Microsoft today introduced what it calls the “next generation” of AI product updates to its portfolio of enterprise applications.

They affect both Power Platform, Microsoft’s low-code toolkit for building applications and workflows, and Dynamics 365.

The company’s suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

Enterprise

In an interview with TechCrunch, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s CVP of enterprise applications and platforms, described the updates as the next logical step in Microsoft’s automation journey.

The new features, based on technologies from artificial intelligence startup OpenAI and built using Azure OpenAI Service.

Microsoft’s service that provides enterprise access to OpenAI APIs, follow the introduction of OpenAI text generation AI models in Power Platform four years ago and beyond.

The debut of generative AI features in Viva Sales, Microsoft’s sales experience app.

“Over the past four years, we’ve been on a journey to bring generative AI and foundational models to the workplace,”.

Partnership

Lamanna said via email, noting that Microsoft has a long-standing partnership with OpenAI to commercialize the vendor’s technology in its own and Microsoft products.

Through the Azure OpenAI service. “And now we’ve reached a point where the technology and the product can enable transformational outcomes for customers.”

In Dynamics 365, Microsoft is launching what it calls Copilot (borrowing the brand from GitHub’s Copilot service), which broadly speaking aims to automate some of the more repetitive sales and customer service tasks.

For example, in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, Copilot can help write email responses to customers and create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook.

The meeting summary pulls details from the vendor’s CRM, such as product and pricing information, Lamanna says, and combines it with insights from the recorded Teams call.

“We securely and intelligently access information from customers’ CRM, ERP and other enterprise data sources on the fly,” Lamanna added.

“We use large language models to combine business data with underlying knowledge to create answers tailored to each customer.

Importantly, we do not use customer data to train the models.”

In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot can suggest “contextual responses” to customer questions via chat or email, and provide customer service agents with “interactive chat” that draws from both knowledge bases and case histories.

These complement a new “conversation support” feature in Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft’s chatbot maker, which allows companies to connect a bot to resources such as a website or knowledge base and use that data to answer questions the bot hasn’t been trained to answer.

In turn, Conversation Accelerators complements the new “GPT” model in Microsoft AI Builder, which enables organizations to incorporate text generation capabilities into their Power Automate and Power Apps solutions.

For example, Lamanna says, a researcher could use it to summarize text from weekly reports and have it sent to their email.

A marketing executive could tap the GPT model to create targeted, generated content ideas by entering specific keywords or topics .

Given Microsoft’s recent foray into generative text namely, Bing Chat one might be reluctant to build an app using the company’s technology lest it go off the rails.

But Lamanna says the conversation boosters and GPT model — plus Copilot, for that matter — are “grounded in reality” using each customer’s CRM, ERP and other data sources.

“AI-generated content is always clearly labeled and users are encouraged to verify its accuracy before using it.

Where relevant, we also cite the sources from which the answer was obtained to allow the user to better verify the accuracy of the answer,” said Lamanna.

“We have monitoring and controls in place that allow us to respond quickly with manual intervention should any issues slip past the above lines of defense.”

Dynamics 365 will be the world’s first built-in CRM and ERP built-in co-pilot.

The new Copilot will introduce new artificial intelligence and natural language processing capabilities to Dynamic 365, helping professionals generate ideas and content faster and complete tasks quickly and efficiently.

The AI-powered copilot will also provide business professionals with information to plan next steps and actions.

Sources: Techcrunch | techcult.com