Copilot Where You Work: AI Functionalities in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365
Microsoft Copilot’s AI-driven capabilities can streamline and enhance operations across various processes in your organization, as it is embedded in Dynamics ERP and CRM systems as well as Microsoft 365 applications like Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.
Understanding how Copilot transforms workflows can give you a comprehensive look into functionalities that mesh with the Microsoft ecosystem. Having this knowledge lets you find ways to save time and eliminate mundane processes, allowing your team to focus on what matters most and streamline their workdays.
In this blog, we’ll look at Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, showcasing how AI can increase efficiency and streamline your workday.
The Evolution of Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365
With the proper licensing in place, Copilot is embedded in Dynamics 365 platforms such as:
- Business Central
- Finance and Operations
- Power Platform
- Customer Engagement and the applications housed there:
- Sales
- Field Service
- Customer Service
- Customer Insights – Journeys (Formerly Marketing)
Let’s dive deeper into the core functionalities Copilot offers across Dynamics 365 applications.
Note: Some features are part of recent releases and are still in preview. Not every feature you read in this blog might be available right now.
Reach out to Stoneridge to track when these features will be available for general use.
Copilot for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations
In Finance and Operations, as well as Supply Chain Management, Copilot streamlines processes such as:
- Reporting and analysis: Copilot can help generate analysis and insights to enhance data-driven decision-making with information from various data records.
- Forecasting: AI automates the analysis of historical data and current trends to generate forecasts to help you prepare for the future.
- Budget tracking and expense management: Copilot offers real-time budget tracking and can also monitor expenses and alert you and your team to potential issues.
- Invoice management: AI capabilities in Copilot can automate invoice data entry, verify invoices against purchase orders, and flag discrepancies.
- Risk assessment and compliance monitoring: Copilot can help you stay compliant and assess areas of risk by analyzing historical transaction data.
- Summaries: Users can utilize Copilot to summarize client data, helping them track invoices, payments, and outstanding balances in real time.
Enhancing Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement houses several tools and applications that help you manage customer interactions, sales, and support. These features help you stay organized to boost sales and quickly respond to customer support requests. Here are some key Copilot features in each:
Dynamics 365 Sales
- AI-powered email drafting and responses: Sales reps can use Copilot to draft personalized emails based on the context of ongoing deals and communications with clients. This allows your sales team to communicate with prospects more effectively.
- Opportunity scoring and recommendations: Copilot automatically generates opportunity scores based on historical data and customer sentiment, allowing sales reps to prioritize high-value deals. It also recommends next steps to keep deals moving forward.
- Integration with Teams and Outlook: Users can update CRM records directly from Outlook or Teams, reducing the need to switch between platforms.
Dynamics 365 Field Service
- Proactive Maintenance and Scheduling: Copilot analyzes service history, equipment usage, and environmental factors to recommend proactive maintenance schedules. It can also optimize schedules for field service technicians based on location, availability, and skillset.
- Intelligent work order suggestion: AI can analyze past service requests and issues to suggest work order steps and spare parts for specific tasks. This helps technicians quickly diagnose and sell issues.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Case resolution suggestions: Copilot recommends resolution steps and related content, helping agents resolve issues more efficiently and accurately.
- Sentiment analysis: Using Copilot, you can scan customer messages to gauge how a customer might be feeling. This allows agents to anticipate needs, adapt responses, and escalate calls to managers if needed.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
- Customer segmentation: Copilot can analyze customers based on common traits and segment them for you, eliminating the need to comb through your entire customer list when you want to send out communications.
- Customer journey creation: You can ask Copilot to create journeys for you using natural language prompts. This automates the creation of more effective and personalized communications with customers and prospects.
Copilot for Dynamics 365 Business Central
In Business Central, Copilot brings automated solutions for processes across your platform. This includes:
- Banking reconciliation: Copilot will analyze discrepancies between bank records and ledger entries, identifying mismatches to save time on month-end close.
- Financial insights and reporting: Using AI tools in Copilot to highlight key trends and variances can help you make informed decisions.
- Order processing and inventory level optimization: Copilot suggests optimal inventory levels based on demand patterns. This helps set reorder points and alerts, ensuring inventory is managed efficiently without overstocking or stockouts.
- AI-Driven Sales Forecasting: Users can ask Copilot for insights on future sales potential based on historical sales performance, seasonal patterns, and customer trends.
- Vendor Performance Analytics: By analyzing vendor data and tracking metrics like delivery times, quality, and costs, Copilot can help your team make data-driven decisions when selecting vendors.
- Intelligent product recommendations for upselling: Copilot suggests products for upselling and cross-selling based on historical sales data and customer buying patterns.
