Introduction:

In the ever-evolving landscape of business operations, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management has been a trusted companion for organizations, offering a robust suite of features to streamline processes. However, with its rich functionality, there often comes a learning curve for users. They require guidance to harness the full potential of the software. Enter the innovative in-app help guidance powered by Microsoft Copilot, which is set to transform the user experience.

Unleashing the Power of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management:

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides a wide array of tools to support diverse business processes. Yet, mastering this complexity often necessitates training and hands-on experience. Traditionally, users relied on experts, partners, or Microsoft support for guidance. But now, a revolutionary solution is at hand.

Introducing Copilot’s capability for In-App Help Guidance:

Copilot brings AI-driven capabilities into Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. One powerful capability delivers contextual help and guidance right into the application. This capability has arrived in public preview.
Here’s a closer look at how it functions:

Harnessing Public Documentation

The Copilot capability for help and guidance is grounded on the extensive repository of public documentation on Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features. It employs generative AI to craft precise responses to user queries based on the understanding of the documentation it has been grounded on.

Contextual Assistance

Users can seamlessly and conversationally engage through Copilot within the application. They can pose questions related to their current context, and the Copilot, armed with a wealth of documentation, provides tailored and context-aware guidance.
In the future, it will facilitate direct navigation to specific pages within the application and suggest relevant actions to complete users’ tasks.

Real-World Applications:

The Copilot’s in-app help and guidance proves invaluable in various scenarios. For instance:

1. Onboarding New Users: As new business users join, they often require assistance in understanding the application’s functionality and workflows. Copilot can answer questions like, “How do I navigate the procurement process?” or “What steps are involved in inventory management?“
2. Immediate Problem Solving: Users can seek instant solutions to challenges they encounter while using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Whether it’s configuring settings or troubleshooting issues, Copilot is there to help.
3. Reducing Training Costs: Small and medium-sized enterprises often invest heavily in training their workforce on new ERP systems. The in-app help guidance feature minimizes training expenses by enabling users to rapidly familiarize themselves with the software.

Step-by-Step Experience:

Let’s take a journey with Alice, a Purchaser who is new to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Alice is eager to initiate the creation of a purchase agreement with a vendor but is feeling uncertain about the process. Fortunately, Copilot is here to assist her every step of the way, thanks to its generative help feature.

Step 1: Access Copilot

To begin her journey, Alice simply looks for the Copilot icon at the top of the screen. Clicking on it opens the conversational sidecar experience.

Copilot introduces itself warmly and encourages users, like Alice, to ask any questions they may have.

Step 2: Pose Your Question

In this for her uncommon task of creating a purchase agreement, Alice can simply type her question into the Copilot chat experience.

Step 3: Instant Guidance

Like a trusted companion, Copilot responds promptly, providing Alice with clear, step-by-step guidance. With Copilot’s help, Alice navigates through the process seamlessly, ensuring she doesn’t miss a single detail.

Watch the demonstration videos below to see Copilot in action:

In this animation, Alice as a novice user experiences Copilot with its in-app help and guidance feature and Copilot helps her to get started with the Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management application.

In the second example you see a Copilot interaction where a more experienced user is empowered by Copilot to efficiently tackle complex tasks with confidence and ease.

The Benefits Unveiled

The advantages of Copilot’s in-app help guidance are numerous:

• Cost-Efficiency: By reducing the need for extensive training, organizations can save significantly on training costs.
• Enhanced User Experience: Users gain immediate access to accurate information, enhancing their overall experience with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
• Improved Productivity: With real-time answers to questions, users can work more efficiently and effectively.

Responsible AI

We are committed to responsible AI practices. Here’s how Copilot ensures responsible AI usage:

• Data Privacy: Copilot follows strict data encryption and secure storage protocols to protect user data.
• Content Moderation: Messages generated by Copilot undergo a series of checks to ensure relevance and prevent harmful content.
• Responsible AI Principles: Our work is guided by principles such as fairness, reliability, privacy, transparency, and accountability.

The future of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

This section provides a glimpse into the expanding capabilities of Copilot, where it becomes a valuable partner for users, offering guidance, insights, and seamless navigation within the application.

• Copilot will go beyond providing answers, it will assist users in navigating within our product, making it an indispensable tool for efficiency.
• Users can inquire about data, processes, and status, and even act directly from the Copilot conversation.
• Copilot, in generative help and guidance, will provide the next best action suggestions on what users should likely do next.

