Editor’s note: this analysis was updated On Oct. 23 with additional details on products and features highlighted in today’s Business Applications Launch Event held by Microsoft.
As Microsoft prepared for today’s business applications launch event, the company kept its foot squarely on the AI pedal, rolling out new agents for Dynamics 365 that help sales teams drive performance against their goals and improve service teams’ ability to measure quality. It also rolled out a benchmarking tool to help sales leaders measure how AI is helping them meet sales targets.
This week’s introductions include a Sales Close Agent to support the work of driving deals forward and a Quality Evaluation Agent to track service quality, including within contact centers. These agents are “designed to accelerate deal velocity and elevate service quality,” said Bryan Goode, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, in a LinkedIn post about the new agents.
Taken together, the new agents and the benchmarking tool sustain the company’s momentum in building out AI agent functionality and performance tracking in Dynamics 365, with particular focus on the Sales, Service, and Contact Center applications.
The company provided additional details and demonstrations of several of these agents during today’s event.
New Agent Rollouts
The new Sales Close Agent for Dynamics 365 sales helps salespeople assign priority to the most high-value opportunities in their pipeline, proactively identify and address risks with developing deals, and close simple transactions efficiently. This agent, which promises to improve velocity and win rates, enters public preview in the coming days.
Two other sales agents are moving to public preview and general availability in the near term. They are:
- Sales Research Agent, which taps a multi-modal, multi-model architecture while enabling self-service analysis based on deep sales domain expertise
- Sales Qualification Agent, which automates previously manual lead qualification processes
Presenters during today’s event explained how Sales Qualification Agent and Sales Close Agent work together. The two agents address the problem of sales teams lacking capacity to thoroughly evaluate every incoming lead. The Sales Close Agent — referred to as the Deal Close Agent during today’s event — takes qualified leads from Sales Qualification Agent and moves forward, confirming needs, addressing objections, and nurturing the lead to advance it toward a closed deal.
It aims to ensure every opportunity receives appropriate levels of attention and the company does not leave revenue on the table.
Sales Research Agent, meanwhile, provides real-time performance insights, allowing leaders to ask in-depth questions in natural language. A manager could ask, for example, for detailed analysis on opportunities by sales person and which person is creating the most pipeline. The agent will develop a plan to maximize team performance.
For users of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, the new Quality Evaluation Agent gives service team leaders real-time visibility into service quality across human- and AI-led interactions.
The new Quality Evaluation Agent taps into the scalability of AI to evaluate a higher number of cases and conversations than humans could review manually. This facilitates uncovering actionable insights and assessing interactions handled by AI. It monitors quality metrics, detects anomalies and can even initiate corrective actions to boost quality management. Quality Evaluation Agent becomes generally available this week.
Additionally, these service agents are moving to general availability:
- Case Management Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which can create cases autonomously from conversations in voice, live chat, and other digital messaging channels. It can also predict and update case fields autonomously .
- Customer Knowledge Management Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center. This agent can autonomously convert cases and case-related conversations, emails, and notes into knowledge articles.
- Customer Intent Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center. This agent analyzes past interactions between service reps and customers to create an intent library for better understanding of customer needs.
A demo of the Customer Intent Agent showed how agents can understand a customer’s needs, route a given customer to the ideal resource, and resolve cases. It’s designed to address complex scenarios and escalate to humans only when necessary.
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Benchmarking Advances
Given the number and complexity of agents that companies are deploying, there’s a growing need to measure the value of those agents. New benchmarks from Microsoft provide an evaluation framework to measure quality of AI outputs. Specifically, the new Sales Research Bench uses a 100-point scale to measure accuracy, relevance, clarity, and transparency of those outputs.
The tool also evaluates how AI generates text and data visualizations in response to sales leaders’ questions. It runs 200 questions based on the needs of typical sales leaders.
Power Platform AI Enhancements
The Business Applications Launch Event also included details on new Power Platform features focused specifically on Plan Designer, an AI tool introduced earlier this year that helps users design and generate a Power Platform app based on a natural language description of a business problem. With Plan Designer, a team of agents can work with a person to clarify requirements, sketch out processes, explore data, and draft solution components, culminating in the building of an app or agent.
Three new features were outlined in today’s event:
- Agent Feed, which provides real time updates to teams so they’re able to take needed actions quickly.
- Generative Pages for creating new experiences in Power Apps through the use of natural language prompts
- Copilot Hub, which gives IT pros clarity into how agents are being used while ensuring governance and security are being applied and enforced
Tom Smith
Analyst
Cloud Wars, Agent and Copilot
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