• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 6, 2023

Microsoft is leaning into generative artificial intelligence (AI) with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, a set of tools to help marketers and others throughout an organization reduce repetitive tasks.  

In theory, these capabilities allow everyone to “spend more time on the best parts of their jobs and less time on mundane tasks.” The latter would include “manual data entry, content generation and notetaking,” says Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president, business applications for Microsoft, in a Monday blog post announcing the launch.  

What can Copilot do for email teams in particular? For one thing, they can use it to “effortlessly get inspiration for fresh email campaign content based on a simple request,” Lamanna writes.

Lamanna adds: “PlatformCopilot makes suggestions based on key topics entered by the marketer, the organization’s existing marketing emails, as well as from a range of internet sources to increase the relevance of generated ideas.”

In addition, marketers can “curate highly personalized and targeted customer segments by having a dialogue with their customer data platform using natural language,” Lamanna continues. Users can also “receive suggestions about additional segments that may not have been previously considered. This new capability can handle complex calculations and match customers that fit a select profile.”

There are also applications for customer support agents. “Dynamics 365 Copilot drafts contextual answers to queries in both chat and email, in addition to providing an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history so this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions,” Lamanna states. 

And, B2B salespeople can use helps sellers dramatically reduce the time they spend on clerical tasks. AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook.  

How does this work? The meeting summary “pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, as well as insights from the recorded Teams call,” Lamanna explains. “With sellers spending as much as 66% of their day checking and responding to emails, this presents a significant business upside to give the seller more time with their customers.”

Lamanna notes that today’s announcement “builds on recent AI momentum across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform. 

At least one reviewer gives Co-Pilot a good review. Teams that want to upload a new product to their sales catalog, modify their website and set out launch campaigns “have a lot of work to do,” Josh Bersin writes. 

“These kinds of activities require in-depth understanding of the application and lots of quality control to get it all right.

Bersin adds: “The Co-Pilots can do a lot of this for you.” 

It remains to be seen if the new tools can deliver everything promise by Microsoft, and if they will have a negative impact in companies—namely, job loss or implementation difficulties. One thing is certain: this is not the last announcement you’re likely to see about generative AI.