As we look into the future, we are excited to share a demo video that offers first hand experience of Copilot’s evolving capabilities in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Copilot with its its In-app help guidance in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management represents a significant step in enhancing user experience. It bridges the gap between complexity and ease of use, enabling users to unlock the full potential of our product. While we acknowledge that we are in the early stages of this journey with basic capabilities, we are committed to continuous improvement.  As organizations embrace this feature, they begin to reduce training costs and empower their workforce. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management users can look forward to a more streamlined experience.  Copilot In-app help and guidance simplifies tasks and provides instant assistance, helping users make the most of their Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management experience. We are dedicated to enhancing these capabilities further, ensuring that users can navigate our product more efficiently.

Learn More

Interested in learning more about Copilot’s in-app help guidance? Here are your next steps:

Read the Copilot Product Documentation:

For comprehensive and detailed information about Copilot’s capabilities and functionalities, be sure to check out our product documentation. You’ll find in-depth insights into how Copilot can enhance your experience with Dynamics365 Supply Chain Management –

Read the Responsible AI FAQ for Copilot and its capability of generative help and guidance.

Experience Copilot in action (For Existing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Customers):

 If you’re already using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you can enable and experience Copilot’s capabilities to streamline your operations. Here’s how:

• Step 1: Enable Copilot Feature: Follow our documentation for existing customers to learn how to enable this feature. Once enabled, you’ll have access to Copilot’s powerful in-app help guidance within Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
• Step 2: Access Copilot – Locate the Copilot icon at the top of your screen within Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, then click on it to open the conversational sidecar experience. Copilot will introduce itself and encourage you to ask questions.
• Step 3: Pose Your Question – In any uncommon or challenging task within the application, simply ask Copilot for guidance. For better results, especially when seeking documentation-related in-app help, consider starting your questions with ‘How.’
• Step 4: Instant Guidance – Copilot will provide you with step-by-step guidance; all responses are grounded by our public documentation.

Please note that Copilot’s capabilities are exclusively available to existing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers. If you’re one of them, don’t miss out on the opportunity to enhance your user experience and streamline your operations with Copilot.

Join Copilot for finance and operations apps – Yammer

Stay informed about the most recent Copilot by becoming a member of our Copilot for finance and operations Yammer Group  . Share your Feedback and be the first to know about the latest enhancements.

The post Microsoft Copilot brings generative help and guidance into Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are committed to continuous innovation to reimagine business applications in this era of AI. Today we are excited to announce the preview of Project “Sophia”, which you can try at: Http://aka.ms/projectsophia. Project “Sophia” is an AI powered business research canvas designed to help all business users solve complex, cross-domain business problems. It enables users to discover, visualize, and interact with data in new ways, to optimize business processes, and answer strategic questions that drive better outcomes.  

Research Journeys to explore cross-functional data and insights to find innovative solutions  

As an AI Powered Business Research canvas. you can ask Project “Sophia” any business question across every business domain in your organization. You start by uploading data you want help exploring or you can simply ask a question, and Project “Sophia” will start a research journey for you. With Project “Sophia”, you have access to your own ‘digital analyst’ as well as access to the power of rich domain expertise across departments. You can scale with a focus and intelligence around your core business processes to effortlessly research where optimizations can be created in these journeys in a matter of minutes or hours vs. days or months.   

Magically generate rich user experiences and provide actionable recommendations

Project “Sophia” automatically generates what we call blueprints, which are information rich building blocks, designed to help provide structure to your AI powered research making it easier to navigate. Every blueprint contains a textual overview, visual representations of insights and a range of suggested next actions. Using the AI cursor, a new innovative, fully contextual chat experience, you can dive deeper into any areas of the research journey, triggering a conversation with “Sophia” who will now assist with further explorations and suggestions. Blueprints, insights, next steps and AI Cursor interactions are all generated using the power of large language models. 

Achieve specific outcomes for high value business tasks using Business Process Guides

Business Process Guides are experiences where Project “Sophia” guides you through the process of achieving a predefined outcome for a specific high value business task. The first Business Process Guide that is supported in this Preview release is Account Planning or Sales Territory Planning.  

When you upload data about accounts, sales reps, pipeline and other account relevant information Project “Sophia” naturally detects relationships between these different data points – even if it exists across different files – and creates a comprehensive AI generated account plan for you.  This serves as a starting point with the idea to indicate and suggest other data that can help you make an account plan that is even more comprehensive and actionable. 

Try “Sophia” today

We will continue to innovate and add more capabilities to Project “Sophia” based on customer feedback during this preview phase. 

To learn more and get started with the preview, visit http://aka.ms/ProjectSophia. There, you can watch an overview session, see a demo of the AI in action and even try the preview for yourself.  We would love to hear from you and learn more about your thoughts. 