Towards an Autonomous ERP and CRM Future
Copilot for Dynamics 365 aims to create an “autonomous ERP” and “autonomous CRM.” This vision encompasses systems that handle repetitive tasks, generate reports, and facilitate seamless communications across platforms, reducing the need for users to spend extensive time within the ERP.
Microsoft will continue to invest in AI and will likely expand Copilot’s capabilities further in your Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM systems.
Maximize Productivity with Copilot for Microsoft 365
While your ERP and CRM systems are where you run processes that power your business, Microsoft 365 applications like Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and more are equally important in helping your business operate.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 enables users to simplify tasks, organize information, and engage with data in ways that enhance workflow efficiency. Here are a few ways Copilot helps you boost productivity during meetings, automate document creation, and manage day-to-day tasks.
Enhance Meeting Productivity with AI Summaries and Action Tracking
- Instant Summaries: If you’re joining a meeting late or catching up on one you missed, Copilot can provide a quick summary, allowing you to jump in fully informed.
- Transcriptions and Follow-Up: Copilot transcribes conversations and identifies action items automatically, saving you the hassle of manual note-taking.
- Action Item Tracking: As you discuss action points in meetings, Copilot captures them and adds them to your meeting summary. You can easily review and follow up on tasks, keeping projects on track.
Data Analysis and Presentation
- Data Summarization in Excel: Just ask Co-Pilot to summarize data tables, and it generates clear, concise insights, helping you make data-driven decisions quickly.
- Automatic PowerPoint Generation: With a simple command, you can convert Word documents into PowerPoint presentations, ensuring your main points and content structure are preserved without the need for repetitive work.
- Efficient Document and Presentation Summaries: Summarize lengthy reports, presentations, or documents within seconds, allowing you to absorb key details and stay informed without reading through entire documents.
Streamlined Email Management
- Suggested Responses: Co-Pilot can craft polite, contextual responses to emails, which can save time, especially for less critical communications.
- Conversation Summaries: For those multi-threaded, lengthy email chains, Co-Pilot condenses the entire conversation into a digestible summary, allowing you to catch up quickly and respond thoughtfully without combing through every message.
- Personalized Responses: Co-Pilot learns from your email tone and style, helping it generate responses that align with how you usually communicate.
Business Chat and Integrated Enterprise Search
- Business Chat: Co-Pilot enables users to ask business-related questions, such as, “Who is our current dental provider?” or “How do I access our project management portal?” If this information is stored within your Teams, SharePoint, or OneDrive, Co-Pilot can retrieve it for you.
- Enterprise Search: By integrating with your OneDrive, SharePoint, and even web data, Co-Pilot provides a secure and comprehensive search experience. This saves you from navigating multiple apps and systems—everything is accessible through a single search interface.
In-App Summaries and Side Panel Interaction
- On-Demand Summaries: From summarizing a Word document to offering a synopsis of a 28-slide presentation, Co-Pilot enables you to understand complex content quickly.
- Interactive Side Panel: Whether you’re drafting a report in Word or analyzing data in Excel, you can ask Co-Pilot questions and get immediate answers, making data exploration intuitive and efficient.
Intelligent Meeting Recap for Deeper Insights
- Detailed Engagement Metrics: Co-Pilot’s recap feature can display who spoke and for how long, allowing managers to review client interactions or internal presentations to ensure team members and clients are equally engaged.
- Quick Q&A: If you have specific questions after reading through the meeting summary, Co-Pilot allows you to ask follow-up questions directly.
Empowering Users with the Power Platform
Copilot also extends its capabilities into the Power Platform, including Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Pages. Power Automate benefits from Co-Pilot by making it easier to build automation workflows. Users simply describe the workflow they want, and Co-Pilot generates the flow, speeding up the development process and enabling even non-technical users to create automation solutions with ease.
Power BI users can also leverage Co-Pilot’s insights to analyze data, while Power Pages benefits from Co-Pilot’s capabilities in building user-friendly pages faster than ever before.
Copilot Licensing
An important thing to note is that accessing Copilot features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 requires specific licensing requirements. For more information on that, read our blog on Copilot licensing.
Alternatively, you can reach out to our licensing team for a free review of your current licensing structure to ensure your users have the right licenses in place to use Copilot.
Reach out to Stoneridge to Learn More About Copilot and AI
Stoneridge can help you analyze your processes and pinpoint areas where Copilot can help. AI isn’t going anywhere and utilizing its capabilities can help your team streamline their workdays and allow them to focus on work that brings more value to your business.
Get in touch today for more information.
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