The advent of next-generation Artificial Intelligence(AI) is ushering in a new era of heightened productivity and efficiency. This is spurring novel breakthroughs in the supply chain domain. With AI’s transformative influence, the conventional ways of operations managers collaborating with suppliers, vendors, and third-party service providers are being revamped to streamline the entire process.

By collaborating with suppliers and utilizing state-of-the-art AI, Supply Chain managers can enhance supply chain performance and avert logistics disruptions triggered by diverse external factors.

We’re excited to launch Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center,  which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news.

Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center

Over the last few years, numerous companies have realized that their existing supply chain technologies are inadequate to cope with the current environment marked by frequent disruptions, limitations, and scarcities. By leveraging AI-powered supply chain management, businesses can gain unparalleled visibility and invaluable insights, enabling them to proactively address potential disruptions before they materialize.

Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Centerallows for proactive identification of external issues related to weather, finance, and geopolitics that could impact critical supply chain processes.

Predictive insights surface impacted orders, and Copilot helps take action on this insight with contextualized email drafts. This enables supply chain users to collaborate with impacted suppliers in real-time to quickly identify new estimated times of arrival and reroute purchase orders based on weather disruptions or geopolitical tensions.

Organizations can collaborate with their suppliers through customized and contextualized responses to fulfill high-priority customer orders via alternate distribution centers, which ultimately streamline operations and save time. By harnessing the power of generative AI and collaboration, Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center helps Supply Chain managers maintain optimal supply chain performance while also mitigating potential disruptions.

Understanding the functionality of Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center

At present, we are leveraging Copilot to streamline communication regarding supplier news. However, our plan is to expand its application to other areas of our product in the future.

Experience the capabilities of Copilot in Microsoft’s Supply Chain Center by viewing the demonstration video below

Uncovering the Technical Mechanism: How it Works

The following four-step process outlines how supplier news communication is facilitated, as shown in the accompanying diagram:

1. Relevant AI-driven news articles that may impact suppliers are presented to operations managers through Bing Search and our custom Copilot AI model.
2. Customers initiate collaboration by selecting a supplier and the message type (ex, confirm impact on orders etc.) that they wish to send via email.
3. Copilot gathers relevant contextual data and calls Azure Open AI (GPT 3.5) for internal processing.  As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Responsible AI, any generated response passes through a series of checks before being returned to a user. These checks include a series of relevance scores to ensure messages are on-topic and Content Moderation to detect any harmful, controversial, or sensitive content. Though they cannot fully replace human review, such guard rails help ensure the quality of communication via Copilot.
4. An email draft is prepared.

Next-generation AI that is ready for enterprises.

Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly.

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Try Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center

Sign up for the limited preview of Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center. This preview is available for instances in North America using the English US language.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the use of generative AI in the form of Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can significantly optimize supply chain productivity and prevent disruptions caused by external factors. The tool’s ability to proactively identify issues and provide predictive insights allows for swift action and collaboration with suppliers, leading to more efficient and cost-effective supply chain management. Furthermore, the implementation of responsible AI practices ensures the quality of communication via Copilot. Through proactive supplier collaboration, organizations can achieve greater supply chain resilience, agility, and competitive advantage. Interested parties can learn more about Copilot by viewing the demonstration video or signing up for the waitlist.

Learn More

 Read the product documentation.

Not a Microsoft Supply Chain customer yet?  Discover more and sign up for the free trial

The post Optimizing Supply Chain Performance through Collaboration using Generative AI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Since first announcing new AI-powered experiences for Microsoft Viva Sales last month, we’ve given these capabilities a nameCopilot in Viva Salesand introduced new sales scenarios and updates.

All of this is happening in conjunction with the introduction of Dynamics 365 Copilotthe world’s-first AI copilot in both customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and finance applications enterprise resource planning (ERP). To date, tens of thousands of customers have used next-generation AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Copilot and within Microsoft Power Platform. 