The post Introducing Project “Sophia”, a new generation AI-first business application appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Copilot presents an opportunity to reimagine the way we work—turning natural language into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. With AI, organizations can unearth value in the mountain of data across productivity tools like Microsoft 365 and business applications.

To this end, earlier this year, we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365, the world’s first AI copilot natively built for CRM and ERP. Since then, more than 130,000 organizations have experienced copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform firsthand. In fact, a survey revealed that 70 percent of the Copilot users were more productive, 73 percent could complete tasks faster, and 68 percent of users improved the quality of their work.

Organizations, however, depend on a range of business applications across roles and functions, from customer relationship management (CRM) systems for marketing, sales, and service roles to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for finance, supply chain, and operations departments. At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing new Microsoft Copilot experiences that empower organizations to unlock value from a multitude of systems of record. In conjunction with these copilot experiences, we are announcing new and updated copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 applications.

Microsoft Ignite 2023

Access recordings of keynotes and sessions, including opportunities to learn about the copilot capabilities announced.

Get on-demand access

Announcements include:

• Updates to Copilot for Dynamics 365 to drive efficiency across the organization, featuring capabilities that help marketing, sales, and field service professionals provide exceptional customer experiences.
• Introduction of Microsoft Copilot for Service and Microsoft Copilot for Sales, the evolution of Sales Copilot, bringing together the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions. Both provide flexibility to integrate with an organization’s existing contact center and CRM systems respectively. 

Together, these capabilities empower organizations to harness secure and enterprise-ready, generative AI experiences, helping employees to perform at their highest potential across every role and function. 

Reimagine ways to drive efficiency across the organization with Copilot for Dynamics 365

We’re introducing new and enhanced copilot capabilities for Dynamics 365 that help marketers, sellers, and field service professionals elevate customer experiences.

The following Copilot updates are in addition to recently-announced copilot and demand planning capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, as well as the 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a six-month rollout of new and enhanced capabilities scheduled for release between October 2023 and March 2024.

Copilot delivers answers and information to field service workers in a chat-based conversation

Field service workers depend on quick access to a variety of customer and technical information precisely at the moment it is needed. A recent survey by Microsoft highlighted that not being able to easily find the information they need ranks in the top five disruptive issues faced by frontline workers in their current day-to-day role.¹ This can significantly affect key performance indicators such as first-time fix rates, customer satisfaction, and retention.

We’re introducing AI-powered experiences for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, available for preview in December, that enable frontline workers to quickly access information on a job site by asking questions in conversational language, directly within Teams.

We’re also announcing the general availability of AI-assisted work order creation and technician scheduling, and the public preview of financial and inventory data flow between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are available at no additional cost.

Explore the full set of updates to Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Reimagining CRM systems with natural language experiences

The innovation and scale of Copilot have established Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as an innovative leader in sales technology, as recognized by Gartner and Forrester. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales enhances seller productivity and effectiveness in their flow of work, enabling them to automate the sales processes and make informed decisions with AI-powered insights and actions. Copilot features help sellers save time, boost productivity, and eliminate mundane workloads to maintain focus on connecting with customers and closing deals.

We’re announcing new copilot experiences in Dynamics 365 Sales that allow sellers to interact with their data using natural language.  

Now in preview, sellers can use their own words to get contextual insights and recommendations for leads and opportunities.

In addition, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales has a new full-screen view where sellers can use natural language or prebuilt prompts to gain a quick understanding of customers, deals, meetings, forecasts, and more. The feature is now available in Asia and Europe and will be available in North America in December.

Deliver more personalized customer experiences with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

New capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provide a deeper understanding of target customers and segments, helping to hyper-personalize campaign content and improve engagement.

Available for preview in December, sellers can use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to instantly generate a customer profile summary—including demographic, transactional, behavioral, and analytics data—to uncover key insights on customers. The capability is available for organizations that have both Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise or Premium subscriptions.  

We continue to build capabilities that enable a seamless handoff from marketing to sellers. Now in preview, marketers can qualify their leads using metrics such as engagement scores, ensuring marketing and sales teams maximize the opportunity pipeline and improve win rates.  

Adding to our growing ecosystem, we’re announcing a unique partnership with Optimizely. In preview this December, organizations can use the segments and journeys built in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights directly within Optimizely. This enables Optimizely users to build personalized campaigns in real time without writing any code. Through bi-directional integrations, organizations can deliver hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences across web, social, email, and offline channels.

