Microsoft has announced new AI-based features for Dynamics 365 and other products, including the Office suite. That’s great news – but what does it mean for your business?
The short answer is that it means less time spent on routine tasks and more time on high-value creative tasks and problem-solving. To explain why, it’s worth a brief diversion into OpenAI, ChatGPT and the world of artificial intelligence.
What’s OpenAI?
First things first: Open AI is a research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. Its goal is to develop and promote AI for humanity’s benefit. Its website notes that:
OpenAI was created in part out of the founders’ fear of potential disaster as a result of the negligence and misuse of general-purpose AI. In the long term, the company pays special attention to fundamental advances in AI and its capabilities.
The company’s intention to work on secure general artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity is reflected in its intention to freely collaborate with other research organizations and individuals. Research and patents made by the company must remain open to the public unless it could adversely affect safety.
Musk resigned from his board position in 2018; in 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion, and in 2023 made another investment, reportedly $10 billion over several years. Infosys and Khosla Ventures are also corporate investors.
Open AI has launched many products and applications, including several Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs), DALL-E and CLIP (image generators), ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus.
What’s ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a Generative Pre-trained Transformer that can interact with humans conversationally. That is, it’s an AI-powered chatbot that uses reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), combining supervised learning and reinforcement learning to improve its performance.
As OpenAI describes it: “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”.
It’s built on GPT 3.5 and is highly versatile. It can write and debug computer code; write fiction, poetry and song lyrics; compose music; answer test questions; and play games.
For businesses, it can combine data and insights from multiple sources in real time, then compose messages, notes and more to allow humans to spend more time working with each other and less time trawling through databases and spreadsheets.
What’s Microsoft doing?
Microsoft – along with other IT companies – is already making use of these technologies. They’re being incorporated into business and Dynamics products, for example, in Teams and Sales, under the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot umbrella.
Dynamics 365 Copilot
Microsoft says Dynamics 365 Copilot is “the world’s first copilot in both CRM and ERP, that brings next-generation AI to every line of business”.
It’s not kidding. Using AI to automate repetitive manual tasks frees workers to concentrate on higher-value tasks like relationship building, product development, sales strategies and business planning.
Dynamics 365 Copilot uses generative AI to automate tasks and provide insights to assist sales, planning and other functions. Best of all, these capabilities are spread across the product suite:
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Copilot can draft email and chat replies and run interactive chats covering knowledge bases and case histories.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: Copilot enables natural language dialogues to personalize and target customer segments, including uncovering new segments and matching customers to profiles.
- Dynamics 365 Marketing: Copilot can generate email content suggestions based on user prompts, existing marketing emails and internet sources.
- Dynamics 365 Business Central: Copilot can streamline and generate product listings for approval or publish to Spotify with a few clicks
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Copilot can access Microsoft Supply Chain Center and flag external factors, including weather, geography and financial updates that might impact supply chains and highlight potentially affected orders.
Teams Premium now includes Large Language Models powered by GPT 3.5. In practice, users will enjoy new, AI-powered features, including:
- Intelligent recap: automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks and personalized highlights
- AI-generated chapters: dividing the meeting into sections for easier review
- AI-generated notes and tasks: to simplify follow-up and review
- Live translations: AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages
Meanwhile, Viva Sales users will benefit from Azure OpenAI Service and GPT for deep insights and data. Key capabilities include:
- Generating suggested email content: automatically generate draft email content for replies to queries, sales opportunities, order changes and more.
- Data insights: rich and accurate customer and data insights drawn from Microsoft Graph to make it easier for sellers to follow up and stay in touch with customers and prospects.
How can we help you?
These capabilities – and more – are available today. If you’re using Microsoft Dynamics 365, integration is simple, cost-effective and ready to transform your business.
If you’re not using Microsoft Dynamics 365 – then why not? We believe it’s the best, most effective CRM and ERP platform on the market, which is why we use it internally and recommend it to our customers and partners.
Wherever you are on your business journey, the team at Eagle360 is ready to help. Why not contact us today to see what we can achieve together?