{"id":46081,"date":"2023-08-24T06:51:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-24T10:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/?p=46081"},"modified":"2024-03-08T09:20:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T14:20:01","slug":"how-to-unleash-the-power-of-dynamics-365-through-ai-integration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/blog\/how-to-unleash-the-power-of-dynamics-365-through-ai-integration\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Unleash the Power of Dynamics 365 By Leveraging AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
In our last blog<\/a> from our Dynamics CRM Never Stops Evolving series<\/a>, we explored some of the most common, often overlooked high-value capabilities you can implement as quick wins to level up your system and ensure you get the most benefit from your tool. As you advance in your Dynamics 365 journey and continue to mature, implementing more advanced functionality and using AI can allow you to manage your business processes and gain insights, automate repetitive tasks<\/a>, and get suggestions to optimize your activities and make intelligent decisions.<\/p>\n With new application features released almost daily, it\u2019s hard to keep systems updated with the latest and greatest functionality.<\/strong><\/p>\n To keep up, first, we must understand it\u2019s about the (Dynamics 365) journey, not the destination.<\/p>\n Headlines about generative AI<\/a> have recently popped up in every nook and cranny of published content across the internet. But if you recall from your early English courses, writing aims to achieve one of these four things \u2013 inform, persuade, explain and entertain.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll venture to say some of the content produced about AI has informed and explained. However, the majority has heavily leaned toward the persuasion objective to convince you to implement these tools yesterday. Technology organizations opened Pandora’s box and are racing to be the first to dominate in this new product offering, encouraging businesses to adopt AI now.<\/p>\n In fairness, you should consider adopting AI tools and capabilities within your business applications as part of your roadmap<\/a>. But before you get drawn to this new and shiny thing, we need to make sure your systems can support all the capabilities AI promises.<\/strong><\/p>\n In this article, we\u2019ll explore the latest Dynamics 365<\/a> AI features, including Copilot. We will also review how to adopt new capabilities effectively, and the importance of focus on enhancing your system’s maturity in specific areas to support these implementations. Here are the modules we’ll cover:<\/strong><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Sales<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Field Service<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Customer Service<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Customer Insights<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Finance<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Project Operations<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Business Central<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 is a suite of intelligent cloud business applications with products available to support various business processes across your organization, from customer-facing activities (CRM) to back-end operations (ERP).<\/p>\n Dynamics 365, among many other Microsoft products, is built on top of the Dataverse. Thanks to this common foundation, integration across other tools comes standard, allowing you to build an end-to-end business application ecosystem where all systems speak to each other and share data seamlessly.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n For the sake of this article, we won\u2019t dive into the core capabilities of each application. Instead, we will break down the latest AI features that infuse within these products to bring your platform to the next level and enable you to fully unleash the power of your Dynamics solution<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n In recent releases, Microsoft emphasized its focus on AI capabilities and investments. Here is a list of some of the latest AI features organized by Dynamics product.<\/p>\n Analyzes data from email, calendar and historical customer interactions to provide relationship insights.<\/p>\n Suggests the names of colleagues who can facilitate introductions to potential leads by calculating relationships based on email interactions and meetings.<\/p>\n Increases conversions by finding and prioritizing prospects who are more likely to convert.<\/p>\n Suggests related products to increase sales.<\/p>\n Knowledge-based insights reflected in assistance cards on customer records, auto-capture of emails and meetings, email engagement to track read receipts and provide follow-up reminders. Includes sales accelerator, which summarizes and prioritizes the next best action and to-do items.<\/p>\n Improves forecasting accuracy using AI-driven models to review historical data and the sales pipeline to predict future revenue outcomes.