By Ed Staats
Microsoft’s primary focus of the Dynamics 365 2024 release Wave 2 (October through March 2025) is the incorporation of AI, Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft is building upon the investment in Copilot made in the 2024 release Wave 1 in significant ways to provide users with even greater insights at their fingertips.
Copilot for Sales
Microsoft continues to heavily invest in Copilot for Sales which was released in early 2024. Copilot provides more tools for sales executives to manage activities. Release Wave 1 focused on the ability to take quick actions on next steps from emails, national language search for information, and AI generated notes. Release Wave 2 provides even more capabilities in the form of enhanced opportunity management, AI-driven insights, and cross-application integration.
Enhanced Opportunity Management
Copilot for Sales will provide the sales team with the ability to group and aggregate their pipeline in a variety of ways. This will provide team members with more flexibility around how they wish to view and organize their pipeline.
AI Insights for Sales
Natural language processing and AI was introduced in release Wave 1 but is planned to be enhanced in release Wave 2. Some items that organizations should be able to take advantage of this fall are explained below.
Copilot email assistance provides the ability within Dynamics 365 Sales to create highly personalized emails that will provide suggestions based on the category of the email and tone you wish to set. This helps to provide a framework for the email which can then be edited prior to sending.
AI will also provide a summarized, holistic view of an account. This summary can be configured to search for related information such as opportunities, leads, marketing campaigns, and the latest news about an account. This will allow users to spend less time sifting through data and more time proactively managing relationships with an account.
Email conversations have for years been able to be tracked from Outlook into Dynamics 365 for Sales. The addition AI will provide the ability to summarize lengthy emails so that users can quickly gain insight rather than sift through a long string of communications.
Document summarization will help sales professionals search through related SharePoint folders for contacts, accounts, leads, and opportunities to eliminate the need for searching through lengthy documents for the information. This will assist with qualification of opportunities by providing a quick summary of a customer’s needs.
Microsoft Teams recently has introduced the ability to provide transcripts and summaries of meetings. In September 2024, the organizer of a Teams meeting will be able to tag the meeting and quickly allow for searching records or transcribed meeting history. Sales teams can then use the tagging feature to highlight key items that were covered in the meeting such as budget, timelines, or requirements so that it is easy to search through meetings later.
Sales teams often spend a great deal of time on post-meeting activities, whether summarizing meeting notes, creating follow up emails, or generating an opportunity. Copilot for Sales can soon help automate those tasks. When a Teams meeting with prospects or clients ends, the organizer will be able to tie the AI generated meeting summary directly into Dynamics 365 Sales. A sales opportunity can also be quickly created from a meeting summary directly in Dynamics 365 Sales with many fields being auto-populated based on the conversation in the meeting. Finally, follow-up emails can also be automatically generated to serve as a starting point for highlighting next steps.
Sales managers will soon be able to provide better coaching experiences by understanding where deviations from a sales script or knowledge gaps may exist among the sales team. Copilot for Sales will scour through conversations with customers through Microsoft 365 Chat, Copilot for Sales add-in in Outlook, and Copilot for Sales app in Teams to provide sales managers with an analysis of topics that can be had with the sales team.
Copilot in Microsoft Word, which will be powered by Copilot for Sales, will be able to create an automatically generated summary document in preparation for a sales call. This summary document will extract information from Dynamics 365 Sales related to an opportunity and provide participants position and roles from CRM, a summary of the opportunity, a summary of email conversations, open tasks related to an opportunity, and open additional cases and opportunities within the account.
These updates in the 2024 release Wave 2 plan demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to leveraging AI and Copilot to help sales teams achieve their goals even more effectively.
Beginning in late July partners and customers will be able to review some of these new features in a testing environment. Other updates to be validated also include user experience improvements that will automatically be added to production in October.
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