New Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot innovations for supply chain, sales, and service join the 2024 release wave 1

Sellers, service agents, and supply chain professionals share a common goal: delivering quality goods and services to customers on time, every time. Today, we are announcing new experiences for Microsoft Dynamics 365 that help professionals across business functions to collaboratively solve challenges, streamline workflows, and focus on what matters most—key factors for transformative customer experiences. These new products and capabilities join hundreds of other features launching between April and September as part of the 2024 release wave 1.

Innovations announced include:

• New AI demand planning capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium, a new product offering that’s now available.
• New AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations to improve operational processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences, from sales to service.
• Updates to Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service, extending Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions that integrate with your existing contact center, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and productivity apps.

New AI capabilities with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium

In October 2023, we announced the public preview of new demand planning capabilities for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. These capabilities are available today in a new product offering, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium. The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. By combining insights with streamlined collaboration, planners can have an increased level of trust for a more reliable forecast. Customers like Poloplast, an Austrian pipe manufacturer, is using Dynamics 365 to enhance its demand planning and forecasting.      

“The storage space allocation of our goods has improved because it is now based on statistical methods surfaced in Dynamics 365 … . We have seen a measurable reduction in external storage costs as a result, significantly less than what we used to require.”

Holger Kreisel: Head of Enterprise Resource Planning, Poloplast

With general availability, we are also adding several new capabilities that significantly enhance demand planning. Users can engage with Copilot-provided data insights that bring a new level of intelligence and automation to demand forecasting, and allowing for more accurate and data-driven decision-making. The new product phase-in-phase-out process helps support smoother transitions in product life cycles, minimizing disruptions and optimizing inventory levels. The introduction of row-level security enhances data protection, allowing for granular access control and safeguarding of sensitive information. Moreover, the new cell-level commenting feature complements the existing plan-level commenting, providing users with the flexibility to annotate specific data points. This fosters a more detailed and collaborative planning process, where insights and context can be shared directly within the demand planning workspace.

New AI capabilities help boost seller productivity and close deals faster

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to bring new capabilities that extend customer insights and boost sales through intelligence, collaborative selling, and Copilot-enhanced sales processes. A new proposal summary feature recaps important details within lengthy customer proposals associated with a specific contact, opportunity, lead, or account. The summary briefs sellers on the budget, authority (decision maker), need and timeline gleaned from the proposal or agreement documents, and recommends next best steps.

Additionally, sellers can access enhanced AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations in the flow of work, including in the immersive Copilot homepage, helping them stay on top of active customer email conversations and post-meeting actions to move deals forward faster.

New lead qualification enhancements enable sellers to assign opportunities to the right seller, view an AI-generated lead qualification summary, and create multiple opportunities from a single lead. These features will be available in public preview in mid-May 2024.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales introduces new generative AI capabilities that enable sellers to access sales-specific skills, data, and actions from within Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook and Microsoft Teams. With the new conversation intelligence platform, managers can measure and guide their sellers’ activities without physically shadowing them. Sales managers can use this dashboard to coach sellers to improve their sales interactions, understand customers and analyze market trends, and get insights which will help you build a sales strategy. You can download the public preview here, available since March 15.

Activity orchestration across various accounts and activities is one of the biggest challenges for sellers. When sellers work in a collaboration space in Teams, Copilot will monitor conversations and suggest tasks based on the selling team’s activities. Once accepted, the tasks are automatically generated with assigned owners. Sellers can add a tab in the collaboration space to access and view the status of tasks assigned to team members. This capability will be generally available in mid-April 2024.

New AI innovations continue to boost agent productivity and deliver personalized experiences

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to deliver innovations that empower agents to accelerate case resolution and provide exceptional customer experiences. Agents can now get a succinct overview of the most recent and significant updates related to any record in the Dynamics 365 timeline, and swiftly catch up in just a single click. Copilot generates the streamlined timeline highlights, summarizing key developments from various activities, such as those in emails, notes, and conversations, enhancing agent productivity by minimizing unnecessary clicks and lengthy scrolling. This helps agents to have faster and clearer interactions with customers to meet their expectations.

Agents can also conveniently use Copilot inline right within the email editor, in addition to the side panel, to generate contextual draft email responses. They can refine their existing drafts with follow-up custom prompts and single-clicks, using Copilot without requiring any knowledge articles. Together, these enhancements make navigation in the workspace more flexible and deliver an easier email authoring experience. The capabilities will be generally available in North America this month with a subsequent planned rollout for other regions.

In addition to currently supported knowledge sources such as Microsoft SharePoint, Copilot can now be extended to access customer, product or case data in Microsoft Dataverse, with prompt plug-in support. Agents can get a unified experience using these plug-ins, as they no longer need to switch to other tabs and tools to connect to information residing in Microsoft Dataverse. Agents save time as well, as Copilot can automatically identify the right prompt plug-in needed, based on the question being asked and through a deep understanding of the intent implied by the question. Available in public preview later this month, support for prompt plug-ins created in Microsoft Copilot Studio helps agents deliver faster resolution and increased customer satisfaction.

AI innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel capabilities also significantly uplevel self-service automation, redirecting more cases that would be typically escalated to an agent. Customers can engage with a robust conversational AI driven experience, with IVR enhancements that now include fine-tuning speech for optimized authoring, improved speech recognition accuracy, and an overall better customer experience when dealing with interrupts, latencies, and information collection.

Additionally, Copilot for Service features previously available in preview status will reach general availability later this month. These include the ability to use Copilot in Outlook and Teams to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and more. Download the Copilot for Service app to experience Copilot for Service in Teams and Outlook.

In May, we will introduce in preview the ability for agents to ask Copilot for answers to questions about CRM data—such as case, contact, or knowledge details, as well as use Copilot to summarize case details.  

Be sure to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan, in the release planner.

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in to the Business Applications Launch Event this Wednesday, April 10, at 9 AM Pacific Time for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.