for new innovation is limited only by your imagination—and with Microsoft’s range of development tools, you can build generative AI-powered experiences exactly where you want them.

To quickly and securely build your own copilots, you can start in a low-code environment with Copilot Studio, going beyond the extensibility capabilities we already covered. With Azure OpenAI Service behind the scenes, Copilot Studio is a fully managed, hosted SaaS service, with built-in analytics as well as security and governance controls. You also maintain control over dialog management and conversational orchestration, and you can deploy custom copilots built with Copilot Studio to many channels across web, apps, social channels, and Microsoft Teams.

You can also take your custom copilot a step further with a pro-code approach giving developers full control in an end-to-end application development platform—Azure AI Studio.

Azure AI Studio is a generative AI environment for developing intelligent applications from end-to-end, including custom copilots. For skilled development teams that need to benchmark models, mix and match models, fine tune, evaluate, and continuously monitor their solutions, this is the place. Azure AI Studio enables developers to build new AI applications or augment existing apps with AI capabilities. Developers can identify the best models for a custom copilot, create multimodal capabilities beyond text alone, design and evaluate prompts, build extensions with custom AI search, mitigate risk with robust content safety tools, deploy at scale, and continue to monitor applications in production.

Use the right tool—or tools—for the job

Though we’ve outlined a few different options for how you can use AI to help reach your business goals, these pathways are by no means mutually exclusive—you can and should use more than one approach to meet your needs. And with the Microsoft Cloud, you can easily work across approaches, and shift gears as your needs change.

You can start with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and use Copilot Studio to quickly build a workflow that serves a specific business function, then as you uncover more advanced applications for that workflow, Copilot Studio also works with Azure AI Studio and additional Azure services. This connected, end-to-end AI toolchain allows your developers to use the right tool for the job at hand, spanning low-code and pro-code capabilities as their needs change.

And keep in mind that AI safety and responsibility should be top of mind from the very beginning. Make sure you’re considering the principles, corporate standards, tools, and governance that you’ll need to ensure your AI experiences are built on trust. The Responsible AI Standard is a great place to start.

Next steps

I hope you take the time to explore the breadth of Microsoft’s AI innovation, and dig deeper into the various AI approaches I’ve outlined here. Remember—no matter what your business priorities, or where you’re starting from, Microsoft is ready to help empower your AI transformation.

The post Build, buy, or both? How to choose the right approach for your AI transformation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

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.

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. 

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.¹ 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.¹ 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.

MICROSOFT COPILOT STUDIOLearn more 

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 public 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.¹ 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 2023 Work Trend Index survey

² 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 The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

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

Transforming customer experience in the age of AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sellers reach new levels of productivity with Microsoft Sales Copilot

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

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

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

Marketers surface deeper insights, optimize customer journeys with Copilot

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

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

Start transforming customer experiences with Dynamics 365

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

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

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

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

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

Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

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

Read how

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

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