If you’ve noticed that emails from salespeople or responses from customer support agents seem a little off – or that they’ve taken a significant bump in writing quality – you may have AI to thank. Microsoft has announced that it will introduce AI features in Dynamics 365, its suite of business applications for customer relationship management and resource planning.
The company calls the set of features “CoPilot,” and touts it as a way to help entrepreneurs “create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get results- well and next best actions.” That includes things like having an AI write customizable emails to customers and automatically generate meeting summaries, writing replies to customer service chats and emails based on previous conversations. , and help marketers analyze their data without having to write SQL. The company is also pitching it as a way to help generate ideas for marketing emails, which means you could start seeing AI-powered ads in your inbox soon.
Microsoft’s promise goes beyond that – the company says the system will facilitate the creation of “virtual agents” for customer support, using OpenAI technology for Bing search and internal knowledge bases for in the answers.
As with other AI tools, Microsoft is targeting it as something people will use, rather than a way to replace employees. In a LinkedIn post, CEO Satya Nadella called the announcement a step toward “transforming every business process and enabling interactive, AI-powered collaboration.”
The same technology can come in software that isn’t entirely business-focused. There are reports that Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT into apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Its most famous use of technology is probably Bing, its chatbot and search engine that is currently available to people on a waitlist.