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Microsoft aims to make sales and service teams more efficient by leveraging an AI copilot. At the Microsoft Ignite conference today, the company introduced a suite of AI-driven Copilot features designed to enhance sales productivity and improve customer service experiences.
The new Microsoft Copilot features for sales and services significantly upgrade the initial capabilities first introduced in July with Microsoft’s Sales Copilot. These updates go beyond just sales and service functions using Microsoft Dynamics; they offer deeper integration across the entire Microsoft portfolio. Users can now more easily integrate Microsoft 365 with sales and service data sources.
Emily He, CVP for Microsoft Business Applications, mentioned that since the beginning of the year, they’ve been focused on embedding copilots in all their products, from Microsoft 365 to Dynamics and security. Although customers found the initial round of copilots useful, they felt overwhelmed by the number of different copilots. To address this, Microsoft is now announcing a streamlined copilot experience that will integrate seamlessly across all Microsoft applications.
What sets the new Microsoft Copilot for sales apart from its predecessor is its enhanced power and integration with Microsoft tools, especially Microsoft 365, and other customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Users appreciate the ability to extend the copilot experience in Microsoft 365 to include customer data from CRM systems, allowing them to create emails and other documents more smoothly.
In the past, interactions using the previous Microsoft Sales Copilot could be fragmented. For instance, if a team was on a Microsoft Teams call with a customer, they often had to log into a CRM system separately to access data. The new Microsoft Copilot for sales connects CRM data, including non-Microsoft CRM data like Salesforce, enabling users to ask questions and receive competitive insights without logging into multiple systems.
While the sales sector previously had a copilot, the service sector did not. At Ignite, Microsoft introduced Copilot for Service technology to integrate service information from various systems into the unified copilot experience, much like the sales version, but now also integrated with Microsoft 365.
Emily He explained that this is a new offering geared towards improving customer service, an area ripe for AI intervention. Customer service agents often have to navigate numerous knowledge bases while interacting with customers. The new copilot allows agents to use natural language to ask questions, with the system reasoning across all connected knowledge sources to provide the right answers, complete with source links.
This capability significantly reduces the time customer service agents spend navigating different sources to find answers. While competitors like ServiceNow and Salesforce have also been adding AI features, Emily He believes Microsoft has a distinct advantage thanks to its integrated approach. Most employees already spend a significant amount of time using Microsoft productivity tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Microsoft’s copilot can bring customer and business data into these tools, enhancing the user experience without requiring employees to switch tools. For other vendors, lacking this extensive product footprint makes it harder to offer similar functionality.