This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Copilot is now your window into the world of agents, with new capabilities that lay the foundation for this next phase.
The post Microsoft 365 Copilot: Built for the era of human–agent collaboration appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Three AI service agents for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center are now available in public preview: Case Management, Customer Intent, and Customer Knowledge Management agents. Collectively these agents learn to address emerging issues, uncover new knowledge, and automate manual processes to boost business efficiency and reduce costs.
With these autonomous agents, contact centers have the opportunity to improve their efficiency and enhance the customer experience. Agents can reveal valuable insights from seasoned customer service representatives using chat logs, call recordings, case notes, and other data sources. They can use these insights to improve self-service with automatically generated knowledge that evolves to meet potential customer issues.
Here is a quick overview of AI service agents:
The Case Management Agent for Dynamics 365 Customer Service is designed to simplify and streamline your case management process. It also reduces handling time and improves customer satisfaction. The process of creating cases, updating details, following up with customers, and ensuring timely closures can be time-consuming and prone to errors. By automating these essential tasks, Case Management Agent reduces handling time and minimizes errors. It allows customer service representatives to focus on what matters most: solving complex customer issues.
You can seamlessly configure the Case Management Agent with your choice of attributes to meet your business needs. It automates key tasks throughout the lifecycle of a case, from creation to closure. Whether you’re managing live chats or processing incoming emails, this agent handles the details, so you don’t have to.
During customer conversations, the agent automatically creates a case, fills in relevant fields, and updates them as the conversation progresses. The agent tracks cases requiring attention, sends follow-ups, and even resolves cases autonomously when the customer issue is resolved.
From managing high case volumes to reducing average handling time, this agent makes life easier for your team.
The Customer Intent Agent for Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses generative AI to analyze past interactions between customer service representatives and customers. Using this data, it creates an intent library that the agent uses to understand what the customer wants and provide tailored solutions to customer issues. While traditional chatbots and prompts require developers and support staff to update, the Customer Intent Agent updates itself continuously as it receives more data. You can use this agent in Dynamics 365 Contact Center for both self-service and service rep-assisted scenarios.
Using the Customer Intent Agent, contact centers can enable their customers to self-serve in a transformative way. Instead of writing a specific menu of responses for each topic, contact center managers and IT professionals can let the Customer Intent Agent use past customer conversations across channels to determine how to answer a question. It uses case and conversation data to find appropriate follow-up questions to ask the customer to refine its understanding of the customer’s intent.
When a conversation requires a service representative, the Customer Intent Agent provides valuable context and information so the service rep can give better assistance. It also helps service reps resolve issues in live chat and persistent chat with reduced handling times. Service reps have access to intent-based suggestions through the Ask a question tab in the Copilot help pane, and in the tab-to-complete suggestions in the conversation control. The intent agent uses the context of the conversation to display relevant intent attributes as questions for the service to ask the customer.
The Customer Knowledge Management Agent for Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps your organization scale its knowledge with minimal effort from service reps. When admins configure knowledge management and knowledge sources, service reps can generate knowledge assets without spending time synthesizing case data to author them.
Clear, current, and accurate knowledge is key for service representatives to best assist customers. Contact centers that use Copilot to inform their self-service systems and service reps rely on a well-maintained knowledge base. Creating and maintaining knowledge assets is a time-consuming process. Service reps don’t always have time to put their learnings from cases and conversations into a knowledge article. Furthermore, to maintain good knowledge hygiene, a subject matter expert should check each asset in the knowledge base on a regular basis to ensure relevance and accuracy.
Organizations can use the Customer Knowledge Management Agent to autonomously create knowledge articles based on cases, conversations, emails, and notes. The agent also checks for existing assets with the same information in your knowledge base before creating a new one. Based on rules that administrators set, members of the organization can approve or reject these AI-generated knowledge assets. Admins can also decide whether to make this knowledge available for self-service in chatbots and IVRs.
You can start using all three AI service agents now in paid public preview. Copilot Studio message capacity is required. Get started with autonomous service agents here: Autonomous agents overview
The post Experience the future of customer service with AI agents appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft is introducing a powerful Exchange integration feature in Dynamics 365 Field Service, designed to seamlessly sync work order bookings with Outlook and Teams calendars. This feature lets technicians see their work assignments, personal appointments, and other work meetings in one place.
With this integration, work order bookings from Dynamics 365 Field Service will automatically appear on resources’ Outlook and Teams calendars, provided they are set up for syncing. The synchronization process is:
This feature provides significant advantages for organizations managing field operations:
To enable the Exchange integration, organizations must meet the following prerequisites:
The Exchange integration preview is available starting April 2024! It will be available more broadly in Release wave 2 2025.
Organizations interested in the Exchange integration preview can sign up or leave their email for more information by signing up here today. You’ll need to provide:
The post Integrate Field Service bookings with Outlook and Teams appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Adaptation and change are the only constants in business—and the pace is accelerating. To thrive, your business needs the right tools, from AI-powered insights to low-code solutions, designed to help you adapt faster, enhance customer experiences, and boost efficiency.
Join us on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, for the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, an exclusive first look at groundbreaking innovations coming to Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. See firsthand how these new technologies empower your organization to proactively navigate changes and seize new opportunities.
Event highlights include:
During the event you will gain in-depth insights into how customers are adopting what’s new in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales:
See Dynamics 365 Sales 2025 release wave 1 in action for more.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service:
See Dynamics 365 Contact Center 2025 release wave 1 in action for more.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance:
See Dynamics 365 Finance 2025 release wave 1 in action for more.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management:
See Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management release wave 1 2025 in action for more.
