Copilot has been integrated into Microsoft Viva Sales soon after its initial release on Microsoft 365 last week.
The release of Copilot in Viva Sales provides sellers with new AI customer support via automated email replies, meeting summarisations, and personalised insights with further updates promised in the coming months.
Microsoft describes Copilot as “the world’s first AI Copilot” for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finance applications. The company says tens of thousands of customers have already used AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Copilot and the Microsoft Power Platform.
Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Platform, said: “Today’s debut of Microsoft 365 Copilot powers even more ways to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills.
“For sellers, the seamless integration of Copilot across Microsoft 365 and Viva Sales (as well as AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) is a powerful combination.
“It’s a new way to engage prospects and customers, all while freeing up time previously tied up in “busy work”—like composing every email from scratch.
“As we move into a new era for customer experience, we want to ensure that salespeople feel empowered to focus on what matters, which is deeper engagements with customers.”
Copilot’s Capabilities in Viva Sales
AI-generated email replies have become generally available in Viva Sales, automating and assisting a range of tasks for sellers.
To save time on meeting organisation, email replies with meeting time proposals can now be automatically generated, based on the available times in their Outlook Calendar.
If a seller is not satisfied with an automated reply, they can be improved by providing new prompts to add to the previous suggestion.
Highlighted areas of text in generated replies signify data sources are available to view by hovering a cursor over them. As a result, agents gain contextual and transparent information to help them understand sales data from the CRM, meetings, and more.
Users can provide feedback via a thumbs-up and thumbs-down rating mechanism for AI-generated content. This will help Viva Sales to refine its AI reply technology and adapt to the sellers’ needs.
Copilot can also help sellers by creating automatic meeting summarisations, which are otherwise time-consuming tasks for sales agents.
Meetings summaries are created using a mixture of Viva Sales’ conversational intelligence, CRM data, and GPT Copilot natural language processing (NLP).
To create meeting summaries, sellers begin composing an email and open Viva Sales.
Next, they need to retrieve follow-up content by selecting the appropriate meeting and then review the automated summary email, which incorporates the topics discussed, action items, and relevant CRP data.
Finally, salespeople will simply need to add the recommendation to their email, make any edits, and send it.
The key differentiator between Copilot’s meeting summarisation technology in Viva Sales, as compared to Teams, is its integration with CRM data and shifting context and tone to suit interactions with customers.
Users will not need to switch screens and can make their edits from within Outlook.
Microsoft is offering a free 30-day trial of Viva Sales and all Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licensed customers can use Viva Sales for no further cost.
Internet news sources suggested recently that Microsoft has axed its Ethics & Society team during a recent purge of 10,000 jobs. The company maintains that it is committed to developing AI responsibly and it has put a lot of emphasis on ethical considerations since the launch of Copilot.
