We’ve written a separate blog post discussing some of the most useful Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Sales. We want to add to that conversation by discussing another new feature that is designed to help you enter data faster, and this new feature is called form fill.

Business Central has included the occasional AI feature here and there for a while now, but recently, with Microsoft’s 2024 Release Wave 1, more and more are being added. Though all these features prove useful for various needs, there are five features we believe are most valuable to our clients and the broader Business Central user base.

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. Copilot is Microsoft’s answer for how to begin integrating AI into your normal business processes and includes a variety of tools to improve efficiency, such as providing summaries and generating email content ideas.

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

Dynamics 365 Copilot is the newest AI feature that helps users save time when working in Business Central and the rest of the Dynamics 365 CRM suite. Copilot is your new AI-assistant, taking your previous work and other inputs to generate content for you – from emails and presentations to proposal drafts and beyond. It is the ultimate idea starter to get you going with new material that you can use as-is or edit to fit your needs.

Often, there are too many disconnected apps at play in the workplace, so the challenge is to ensure that any additional app you add to your tech stack is multifaceted and adds tangible value to your work process. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide useful tools to teams who attract leads, build rapport with opportunities, and support current clients. Here are a few of the ways that CRM apps within the Dynamics 365 suite can be more than just a CRM.

Piecing together fragmented processes is a great start for businesses looking to optimize the way their tech stack operates from day-to-day, and as tedious as it may seem to find technology solutions that keep your business running, implementing an all-in-one business management solution is one of the most effective tools you can deploy for your organization. Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-native ERP system made to address common business pain points to keep your day running smoothly, ensure cross-company teams stay in sync, and to promote visibility into key operations and workflows.

Manufacturers value efficiency, automation, and the ability to forecast orders, sales, inventory, and other important elements of their business. Considering these values, it’s perhaps a curious thing, or maybe not so curious, that many manufacturers use their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for customer relationships management (CRM) activities, or else they don’t use any solution for CRM at all. Considering the myriad benefits of CRM functionality—from lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, data analysis, automated marketing campaigns, event management, branded landing pages and forms, email creation, and so much more—it’s a wonder how a business could get by on the limited customer relationship functions a typical ERP provides.

This whitepaper is a brief and comprehensive guide to module capabilities, licensing, and other pertinent details of the ERP—such as machine and work centers, subcontracting, capacity planning, and more. Read about the differences between Business Central Manufacturing and Business Central Jobs, get a glimpse of the user interface, and check out other resources to help you narrow your ERP discovery.

Things like real-time customer journeys, recommended actions, SMS messaging, and using natural language to create targeted segments are exciting (and relatively new) features that can help you connect with customers in the ways that matter most. Now, AI has been harnessed in Dynamics 365 Marketing for a new, imaginative feature called Content ideas.

Here’s how to use Content ideas to quickly generate on-message content to create personalized customer experiences:

The search is always on for how businesses can achieve more with the effort they put in. To achieve the goal of more results with less effort, the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 Release Wave 2 focuses on engaging customers across all touchpoints when that contact will have the most impact, personalizing customer interactions using their own data for a heightened sense of connectivity, and making the strong and speedy business decisions that are afforded to Microsoft customers through AI-driven analytics.

The supply chain is a living, fluctuating entity that can be studied, its motions anticipated. Manufacturers of all types—whether they be agile, discrete, process, custom, etc.—require strong forecasting skills to stay on top of that entity and meet customer demand. The better a business can forecast and anticipate what is to come, the faster they can produce product and get it to their customer, the higher their customer satisfaction, and the more sales they are likely to make.

Effective marketing strategies and tactics are designed to cultivate enough interest to make sure each sales-focused interaction has a stable foundation. Creating lead scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing autogenerates a score to indicate each contact or account’s likelihood of closing a deal based on interactions with websites, emails, events, and more. Scoring leads allows users to focus on the most quality prospects by cutting through cluttered sales pipelines and highlighting each lead’s progress towards becoming sales ready.

Continued advancement of communication technology has provided marketers with the tools to reach audiences faster and on a broader level. As such, marketers need to keep moving faster and faster to stay ahead and keep their customers engaged.

Marketing automation tools like customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing allow for that instant connection to be made when potential customers first express interest. Coming up in April, Microsoft will be releasing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities for preview.