Microsoft launched a series of AI agents and an AI accelerator program for sales as it outlined a bevy of customer references implementing the software giant's copilots and agents.
The company's AI agent tools are being rolled out in Dynamics 365 and are natively integrated across Microsoft 365 productivity apps. The AI agents will connect to an enterprise's data platform (Azure and third parties) and use Microsoft's horizontal data across productivity apps and LinkedIn to include context.
Here's what's rolling out:
- AI Accelerator for Sales, a program that brings services and expertise to enterprises adopting agentic AI, which will be available in April.
- Sales Research Agent, which will be in public preview in April.
- Sales Agent, which brings agentic AI to salespeople in various environments such as Dynamics 365 and Outlook. Sales Agent will be in public preview in May and autonomously researches and prioritizes leads.
- Sales Chat, which allows you to interact with sales data in natural language, will public preview in May.
Sales Agent and Sales Chat agents can be accessed in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.
Microsoft also announced a variety of customer references for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Many of these customers were highlighted by CEO Satya Nadella on Microsoft's most recent earnings conference call.
- Microsoft launches Copilot Actions, Agents in SharePoint at Ignite
- Microsoft outlines Copilot agents for enterprises
The list of customers hits back at Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff who has argued repeatedly that Microsoft couldn't show what customers were doing with Copilot or AI agents. Microsoft said more than 160,000 organizations have used Copilot Studio to create more than 400,000 customer agents in the last three months.
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Enterprise customers leveraging AI agents and Copilot include Holland America Line, Vodafone, Novartis, Campari, Dow, ABN Amro, Accenture, and Estee Lauder to name a few.
Constellation Research got a demo of Sales Agent, Sales Chat and an AI canvas applications that enabled enterprises to delve into data and dashboards in natural language. A few takeaways:
- The ability for Sales Agent to interact with sales folks within various applications like Outlook with context in an autonomous way was notable. Tasks can be sped up dramatically.
- Sales Agent can carry out tasks and automatically update Dynamics 365.
- Performance tracking on engagements on metrics such as emails sent and open rates, meetings booked and opportunities created enable enterprises to gauge ROI of agents and optimized.
- A Sales Management AI workspace highlights the future of workflows as well as the ability to get specific data points and discover new insight. This "infinite canvas" approach can be helpful and enable enterprises to make better decisions.
Constellation Research analyst Martin Schneider outlined his thoughts in a post. He said:
"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 simply 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."