Today’s debut of Microsoft 365 Copilot powers even more ways to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. For sellers, the seamless integration of Copilot across Microsoft 365 and Viva Sales (as well as AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) is a powerful combination. It’s a new way to engage prospects and customers, all while freeing up time previously tied up in “busy work”like composing every email from scratch.

As we move into a new era for customer experience, we want to ensure that salespeople feel empowered to focus on what matters, which is deeper engagements with customers. Let’s take a closer look at some of the Copilot capabilities in Viva Sales that make this possible.

Try Viva Sales Today

Use Viva Sales to help sellers be more efficient, productive, and effective.

Get a free 30-day trial

Copilot in Viva Sales automated email replies is now generally available

With Copilot in Viva Sales, AI-generated email replies have now moved from preview into general availability, with more features and enhancements built into the generated response. Here are some of the new additions we’ve made:

• Generate replies with proposed meeting times: Sellers can now generate email replies with proposed meeting times based on their calendar availability in Outlook, making it easier to schedule customer meetings and simplifying the process for finding a time that works for everyone.

• Build upon generated replies by providing additional prompts: To make modifications to the generated reply, sellers can refine the results further by providing a new prompt that builds upon the previous suggestion. This allows sellers to more easily fine-tune their email replies according to their unique needs and preferences.

• Understand the data sources behind generated replies: Sellers can now hover over any highlighted areas of text to view the data sources behind generated replies. This provides sellers with valuable context and transparency regarding where the embedded information comes from, such as any previous meetings or sales data from the CRM.

• Improve future replies by providing feedback: Finally, a new feedback mechanism allows sellers to rate the AI-generated content with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. This helps refine and improve future replies to ensure that Viva Sales continues to adapt to the unique needs of each seller.

Meeting summarization: Quickly and easily send follow-up emails after meetings

One of the best practices for sellers is to follow up on meetings and customer interactions with a clear summary, including the relevant action items or next steps. This takes time to compile, and in the busy world of a seller, manual tasks like this can take days to get to, or are sometimes forgotten. We want to increase the buyer-seller connection by providing quick seller responsiveness, demonstrating the priority of the relationship without needing to hunt out the information to create a personalized response.

With the help of Copilot in Viva Sales, alongside the insight from the call and CRM, we can automate to help jump-start the seller into action.

We use the existing conversation intelligence technology in Viva Sales to provide sellers with meeting insights, together with CRM data and the GPT copilot technology. This creates a super-simple way for sellers to generate meaningful meeting summaries:

• Start composing an email and launch Viva Sales.
• Confirm the relevant meeting to get follow-up content.
• Receive the summary email recommendation that refers to topics you discussed and action items you both committed to, and puts all of this in a well-formed email for your review. It even includes relevant data from your CRM to enrich the reference points.
• Simply add the recommendation to your email, edit to your liking, and send.

The major difference between this experience from our intelligent meeting recaps in Microsoft Teams is how the magic happens in the seller’s inbox, connected to CRM data, in the context and tone of a customer conversation. There is no need to switch screens, and minimal email composition is required. The seller can make minor edits, all from within Outlook.

Watch the Copilot in Viva Sales demo below:

Vision for the future of Viva Sales

With a monthly release cycle, Viva Sales brings innovation to delight sellers. In addition to the above-mentioned features, we have some exciting updates due over the coming months.

Learn more about Viva Sales

Copilot in Viva Sales is a powerful AI-boosted application that can help sellers to be more efficient, productive, and effective. By providing personalized insights, automating routine tasks, and helping sellers to prioritize their efforts, the available solutions can help sellers to close more deals and grow their businesses. If you are a seller looking to take your sales game to the next level, consider giving Viva Sales a try.

If you are not yet a Viva Sales customer, check out our Viva Sales webpage where you can get a free 30-day trial.

Pricing and licensing can be found here, and note that all Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licensed customers will have Viva Sales available at no additional cost.A great reason to get started today!

Want to stay in the loop? Stay connected to the latest improvements before everybody else. We welcome your feedback and ideas in the community feedback forum.

The post Copilot in Viva Sales available as thousands of customers adopt next-generation AI in Dynamics 365 Copilot and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.