Microsoft has been building out its generative and agentic AI tools for some time now, building upon its mega-billion investment in OpenAI. The evolution of Microsoft’s copilot concept is of course built on agentic AI, and multi-agent flows. Today, the company announced a new packaging concept, the “AI Accelerator for Sales” which combines Microsoft’s existing AI capabilities and a few new wrinkles just announced.
The program includes the following resources for sales organizations looking to transform their operations with AI tools and agents:
• Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower every salesperson with an AI assistant
• Pre-built agents to accelerate time to value for common sales processes, including a new Sales Research Agent using deep reasoning to help with strategic decisions
• Custom agents with Copilot Studio to automate bespoke sales processes
• AI model fine-tuning, to personalize the output of agents to meet unique business needs
• Dynamics 365 Sales, to manage customer accounts and drive sales from lead to close
• White glove engagement, working hand in hand with Microsoft’s AI experts
Novel in the above list is the Sales Research Agent. This is essentially a conversational interface which allows sales leaders and executives to build dashboards generated on the fly from plain language inquiries. The system instantly starts building new visualizations and charts and providing insights on the fly. In short, the old way of thinking about manager and executive dashboards may be a thing of the past. Rather, more contextual, purpose-built dashboards can now be created with zero tech skills. And, these dashboards can pull data from more sources, making them even more useful than tradition CRM dashboards that were usually limited in the scope of date from which they could consume.
In a recent briefing, Microsoft a great example of how one might use the dashboard in retail: asking the Research Agent, “Show me this year’s Black Friday sales versus last year…” Those familiar with how reporting tools work, know that the different dates, scopes and even the nomenclature of “Black Friday” would be an incredibly difficult report to create and run with confidence. But this can be done in seconds with Sales Research Agent.
The company has also announced two new tools, Sales Chat and a Sales Agent. Sales Chat is a conversational tool that allows sellers to better prep for meetings, understand their path to quota, etc. It can aid sellers in nurturing the right leads, attacking g hot leads at the right time, and simply being more prepared and productive.
The Sales Agent goes beyond the common “AI sales development reps” that are available from many vendors. This new agent can actually execute true selling motions and foster transactions, allowing B2B firms, for example, to immediately enable self-service buying in addition to the agent assisting human sellers in generating quotes, suggesting discounts, etc. For B2B firms, this is a great addition, as it allows a far more frictionless transformation to being a more dynamic and fluid sales organization. Enabling self-service in the past meant serious customization of customer portals, commerce engines, etc. Now, the agent can perform significant tasks in a dynamic manner, that get the customer what they need, and augment - not replace - the human element in the company/customer relationship.
These advancements underscore an overarching theme occurring across front-office application development. Where we used to think of suites like CRM as a collections of applications with their own user interfaces….today we are seeing “Copilots” (and their relative cognates) as the new collective UI that can draw functionality and present insights from a wide swath of applications. Also, where we saw workflow as something that needed to be considered, built, and managed - now agents have streamlined workflow to the point where we can simple create complex and effective workflows with a single sentence added to a prompt. And where we looked at CRM systems as a data store, now we can finally start looking at them as a tool for access to knowledge beyond just the data we put into it. High composability, the simplicity of conversational interfaces and more fluid data integration capabilities are driving these rapid changes.
For Microsoft Dynamics and 365 end users, while this seems a clear and clean bundling of AI tools, the issue is still pricing in the end. Microsoft is making many of its AI tools available in a consumption model. It is important to understand the unit pricing, and what your organization’s expected reasonable use of these new tools will be, to avoid any surprise fees and budget issues.
