Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales
AI has been rapidly spreading as a powerful tool to increase productivity and aid workers across industries. It is still early for this technology, but properly leveraging and adapting to its uses now will make it more useful as it continues to advance. If your company uses Microsoft business solutions such as Dynamics 365 Sales or Business Central, you’ve probably been seeing Copilot in your app recently. (If you use BC, check out our other blog all about Copilot in Business Central!) Copilot is Microsoft’s answer for how to begin integrating AI into your normal business processes.
Sales teams often have many leads and accounts they manage. As they build up, it may become more difficult to always remain fully on top of their workload, which can reduce a seller’s ability to maintain a more personalized experience for their customers. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales aims to help keep the balance through a variety of tools to improve efficiency, such as providing summaries and generating email content ideas.
Copilot features
The Copilot panel will often automatically slide out on the right side when you open up an app, but if you’re ever looking for it you can find the icon on the right navigation.
One of the easiest things to do with Copilot is quickly collate information on your lead and opportunity records. Clicking into the chat box also gives a few suggested options for common requests. When you start typing the record name, it’ll act like you’re using a lookup field and show you results for what you type.
Copilot can collate info on leads and opportunities so you can stay up-to-date.
The summaries generated by Copilot are also customizable. The fields used in the summaries can be added and removed by an administrator. If you have more specific customizations to your system or make more use of fields that aren’t included by default, reach out to your system administrator or Microsoft partner to adjust as needed!
Admin can add and remove what generates in Copilot summaries under “General Settings” in the Sales Hub App Settings area.
What you missed summaries
Everyone has had that overwhelming feeling of coming back after a few days off and trying to catch up on all the emails and updates from when you were out. Copilot can help alleviate that stress by collecting the recent updates to your assigned records. Similar to the record summaries, the fields included in the summaries can be adjusted by an administrator. To use this element of Copilot, you’ll want to make sure your administrator has turned on auditing for that type of record.
Copilot can collect recent record updates, which is especially helpful when you’ve been out of office for a while.
Content generation
Probably one of the more popularly known elements of our current AI technology is its ability to generate conversational text. Microsoft has included this in Copilot through email content generation for your leads and opportunities, as well as the ability to summarize your past email conversations. It’s a great way to get the basic structure of an email set up with all the key points you need. However, as is true with all AI technology, you’ll probably want to give it a read through and adjust it to make it sound a bit more like you. Sometimes AI content can sound a bit…robotic.
Copilot can generate email content for your leads and opportunities, which you can then use as-is or edit to your needs.
Turning on and off
You probably have seen that Copilot functionality has been automatically turned on for most users. But, if AI is not something you or your company wants to incorporate right now, that is totally okay!
Your system administrator can disable Copilot in CRM on an app-by-app basis through the App Settings area of the Sales Hub app. It’s in the same place you would go to adjust the fields included within summaries and record catch-up. You can also reach out to Syvantis as your Microsoft partner for assistance.
You can enable and disable Copilot as needed.
2024 Release Wave 1 – Copilot features to watch
At the end of the day, AI is still a very new technology that will continue to be iterated upon. As it stands now, it may not be something that you find worthwhile. However, with the baseline that’s been shown and the theoretical infinite ceiling, it’s likely to be a tool that will be deeply integrated within everyday tasks across all industries. Microsoft is continuing to invest in AI and Copilot as we can see in their recently released plans for the Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1. We’ll have a separate overview blog of that out soon. Copilot is no small part of the updates. Some of these upcoming features include:
Sales document and literature recommendations for customers, including pulling specific answers to questions from the content of the documents
Stakeholder profiles
There are a lot of interesting upcoming features. Even if Copilot is not something that would work for you now, keep it on your radar! If you’ve been dabbling a bit into Copilot and want to get a bit more assistance or more info on how your company may be able to leverage Copilot, be sure to reach out to us at Syvantis!