Modern enterprises that offer a diverse range of products and services have equally diverse needs and challenges, including managing complex growth, optimizing costs, and ensuring profitability. These organizations require agile solutions that can adapt to evolving business needs and support smarter decision-making. Microsoft is dedicated to addressing these challenges by providing robust, scalable ERP solutions through Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Transform your ERP processes with agents in Dynamics 365

Join us for an exciting session on the future of ERP systems with Dynamics 365.

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Microsoft being recognized as a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric and Product-Centric Enterprises*, from our perspective, highlights the ability of Dynamics 365 to deliver flexible, composable ERP solutions that meet these diverse needs of modern organizations to drive results across financial models, operational processes, and organizational structures.

For example, BDO, one of the largest accounting and advisory networks in the world, successfully unified its complex tax and accounting services using Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Microsoft Copilot. By connecting their data with AI-driven tools, BDO’s teams have gained critical insights and efficiencies with enhanced visibility across projects and clients.

With Dynamics 365 and Copilot, they have streamlined project oversight and empowered their teams with actionable insights, enhancing their service delivery and customer satisfaction. Read the full story here.

Empowering leaders with financial, operational, and organizational agility

For today’s leaders facing complex growth, cost, and profitability challenges, Dynamics 365 provides a scalable ERP system foundations that can adapt to evolving business needs—empowering faster adaptation, smarter decision-making, and optimized performance. This achievement positions Dynamics 365 as an essential partner for leaders committed to transforming their organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly changing markets. 

Financial agility to drive strategic decisions

Leaders today need financial clarity and flexibility to make bold, data-backed decisions—whether for mergers and acquisitions activity, international expansion, adaptive pricing, or new product and service offerings. Dynamics 365 can provide a financial backbone that goes beyond traditional ERP systems, enabling leaders across finance, operations, and strategy to assess complex scenarios, plan for the future, streamline compliance, and mitigate risk. Business models are shifting and hybrid revenue streams like subscription and consumption-based models are becoming more prevalent; Dynamics 365 supports organizations in navigating this complex landscape.

Through embedded analytics and AI-powered insights, like business performance planning and analytics capabilities, Dynamics 365 helps ensure that decision-makers have the financial, operational, and organizational visibility they need to stay agile. By aligning financial operations with strategic goals, leaders can pivot confidently with a product designed to support compliance, enhance audit readiness, and improve security. Dynamics 365 can also empower executives with the insights needed to support rapid, impactful financial decisions, positioning them to meet today’s demands while planning for future growth.

Operational agility to build resilient and adaptive processes

Operational agility is essential for organizations striving to deliver products and services on time, within budget, and at scale. Dynamics 365 equips leaders with tools to help develop resilient processes that can adapt to changes in supply chain dynamics, regulatory environments, and shifting customer expectations. Real-time data and predictive AI-driven insights help organizations proactively manage inventory, resources, and service delivery.

Whether focused on delivering products, services, or a combination of both, Dynamics 365 offers the flexibility to meet diverse customer needs with tailored pricing and delivery models. This scalability enables leaders to optimize operations to drive efficiency, even as market conditions fluctuate. The composable ERP approach of Dynamics 365 helps to ensure that organizations can streamline operations, enabling teams to respond to customer demands with speed, accuracy, and consistency. 

Organizational agility to empower people for strategic impact

In a modern organization, empowering people with the right data and workflows is key to driving strategic impact. Dynamics 365 supports leaders in fostering agile, cross-functional teams that can operate with autonomy, making informed decisions aligned with organizational objectives. A composable architecture—in addition to Copilot and agents—help Dynamics 365 connect employees to the insights they need, promoting a culture of proactive decision-making and collaboration.

This adaptable structure is particularly beneficial for hybrid business models that blend product and service offerings as it breaks down silos, allowing teams to work fluidly across departments. Dynamics 365 supports leaders in building an environment where empowered employees can focus on high-impact work, aligning their efforts to drive outcomes that matter.

Why recognizing Microsoft as a Leader in cloud ERP systems for product and service centric enterprises matters

Industry recognition, such as our inclusion in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report, helps support the unique ability of Dynamics 365 to serve organizations regardless of their business focus, helping to ensure leaders have the tools they need to adapt as business models evolve. For service-centric enterprises, Dynamics 365 delivers essential tools for managing timelines, budgets, and resources. Product-centric organizations benefit from advanced supply chain and manufacturing functionalities that drive efficiency and control.

By supporting evolving business objectives and complex blended business models involving both product- and service-centric operations, Dynamics 365 helps organizations scale confidently. Dynamics 365 further empowers leaders to be agile and responsive, meeting the demands of a diverse and interconnected market.

A strategic approach to ERP modernization

Gartner’s dual Leader recognition of Microsoft, in our view, underscores the strength of Dynamics 365 as a flexible, adaptive ERP solution designed to meet the needs of today’s complex business landscape. By delivering insights and tools that support transformation across financial, operational, and organizational models, including Business performance planning and Copilot, Dynamics 365 empowers leaders to align their strategies with agile, performance-driven ERP systems.

The future of business relies on AI – first business processes with autonomous agents as catalysts transforming how work gets done and how operations are managed. We recently announced new pre-built agents that become part of your workflow autonomizing execution of business processes and performing the tasks alongside your teams like confirming product orders, reconciling financial transactions, and managing time and expense reporting. Your teams can scale better and achieve better business outcomes, including the ability to:

• Consistently meet customer demand on time.
• Enhance cash flow visibility to help make faster and better business decisions.
• Promptly invoice customers and ensure projects stay on track and within budget.

Now more than ever, ERP modernization requires a strategic approach that champions agility, empowers teams, and drives impactful results across the organization. Dynamics 365 provides the foundation for leaders to turn their strategic vision into reality, supporting innovation, resilience, and sustained success in an evolving world.

We invite you to watch an exciting session on the future of ERP systems with Dynamics 365 recorded at Microsoft Ignite 2024. You’ll discover the transformative power of AI in ERP systems and how the latest advancements in generative AI are paving the way for more autonomous ERP processes and scenarios.

For more information on Dynamics 365 AI-driven ERP systems, you can request a demo or take a tour today.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises,” Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson, Dixie John, Tomas Kienast, David Penny, November 11, 2024.

Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises,” Robert Anderson, Denis Torii, Sam Grinter, Naveen Mahendra, Tomas Kienast, Johan Jartelius, November 4, 2024.

The post Microsoft is recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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: 

• Check out the recorded session on Dynamics 365 Sales from Ignite 

• Learn more about Clay for Dynamics 365 Sales  

• Learn more about Dynamics Sales 

• Not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer? Take a tour and start your free trial today. 

The post Customize Dynamics 365 Sales Agents with your data sources and taxonomy appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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. 

• Not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer? Take a tour and start your free trial today. 

The post Boost seller productivity with document summary by Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.