Transform work with autonomous agents across your business processes

We’re expanding our ambition to bring AI-first business process to organizations. First, we’re announcing that the ability to create autonomous agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio will be available in public preview in November 2024. Learn more on the Copilot Studio blog. 

Second, we’re introducing 10 new autonomous agents in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams. These agents are designed to help you accelerate your time to value and are configured to scale operational efficiency and elevate customer experiences across roles and functions. 

Rapidly drive impact with autonomous agents 

Microsoft Copilot is your AI assistant—it works for you—and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. We envision organizations will have a constellation of agents—ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team, or function to execute and orchestrate business process ranging from lead generation, to sales order processing, to confirming order deliveries. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents.

Introducing autonomous agents for Dynamics 365 

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy line of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today’s return on investment (ROI) and tomorrow’s competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams drive business value—and are just the start. We will create many more agents in the coming year that give customers the competitive advantage they need to help future-proof their organization. Today, we’re introducing ten of these autonomous agents which will start to become available in public preview later in 2024 and continue into early 2025. 

Sales: Help sellers focus time on building customer relationships to close deals faster

Agents will help sellers focus time on engaging customers to move through the sales cycle faster. The Sales Qualification Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can free up time for the seller to spend on higher value activities by researching and prioritizing inbound leads in the pipe and developing personalized sales emails to initiate a sales conversation.

For small to medium-sized businesses, the Sales Order Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central will automate the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers, capturing their preferences. See Sales Order Agent in action.

Operations: Empower teams to grow the business, optimize process, and meet customer demand

To maintain smooth business operations, it’s crucial that process in key areas such as finance, procurement, and supply chain are optimized to minimize cost, mitigate risks, and accelerate decisions. Autonomous agents operate around the clock to execute a range of process, helping professionals spend less time on manual work and more time on strategic tasks like planning and decision making.   

The Supplier Communications Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management autonomously manages collaboration with suppliers to confirm order delivery, while helping to preempt potential delays. With agents performing all the tasks related to confirming purchase orders, procurement specialists can focus on managing supplier relationships and improving overall supply chain resiliency.

Additional agents:  

• Financial Reconciliation Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance helps teams prepare and cleanse data sets to simplify and reduce time spent on the most labor-intensive part of the financial period close process that leads to financial reporting. Learn more in this brief video.
• Account Reconciliation Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, designed for accountants and controllers, automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger, helping them speed up the financial close process. This enhances cash flow visibility and can result in faster decisions to drive business performance. Watch this video to learn more. 
• Time and Expense Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows. It helps get invoices to customers promptly, preventing revenue leakage and helps ensure projects stay on track and within budget. See Time and Expense Agent in action.

Service: Transform customer experiences across self- and human-assisted service  

Contact centers face interconnected, compounding challenges to successfully and efficiently serve customers. For example, keeping vital knowledge base articles current relies on manual process. Valuable insights from seasoned customer service representatives are often locked away in chat logs, call recordings, case notes, and other data silos. And self-service tools rely on inflexible, hard-coded dialog with embedded knowledge that must be predefined for potential customer issues.  

The Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents, available for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, help contact centers transform customer experiences across self-service and human-assisted service. The Customer Intent Agent enables evergreen self-service by continuously discovering new intents from past and current customer conversations across all channels, mapping issues and corresponding resolutions maintained by the agent in a library. The Customer Knowledge Management Agent helps ensure knowledge articles are kept perpetually up to date by analyzing case notes, transcripts, summaries, and other artifacts from human-assisted cases to uncover insights. 

Additional agents:

• Case Management Agent for Customer Service automates key tasks throughout the case lifecycle—creation, resolution, follow up, closure—to reduce handle time and alleviate the burden on service representatives. See Case Management Agent in action.
• Scheduling Operations Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables dispatchers to provide optimized schedules for technicians, even as conditions change throughout the workday—for example, accounting for issues such as traffic delays, double bookings, or last-minute cancellations that often result in conflicts or gaps. 

Collectively, these agents are trained to autonomously learn to address new and emerging issues via self-service, improve the quality of issue resolution across channels and help drive time and cost savings.

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be confident that they have robust data governance and security. The agents coming to Dynamics 365 follow our core security, privacy, and responsible AI commitments. Agents built in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls—all managed in Copilot Studio. This includes data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols, and more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. 

Transform your business with agents 

Start your journey with agents by reading more about the full set of capabilities announced today, as well as a closer look at new ways to build autonomous agents with Copilot Studio.  

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