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In today’s world, sellers struggle to meet their goals due to competing priorities, manual processes and increased customer expectations. Most spend their time on administrative and non-selling tasks. However, it’s now the age of AI. Agents help free up sellers’ time to focus on higher value activities, engaging customers and moving them through sales cycles faster. For example, the recently announced Sales Qualification Agent (available soon in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) automatically researches and prioritizes inbound leads and develops personalized sales emails to initiate sales conversations.
This week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced new capabilities to further enhance agents in Dynamics 365 Sales by grounding them in your company’s unique data and taxonomy, as well as enriching the agents’ knowledge with third-party data. This allows the agent to assess a lead’s intent to buy with greater precision, while saving sellers precious time they may currently spend piecing together information from disparate sources. These capabilities will be rolling out in early 2025.
Enhance Copilot and agents with your business terminology and knowledge sources
Organizations will be able to enhance their interactions with Copilot and agents by training them to understand and use specific business acronyms and terms through a customized glossary. This means tailoring AI to the unique language and terminology of a particular business or industry, improving interactions with Copilot and enabling agents to perform tasks on your behalf with higher relevancy.
For example, if a company frequently uses the acronym “TCV” to refer to “total contract value,” they can train the agent to recognize and use this term instead of the more generic “estimated revenue for opportunities.” This customization ensures that the agent’s work aligns with the company’s internal language, improving communication and reducing misunderstandings.
Additionally, organizations will be able to add various knowledge sources to Copilot and agents, such as documents created in Word or Excel, files from SharePoint and tables from databases and lake houses such as Microsoft Fabric or Azure SQL, to complement the Sales data in Dataverse. Agents are built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, which announced new knowledge integrations this week at Ignite and will continue expanding the portfolio–meaning access to even more options over time. This allows the agent to leverage the full power of your organizational data, no matter where it is stored or which apps you use.
By incorporating a business-specific glossary and relevant knowledge sources, the agent becomes more powerful, capable of understanding and responding in a way that is consistent with the company’s unique terminology and data needs.
Enrich your CRM with data from third party enrichment providers
Integrations with third-party data providers and Dynamics 365 Sales, as listed on AppSource, provide data and insights to augment the agents’ customer understanding beyond conventional sources.
We announced a new data integration with Clay, a leading enrichment and orchestration provider. Clay combines first-party data with over 100 enrichment providers and an AI research agent, maximizing data coverage to create a more comprehensive view of the customer.
Through the integration between Microsoft and Clay, Dynamics 365 Sales customers can add insights that would typically not be available in first party sources, such as valuation of private companies, headcount, key competitors and more. With these additional insights seamlessly synced back to Dynamics 365 Sales, agents can perform tasks with more precision, such as identifying leads that fit your ideal customer profile or their intent to buy.
We’ve designed this integration to be user-friendly and efficient. Here’s how it works:
Setting Up Connection: You can easily connect Dynamics 365 Sales to Clay using the out-of-the-box integration and select the specific data tables and fields you want to enrich.
Populating Insights: Once set up, you can enrich your selected Dynamics tables with a variety of insights that can help your sales teams – either from one of 100+ data providers or from scraping public web sources through Clay’s AI agent.
Automatic Synchronization: The enriched data is then synchronized back to Dynamics 365 Sales automatically, ensuring that your agents always have access to accurate and up-to-date information.
Clay joins other integrations already available on Microsoft’s AppSource that can similarly augment your first party data. While data-hungry autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 Sales work tirelessly on behalf of your sales team to reduce time spent while increasing the number of closed deals, these integrations feed unique insights to them to power even the most complex sales playbooks.
Summary
In summary, you can customize your agent to meet your business needs by integrating relevant data sources that are bespoke to your business. You can configure the agent to use your business-specific terminology and response styles, ensuring it aligns with your internal language. Finally, enrich your data with one of the many data enrichment integrations and ensure a perfectly optimized agent for your requirements.
Take the next step
Today’s sellers need the right data and tools to find, qualify, and close deals – all while offering personalized engagement at every step. The innovations introduced this week at Microsoft Ignite can not only help sellers with time-consuming sales activities but also provide access to actionable insights and superior agent performance to build stronger customer relationships and win more business.
To learn more about these updates and how they can benefit your organization, be sure to explore the resources below:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a daily habit for people around the world—already, nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using it. Dow anticipates that Copilot will save it millions of dollars on shipping operations in the first year; at Bank of Queensland Group, 70% of users are saving two and a half to five hours per week; Eaton is speeding up internal documentation processes by 83%; and Accenture is going big, rolling out Copilot to 100,000 employees.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Sellers often need to manage numerous long documents to understand customers’ unique requirements and deliver the personalized attention advancing deals. These documents require sellers to invest significant time reviewing and understanding them, leaving sales team less time for their customers. With the summarization capabilities provided by Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can now obtain pertinent details from sales documents in minutes. Sellers quickly gain insights into customer requirements, budget details, timelines, and main decision makers, enabling them to prepare for prospect meetings more effectively and engage in more informed and meaningful conversations.
Close deals faster with seller-specific document summary
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales can create summaries of sales documents that include insights specific to your sales team’s needs. For example, sellers can quickly get details about the issuing organization, items to be procured, deadlines and timelines for submitting a proposal, contact information and meetings with stakeholders mentioned in the document, and other important information needed to move a deal forward, such as compliance and legal considerations.
Sellers can ask Copilot to summarize sales documents stored in SharePoint or associated with any lead, contact, opportunity, and account in Dynamics 365 Sales.