Copilot Studio:
See Microsoft Copilot Studio 2025 release wave 1 in action for more.
Microsoft Power Apps:
See Power Apps 2025 release wave 1 in action for more.
Microsoft Power Automate:
See Power Automate 2025 release wave 1 in action for more.
The Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event streams live on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, starting at 9 AM PST and will also be available on-demand. Register now to stay updated and get helpful resources ahead of the event.
The post Preview upcoming Dynamics 365 features at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s fast-paced digital era, many organizations are still relying on paper to capture inspection results. This method not only creates a lack of digital footprint but also demands significant effort to digitize the data. As organizations strive to transition to a digital world, the need for efficient data management becomes paramount. We are excited to introduce a preview for the inspection builder feature in Dynamics 365 Field Service.
The inspection builder addresses these challenges head-on, enabling organizations to seamlessly move from paper-based processes to a digital experience. It uses the power of Copilot to streamline inspection template creation, saving you time and effort in your journey to digitalize inspection workflows.
We’ve designed the inspection builder preview to take the hassle out of the process to digitize inspections. Whether you have images or PDF documents of the existing inspection forms – you don’t need to manually recreate each question in the Field Service inspection designer anymore. Simply upload the forms and let Copilot in Field Service do the heavy lifting. In no time, you will get the first draft that you can quickly tweak and publish for your technicians in the field.
It’s fast and context aware.
Inspection builder accounts for the context and uses the question types most appropriate for the content. For example, in the conversion example below, it added a date picker for date question from the form. It also recognizes other questions formats. For example, it created radio box options for each of the yes and no questions. With mobile data entry in mind, it also broke the table down into individual questions for easier data entry.
Inspection builder generates templates using the default “comfort” layout. However, you can change the layout to “compact” to better suit mobile devices.
An administrator can enable this feature in Field Service Settings. Turn the Create inspection templates option on.
Explore the Create with Copilot option in the command bar on Inspection Templates in the Field Service app.
If it’s not immediately visible, check the overflow menu.
Upload the file and let Copilot give you a first draft of the template in the inspection designer.
We are excited to have you try this feature and look forward to your feedback. For more information, have a look at the inspection builder documentation. This is just the first of the updates we are expecting for inspections in Field Service in 2025. Stay tuned for more news and let us know how we can make this tool even better for your needs.
The post Inspection builder preview: digital transformation made easy with AI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In September 2024, Microsoft announced the end of product support and updates for Dynamics GP on December 31, 2029. Microsoft is incredibly grateful to existing GP customers, and is committed to facilitating a stable, supported, and smooth migration for GP customers to a cloud solution.
As a follow-up to that announcement, I wanted to discuss the advantages of beginning the migration process now and review the many resources that Microsoft and our partner community have to support you.
Microsoft has made sure to provide a lengthy runway so customers currently running Dynamics GP can comprehensively prepare for migration to a new system, but there are clear benefits to moving now, rather than waiting.
Here are a few key considerations.
The material value of upgrading is clear: In 2024, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to create a benchmark for the value-add to companies upgrading from an on-premises solution to Business Central. The results of the Total Economic Impact™ study were based on a combination of primary research, customer interviews, and methodological analysis.
Forrester aggregated the data collected into a composite organization with USD15 million annual revenues, 150 total employees, and 28 Business Central users across finance, supply chain, operations, and sales.
An organization of that size saw:
They achieved these savings through the move to Business Central from on-premises, which allowed:
So don’t treat this upgrade as an obligation, but as an opportunity to control the operational headwinds of your organization, virtually eliminate technical debt, and build a strong, repeatable operational framework that will require very minimal intervention in the months and years ahead.
In addition to these smart business reasons, many existing Dynamics GP customers are eligible for substantial promotional discounts offered by Microsoft when upgrading to an online Dynamics 365 Business Central solution. Promotional offers also allow eligible customers to avoid the need to simultaneously spend money on certain Microsoft on-premises fees while migrating. Be sure to ask your Microsoft systems consultant or reseller about your eligibility for Business Central migration offers.
These migration offers are intended to provide GP perpetual-license customers with a strong runway towards the cloud, driving business productivity, while reducing capital spending and costs of maintaining your on-premises applications while deploying Business Central.
With the business case clear, let’s discuss the technical steps in migrating your data and transitioning from Dynamics GP to Business Central.
The first step in a migration process is to consult with your partner on scope, costs, and timing. If your migration requirements go beyond need assistance outside of what your Dynamics GP is able to provide, you can engage a Microsoft representative.
Here’s an overview of the different stages of migration:
When you’re ready to migrate, Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of tools for migrating company data from Dynamics GP. The cloud migration tool typically migrates the following data:
See the detailed overview of data migrated to Business Central.
As mentioned previously, the on-premises environment will remain the active system until the migration process is complete.
Once the cloud migration is set up and underway, data entry in the Business Central online tenant is limited to data not included in the migration from on-premises.
It’s natural to have questions about how Dynamics GP compares to Business Central operationally, and Microsoft is here to support with common workflow comparisons available for review here, and on the Business Central YouTube channel. Additionally, we discuss many more of the implications and benefits of migration in this on-demand webinar.
Even with this powerful technology, though, there will naturally be some manual processes. Both Microsoft and your partners are here to support your transition with best practices, documentation, and support. The goal is not just a seamless transition, but an end-to-end enhancement of operations.
With these guides, you will have the tools you need to migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central with confidence. Reach out to your partner to learn more.
The post Why migrate now: The benefits of moving from Dynamics GP to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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