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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot: How Generative AI is Streamlining Sales, Marketing, and Services Processes

In this video, I share my thoughts on Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Copilot and the benefits of new technologies, like Generative AI, to increase productivity for businesses– especially sales and marketing organizations. As businesses look to new technologies to enable their sales and marketing teams to be more successful, and provide better customer service, especially in the current economic landscape– I believe solutions like Microsoft’s Dynamic 365 Copilot are providing powerful tools to do more with less.

This webcast covers:

  • The current technological and economic challenges facing sales, marketing and customer service-centered organizations
  • The benefits Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot offers businesses, particularly the reduction of manual tasks and improving critical client-outreach
  • An overview of Generative AI, as well as the problems and key productivity issues that tools like Generative AI help to solve
  • The significance of the customer experience when considering increased consumer expectations, given that 70% of customers would switch to another company after a single negative experience
  • How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot is revolutionizing the way we work, offering game-changing solutions that save time and money

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamic 365 Copilot here, or watch the full video here:

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: In a tougher macroeconomy. There are so many challenges for companies right now. Revenue driven sales organizations are under significant pressure to keep the revenue spigots on while doing so, and often cases with less resources. Marketing is being tasked by sales being pushed, “Hey, what are we getting from marketing? How is marketing enabling our sales team to be more successful?” And then of course, behind the sales and marketing organization tends to lie services, and whether you’re a retailer or an e-commerce company or you’re a B2B organization, the ability to service your customers is a massive challenge for organizations.

And so, really even in a easier or stronger economy than we’re in right now, these things are always challenges for businesses, but in this current market, they are even more significant. In sales, companies are right now charging forward and saying, “How do we maximize our growth, maximize our revenue, and do so in the most efficient way possible?”

We all know it comes down once you have the right people in their seats to the right technology serving as an enabler. This might be how do we get proposals put together quicker? How do we get emails out and responses to customers in a more timely fashion? How do we make sure that what is being sent, that the proposal that’s being generated is accurate and as competitive as possible? In this world, there’s such an opportunity to apply technology to enable those things to go faster.

And then you look at things like marketing. How do we generate better product marketing support, update websites, create integrations and chatbots that exists inside an organization that can provide real-time feedback to customers so that they have less weight? So, you go from sales to marketing to services, and this has to be super fluid. So, this is a big challenge, but there’s also a lot of opportunities because as we see the new technologies coming to market, especially generative AI, we see how a lot of those kind of mundane tasks can be automated in a way that’s very human, that feels very interactive and that enables people that are in roles today to do more in less time to get more done and drive that greater productivity, which leads to those sales, those marketing and those service outcomes that companies are looking for.

Recently, Microsoft announced its Dynamics 365 copilot and generative AI. This is a tool that offers a number of benefits and in many cases it’s all about reducing the manual tasks, and this helps employees and customers get more done. You may have heard me speak a little bit about the ability for a company to say, have a salesperson be able to respond to an email more quickly. Well, perhaps you’ve seen this before with some sort of autofill in an email, but what if you could actually take a meeting and then suddenly have that follow up email pre-generated, maybe even include a proposal just based upon what was in a Teams meeting, for instance, that is an amazing capability that could enable so many salespeople to get so much done more quickly, or say you’re nervous about creating this great PowerPoint deck.

We’ve seen some tools that have come up to help our designs, and this is something that has been in the market for a little while, but what about the ability to really shape, say, being able to take a product marketing document combined with a proposal and then have those be influential in the design through generative AI of a PowerPoint presentation that could be utilized and even fit to form. Say, you only want five slides, or say you want it done with certain color pallets or bullets or including of a certain brand archetype, all this can be done, it can be done incredibly powerfully and seamlessly using Dynamics 365.

And this is really impressive and this is something that is being created across the industry. Software companies like Microsoft are doing a really great job rolling it out. It’s been exciting to watch all the innovation coming and of course all the competition. As an analyst, that’s something that excites me very much.

Generative AI overall is such a big topic right now. When you think about what companies are trying to accomplish, how fast they’re trying to move, the challenges of driving back office operations and finances, but then of course, sales, services, and marketing, the need for speed is often the differentiator. We know that leads need to be converted in really short order. We know that sales teams have too much to do. It takes too long to reply, and sometimes getting that fast reply out is a difference between a yes and a no. We know that optimizing a proposal or even creating a professional looking proposal can be a challenge for some companies, and it’s certainly a challenge to do this fast enough. These are all things that generative AI are going to be able to help with.

Now, I want to stop for a minute here. We know that there are very influential people out there that are saying, “Hey, should we move fast with AI? Are we moving too fast with AI? Do we need to slow down?” The speed of which generative AI has come into the market and started to influence our search, influence our productivity apps, and influence our collaboration, has certainly happened at a pace that could be a bit disconcerting for some people, and that’s okay. I think the thing about change and the ability to embrace changes, understanding how companies should be thinking about it, implementing it and utilizing it, the tech industry is going to be focused on not only delivering these kinds of capabilities that yes are enabling companies to do more with less, but they also are going to enable people to work on more interesting work to be able to have people doing mundane design tasks or writing press releases to be able to focus their talents on spruiking them up or creating even more exciting graphical work or the integration or the storytelling that is going to go alongside generative AI.