Bring together the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and business insights and actions

Most organizations depend on a range of applications to manage the business, including CRM, ERP, and supply chain management systems. Integrating innovative technology, like generative AI, into these systems can be challenging—especially when security, privacy, and compliance are a top priority.

Responding to this need, we’re introducing a new category of Microsoft Copilot solutions that tap into data from various applications—including Microsoft 365 and third-party systems of record—to bring a new level of efficiency and automation to business functions across the organization. 

Modernize the contact center with Microsoft Copilot for Service

In a recent Microsoft survey, it was revealed that three out of four customer service agents feel less inspired and motivated by their work. With insufficient focus time, over half of them are struggling to deliver exceptional customer service and efficiently address customer issues.¹ The surveyed agents express confidence that AI can positively impact their performance, as well as provide, analytical insights, including trend and sentiment analysis. 

We’re meeting the needs of service agents with a Microsoft Copilot solution that integrates generative AI capabilities into the tools and processes that they depend on every day. Microsoft Copilot for Service integrates an organization’s trusted knowledge with the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to boost agent productivity in the tools they already use every day, such as Outlook and Teams; providing AI-guided answers and resources personalized for each customer issue and conversation. 

Microsoft Copilot for Service provides the flexibility to integrate with an organization’s existing CRM and contact center systems. Organizations can train Microsoft Copilot for Service using trusted websites, knowledgebase articles, files, and other critical data sources from their existing contact center to unlock generative AI-powered guidance across all of their data. Microsoft Copilot for Service provides out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, and can be extended to other systems through a vast array of more than 1,100 prebuilt and custom connectors.

Copilot for Service can be further customized with Microsoft Copilot Studio, also announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023. With Copilot Studio, service teams can fine-tune copilot experiences by incorporating their own data, logic, and actions tailored for specific scenarios, frequent conversations, or other unique use cases.

Copilot for Service will be available in public preview in early December and generally available in early 2024. Pricing is USD50 per user per month. Learn more about Microsoft Copilot for Service.

Unlock sales productivity in the flow of work

Microsoft Copilot for Sales is the evolution of Sales Copilot, used by leading brands including 10,000 sellers within the Microsoft sales team. A recent survey revealed that 83 percent of Microsoft sellers claim that Microsoft Copilot for Sales helps them improve productivity, with sellers saving an average of 90 minutes per week.¹ Read our ebook on the AI advantage for sellers for details. 

Copilot for Sales brings together the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in seller workflows, using customer data within the CRM system they already use, along with information in documents, email, and chats from Microsoft 365 applications.

The innovations enabled in Copilot for Sales include a newly integrated experience with Microsoft Word and Teams. Sellers can prompt Copilot to create a meeting preparation brief in Word, automatically populated with customer information such as an account and opportunity summary, names and titles of meeting participants, pending tasks, and highlights from recent meetings and email threads. In addition, meeting recaps in Microsoft Teams can surface action items and tasks, key performance indicators (KPIs), and sales keywords mentioned. These experiences help sellers save time and energy, generate innovative ideas, build stronger customer relationships, and ultimately close more deals.

Like Copilot for Service, sellers can customize AI-assisted sales processes with Copilot Studio, bringing tailored experiences informed by their own data, logic, and actions for specific scenarios.

Copilot for Sales² will be available in the first quarter of 2024 for USD50 per user per month.

Learn more at Microsoft Ignite

Register for Microsoft Ignite to access on-demand recordings of keynotes and sessions, including opportunities to learn about the copilot capabilities announced. You have the opportunity to engage with the global community online, regardless of your location, and participate in live discussions at no cost. To get started, we recommend the following sessions: 

• Becoming an AI-powered organization with Microsoft Copilot (keynote, in-person and online)
• Transform customer experience with Dynamics 365 and next-generation AI (breakout, in-person and online)
• Transforming service organizations with generative AI (breakout, in-person and online)
• ERP in the era of AI: A new face of business efficiency and agility (breakout, in-person and online)

In addition, learn more about what’s possible with Copilot for Dynamics 365 and get started on your journey today. 

¹ Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index survey

² Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers will retain rights to capabilities in Sales Copilot. As today’s news demonstrates, copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales will continue to innovate. To get the full value of the new Copilot for Sales, including access to Copilot for Microsoft 365, customers will work with their Microsoft account representative to upgrade.

The post Introducing new Copilot experiences to boost productivity and elevate customer experiences across the organization  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Over the past six months we’ve outlined our vision for the evolution of Microsoft’s portfolio targeting customer service and related markets, beginning with the introduction of Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 as the world’s first Copilot for both CRM and ERP, and more recently reaching the general availability of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. In this blog, we will discuss the opportunity for organizations to delight their customers with generative AI-powered service experiences and explain some of the new innovations we’re announcing to make it a reality. 