Next steps
Learn more about summarizing documents linked to records in Dynamics 365 Sales.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
For Microsoft and our customers, work is changing at the speed of AI. To help you stay ahead, we’ll share monthly highlights of new Microsoft Copilot innovations, plus the latest from our customers on how they’re getting the most value from Copilot.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In an era where seamless network management and enhanced performance are paramount, the release of Network ATC, Network HUD, and AccelNet for Windows Server 2025 marks a significant milestone. These groundbreaking innovations are designed to optimize the way we manage, monitor, and accelerate network operations, promising unprecedented efficiency and reliability.
Network ATC
Historically, deployment and management of networking for Failover clusters has been complex and error prone. The configuration flexibility with the host networking stack means there are many moving parts that can be easily misconfigured or overlooked. Keeping up with the latest best practices is also a challenge as improvements are continuously made to the underlying technologies. Additionally, configuration consistency across failover cluster nodes is vital for reliability.
Network ATC simplifies the deployment and network configuration management for Windows Server 2025 clusters. It provides an intent-based approach to host network deployment. Customers specify one or more intents (management, compute, or storage) for a network adapter, and we automate the deployment of the intended configuration.
Network ATC helps to:
Reduce host networking deployment time, complexity, and errors
Deploy the latest Microsoft-validated and supported best practices
Ensure configuration consistency across the cluster
Eliminate configuration drift
One of the greatest benefits of Network ATC is its ability to remediate configuration drift. Have you ever wondered “who changed that?” or said, “we must have missed this node.” You’ll never worry about this again with Network ATC at the helm. Expanding the cluster to add new nodes? Simply install the feature on the new node, join the cluster and within minutes, the expected configuration will be deployed.
For more details about deploying and managing Network ATC on Windows Server 2025, please check here: Deploy host networking with Network ATC. You can manage Network ATC through Powershell cmdlets or Windows Admin Center.
Figure: Network ATC management in Windows Admin Center
Network HUD (Coming Soon)
Network HUD is an upcoming Windows Server 2025 feature that will proactively identifies and remediates operational network issues.
Managing a network for business applications is challenging. Ensuring stability and optimization requires coordination across the physical network (switches, cabling, NICs), host operating system (virtual switches, virtual NICs), and the applications running in VMs or containers. Each component has its own configurations and capabilities, often managed by different teams. Even with a perfect setup, a bad configuration elsewhere in the network can degrade performance.
The complexity of managing these components has reached an all-time high, with numerous tools and technologies involved. Windows Server OS provides a wealth of information through event logs, performance counters, and tools, but analyzing this data when issues arise requires expertise and time, often after the problem has occurred.
Network HUD excels by analyzing real-time data from event logs, performance counters, tools like Pktmon, network traffic, and physical devices to identify issues before they happen. In many cases, it prevents issues by adjusting your system to avoid exacerbating problems. When prevention isn’t possible, Network HUD alerts you with actionable messages to resolve the issue.
Network HUD leverages capabilities in the physical switch to ensure that your configuration matches the physical network. For example, it can determine whether the locally connected switchports have the correct VLAN settings and the correct data center bridging configuration required for RDMA storage traffic to function.
Network HUD is built as a true cloud service that runs on-premises. It will ship as an Arc extension and will be part of Windows Server Azure Arc Management (WSAAM) services. This allows us to bring in more capabilities and make these available to you as soon as they are ready.
AccelNet
Accelerated Networking simplifies the management of single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for virtual machines hosted on Windows Server 2025 clusters. SR-IOV provides a high-performance data path that bypasses the host, which reduces latency, jitter, and CPU utilization for the most demanding network workloads. This is particularly useful in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments, Real-time applications such as financial trading platforms, and virtualized network functions.
The following figure illustrates how two VMs communicate with and without SR-IOV.
Without SR-IOV, all networking traffic in and out of the VM traverses the host and the virtual switch. With SR-IOV, network traffic that arrives at VM’s network interface (NIC) is forwarded directly to VM.
SR-IOV has been available in Windows Server since 2012 R2 days. So, what benefit does AccelNet provide?
Prerequisite checking: Informs users if the Windows Server cluster hosts support SR-IOV, checking for OS version and hyperthreading status among other things.
Host Configuration: Ensures SR-IOV is enabled on the correct vSwitch that hosts virtual machine workloads and allows configuration of reserve nodes in case of failover to prevent resource over-subscription.
Simplified VM performance settings: It can be overwhelming to identify how many queue pairs may be needed for a VM that is being enabled through SR-IOV. AccelNet abstracts performance settings into “Low,” “Medium,” and “High” to simplify configuration.
Health Monitoring and Diagnostics: Leverages Network HUD to identify and remediate configuration/performance related issues. Examples include NIC SR-IOV support, Live migration management, etc. (Coming Soon)
Simplified management with Windows Admin Center: All AccelNet management functionality is available through Powershell and with an easy-to-use UI through Windows Admin Center (Latter coming Soon).
AccelNet is part of Windows Server Azure Arc Management (WSAAM) services. To learn more about Accelnet, please check here.
As organizations continue to navigate the challenges of an ever-evolving digital landscape, the integration of these advanced features into Windows Server 2025 ensures they are equipped with the tools needed to achieve excellence in network management and performance. Embrace the future of networking with Windows Server 2025 and experience the transformative power of Network ATC, Network HUD, and AccelNet.
We are excited to share all these innovations with you. Upgrade to Windows Server 2025 to try out these features, we look forward to your feedback. For any suggestions, opinions or issues, please reach out to us at edgenetfeedback@microsoft.com.
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