“We want to make sure Dynamics 365 is the most agent-ready business application – that’s the bottom line.” This sentiment was reiterated throughout Satish Thomas’ keynote, “How AI is Redefining Microsoft Business Applications,” on Day 1 of the Biz Apps Partner Executive Summit.
Thomas, who is CVP of Microsoft Industry & Business Solutions, told attendees what it means to be an AI-first company. He explained how Copilot is the UI, agents act autonomously on behalf of users, performing industry and business processes, and the “special sauce” is the human ambition, which “amplifies the AI.”
“It’s not all about agents, it’s not just all about Copilot, but it’s also ‘agents + Copilot + that human ambition’ that makes this so much more powerful.”
Thomas continued to explain that there are levels to being an AI-first company. The first level is humans with assistants. The second level involves human-led agents. Finally, a level three AI-first company is agent-led, human-directed.
Customer support is a strong use case for highlighting the different levels of an AI-first company. Thomas gave a breakdown of these “levels” and how they impact productivity.
Within the customer support industry, Level 1 is defined by a (human) support engineer using Copilot – marked by a 1.5x increase in productivity. Level 2 occurs when agents directly engage with customers, boosting productivity by 3x. Finally, Level 3 occurs when agents are running an entire customer support workflow (and the role of the human or team is to program and create the agents) resulting in a 10x productivity increase.
In order to become an AI-first company, the ecosystem needs AI-first business apps. “How do we think about it foundationally, where intelligence is not just reactive but proactive?” Thomas asked.
Thomas outlined ways to enable AI-driven transformation by leveraging AI-first business apps. Start by using M365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. Next, add Copilot Studio and agents on top of M365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. Finally, add D365 on top of the stack and begin to redesign business functions as a result. The most important part? Ensuring this is fueled by the partner ecosystem. “Don’t wait for your customers to leverage AI agents – partners need to be leveraging this first.”
Thomas closed his keynote on a powerful note: “At least in my career, this whole agentic loop is probably going to be the biggest thing.”
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