Microsoft calls it a copilot, and I like the way they describe it, and that could be an 80% copilot that could be a 90% copilot, but if you think about an airplane right now, many planes can fly on their own, but the reason there’s still a pilot up front is because you need it for; A, obviously the most disastrous circumstances, but more so it’s for the fact that the co-pilot does 80% or 90% and allows the pilots to focus on the important and critical work that you wouldn’t want to leave up to AI solely. And so, in my opinion, while we have a lot of work to do on the ethics of AI, we’ve got considerable work to do on understanding the impacts from a sustainability standpoint, and then of course how AI looks at things like diversity and inclusion, and making sure that it really does see the world as equally as possible.

We have so much exciting opportunity to apply AI to make some of the worst parts of our jobs better, and this is something we spend a lot of time studying, we’ve spent a lot of time talking to salespeople about, and we do believe, moreover that the impacts and capabilities of generative AI are more positive, and despite the fact that we do have some challenges and those challenges will continue to be tackled over the longest periods of time, like every other industrial revolution of the past. AI will be implemented, it will bring our society forward, and it will create more opportunities for those of us even though it may not feel that way today.

If there’s anything that AI can help, it’s also going to be customer service. I’ve talked a little bit about sales. I talked a little bit about marketing and those things are definitely going to get a big boost from generative AI, but the fact is we have become a society of I want it now. I want an answer now. I want a delivery now. I want the immediate opportunity to get what I want right now. I want it to be in the right channel at the right time. I want it to be real time. I want the answer to be good. That’s a lot of stress for an organization, and this is something that AI can really help.

We all know that automation call trees, calling your credit card company or calling your airline, uff terrible. We all know that some of the early iterations of chatbots, not a great experience, they didn’t really do much and that really wasn’t a great reflection of AI. But with generative AI and the ability for it to continue to learn and train and improve, they joke about the useful wrong answers, Microsoft in its earliest iterations, but that’s because AI continues to improve as it continues to be used. And especially with generative AI, the ability to take many cases, say, customers have asked the same questions over and over again and learn how to reply, how to handle different languages, geographies, different challenges, and even being able to handle the multi-term complexities of AI, generative AI is going to change the game.

And so, while companies are kind of exploring how do we handle customer service and customer experience better, it’s going to be a combination of the same old being a customer-centric, customer led organization that really cares. This is going to be also one of those great upskilling opportunities. This is how do we take the talent that we have, the people and the personnel that are trained to handle the toughest and most difficult customer situations and make sure that they’re always in front of the most difficult and challenging situations so that customers can get more, and that those lower tier needs, those lesser complex needs can be handled by generative AI. It’s really exciting.

And so, those that maybe feel some doubt or some uncertainty about the impact and it’s potentially replacing or displacing humans, I think this is all about enabling the smallest problems and challenges to be constantly and rapidly solved by technology and the bigger problems to be given to those people that know how to handle them and can utilize the technology, but can couple that with the human empathy that is required for great customer service. And if it isn’t clear by now, our work will be disrupted. And disruption can feel sad or negative, but I think of disruption as something that we should all be really excited about.

I mean, imagine that we didn’t have the advent of the internet or imagine that the iPhone never came to fruition. What would our world look like? Imagine streaming didn’t happen and we were still going to our mailbox and opening envelope packets to get DVDs out. Heck, imagine if the DVD didn’t happen and we were still spinning cassette tapes and VHS with our pencils. I think you get my point, but in the end, disruption is exciting and it’s good and it’s going to revolutionize the way we work. The copilot, the ability to take a few bullet points and turn it into a PowerPoint, the ability to take a complex product marketing document and create a press release, the ability to generate an email based upon a Teams conversation that can be sent out and then create a proposal that could go out through Salesforce that is really exciting.

Companies all are facing similar struggles in this macroeconomy, and even when the economy improves, companies are always going to be under pressure to sell more, be more efficient, deliver greater profit margins, and of course deliver happiness. I believe that with Dynamics 365 copilot, we are going to immediately see greater levels of productivity and those generative AI challenges will persist. The continued need to be trained and for learning and for reinforcement to make sure that the answers are good, that the proposals are good. This is why generative is copilot in the case of what Microsoft is doing and people and humans work alongside, is to take a lot of help that you’re getting from generative AI, add the human touch, make it exactly how you want it and put it out in front of the customer. But if you can reduce 20% time, let alone 80% or 90% time on certain mundane and repetitive tasks, not to mention some creative tasks, you can get a lot of time back. That generates a lot of productivity. A lot of productivity means growth and for businesses that is good.

And for the people, it’s good too, because it takes the mundane out of our lives. It gives opportunities for more of us to do more, to grow more, and to be excited about the work that we do every day.

 

 

Author Information

Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.

From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.

A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.

An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.

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