Generative AI is transforming customer service 

Customers expect fast, personalized service at every touchpoint. Effective customer service strategies not only delight customers, but also build long-term loyalty, create efficiencies and ultimately grow the business. The stakes are high, yet access to relevant data and the right technology tools continues to be the greatest barrier for agents seeking to resolve customer issues. 

Generative AI is transforming customer service by boosting agent productivity and unlocking organizational efficiency. For example, Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support (CSS) team—one of the largest customer service organizations in the world—has been using Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service for the past six months. We recently shared findings demonstrating how generative AI has impacted the way our CSS agents work to resolve support cases, as well as their efficiency in customer engagements and overall productivity in areas like reducing average case handling time by 12 percent, increasing the ability for agents to independently resolve cases (13 percent of cases in one support business), and more. 

Introducing Microsoft Copilot for Service 

Today we’re taking the next step in our journey to help organizations deliver compelling service experiences by modernizing their existing contact centers with generative AI—introducing Microsoft Copilot for Service. Copilot for Service synthesizes vast amounts of data already available from an organization’s trusted knowledge sources to provide relevant, timely guidance to agents in their flow of work. Copilot for Service provides flexibility for organizations to quickly begin realizing the benefits of generative AI by extending their existing investments in CRM and contact center solutions—including Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow and more.   

Connect to existing contact center and CRM solutions  

Without costly development time or rip and replace efforts, organizations can simply point to their data—such as public websites, SharePoint, knowledgebase articles, and offline files—and in a few minutes unlock generative AI-powered conversations across all of their data. Copilot for Service reduces time to production with out-of-the-box integrations for Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. 

Assist agents in the flow of work 

Copilot for Service accelerates agent onboarding and case resolution, improves efficiency, and automates tasks to help free agents to focus on customers. Embedded in their desktop of choice or deployed in Teams, agents can simply ask the generative AI-powered Copilot questions in natural language to receive relevant answers that leverage existing contact center knowledge to enhance agent productivity and customer satisfaction.  

Since Copilot for Microsoft 365 is included in Copilot for Service, organizations will also benefit more broadly from productivity enhancements in the tools agents already use every day, such as Outlook and Teams. For example, Copilot can quickly bring agents up to speed on email threads within Outlook by providing summaries, as well as accelerate responses to customers by providing draft emails. In Teams, agents can stay on top of meetings with customers or subject matter experts by viewing AI-powered meeting recaps with summaries of key discussion points, sentiment, and next steps. Furthermore, agents can use Copilot to get the latest account and case information from CRM systems. 

In the future, Copilot for Service will make agents even more productive by enriching email summaries, email drafts, and meeting recaps with CRM data. It will not only provide them the ability to view/update CRM records directly in Outlook and Teams in their flow of work, but also automate CRM tasks such as case wrap ups, meeting scheduling, adding new contacts, and task follow up—all with a single click based on context from emails, knowledge sources, and previous customer communications, comparable to the agent assist capabilities that are part of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Copilot for Service will also make proactive recommendations for creating new or updating existing knowledge assets by curating information across email threads, cases, Teams chats and more. These updated knowledge bases will in turn benefit an organization’s broad set of agents as they seek to accelerate the resolution of customer issues, as well as knowledge workers in other roles by providing a full 360 degree view of the customer (inclusive of cases, recent activities, knowledge sources, and other information) from the CRM systems—all in their flow of work via Outlook and Teams.  

Customize and extend to meet your needs 

Copilot for Service enables extensibility with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Add additional topics, automate actions and workflows, and further customize for a uniquely tailored solution. Additionally, Copilot for Service can be extended to other systems with more than 1,100 pre-built and custom connectors that eliminate the need for expensive IT integration work. 

Copilot for Service availability and pricing 

Copilot for Service will be available in public preview in early December. General availability is targeted for the first quarter of 2024. Pricing will be $50 USD per user/month. 

Learn more about Copilot for Microsoft 365 licensing requirements. 

For Dynamics 365 customers, comparable agent assist capabilities are included in Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise. Learn more about Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.  

Learn more 

Join us during Microsoft Ignite to learn more: 

• Becoming an AI-Powered Organization with Microsoft Copilot (Keynote, in-person and online) 
• Transforming service organizations with generative AI (Breakout, in-person and online) 

The post Announcing Microsoft Copilot for Service  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.