<\/p>\n Supports intent and sentiment analysis, real-time conversation intelligence, conversation summary tagged to customer records, allowing you to easily schedule an action item after conversations.<\/p>\n AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. Copilot can also automatically generate action items and provide information and real-time tips during sales calls based on brand and competitor mentions. Copilot can also auto-create email responses with customizable content, such as proposing a meeting date and time based on your Outlook availability.<\/p>\n Automatically schedules jobs to the people, equipment and facilities best equipped to complete them.<\/p>\n The predictive work duration feature learns from historical booking information and completion times. This feature can compute a more realistic duration based on factors such as past resource performance, the customer, and the type of work.<\/p>\n Uses IoT sensors and AI to predict equipment failure and schedule maintenance before it occurs.<\/p>\n Detects emerging trends and identifies opportunities for improvement across support topics, agent-customer interactions, and knowledge management.<\/p>\n Uses conversational analytics to identify issues based on patterns and trends recognized across various interactions and cases.<\/p>\n Saves agents’ time by using generative AI to search for relevant and accurate information on trusted websites and internal documents, including previously resolved issues and knowledge articles.<\/p>\n Uses the power of generative AI with Copilot to quickly resolve cases by efficiently searching and obtaining information from trusted websites, internal documents and past cases.<\/p>\n Uses Copilot to quickly create chat responses, draft emails and summarize conversations for agents to quickly get caught up with a task.<\/p>\n With Power Virtual Agents<\/a>, you can enable self-service for your customers and enhance the experience with intelligent chatbots that include generative AI capabilities embedded into the chat experience as they resolve their issues.<\/p>\n Helps agents be more efficient with real-time insights, visibility into active conversations, and proactive recommendations.<\/p>\n Gets real-time insights while agents work within the platform with insights and recommendations generated during interactions and while working on cases such as customer sentiment, recommended knowledge articles to resolve a case, and more.<\/p>\n Routes cases to the best agent for the job based on availability, skills, workload, urgency, customer sentiment and more.<\/p>\n Seamlessly verifies your customer\u2019s identity, offering a smooth customer service experience using voice and behavioral recognition.<\/p>\n Uses the automated scheduler feature to automatically schedule message deliveries to each contact based on the best time to email \u2013 calculated by the AI for that contact to improve open rates.<\/p>\n Leveraging the query assist capability, this feature allows users to enhance or generate customer segments by describing a target audience with natural language.<\/p>\n Uses AI to assist with inspiration and generate content for emails you can then refine as needed to expedite the content generation process.<\/p>\n Analyzes the content of each marketing email message and generates a score that predicts how likely it is to be flagged by content-based spam filters.<\/p>\n Enables customer journeys to schedule message deliveries to individual contacts automatically, based on the AI\u2019s calculation of the best time to email that contact.<\/p>\n Provides suggestions for new customer segments based on customer attributes and defined measures.<\/p>\n Discovers additional information and insights around your existing segments. Finds what differentiates two segments or what they have in common. Uses natural language to ask Copilot questions about your data in Customer Insights.<\/p>\n Finds similar customers in your customer base.<\/p>\n Predicts potential value (revenue) that individual, active customers will bring into your business through a defined future time.<\/p>\n Predicts product recommendations based on previous purchase behavior and customers with similar purchase patterns.<\/p>\n Predicts whether a customer is at risk for no longer using your company\u2019s subscription products or services.<\/p>\n Transactional churn prediction helps predict if a customer will no longer purchase your products or services in a given time window.<\/p>\n Uses natural language to describe and create customer segments.<\/p>\n Leverages AI to identify and prevent fraud by analyzing transaction data and detecting patterns and anomalies.<\/p>\n Uses AI to analyze financial data and provide insights into cash flow, revenue and expenses.<\/p>\n Uses D365 Finance Copilot (preview) to stay on top of collections to ensure timely payments and reminders and streamlines the data gathering activities to retrieve historical information like the last payment date and amount owed.<\/p>\n Uses natural language to prompt Copilot to generate a project plan based on project requirements.<\/p>\n Uses natural language to automatically generate a project status report and leverage Copilot to identify risks and suggestions for mitigation plans.<\/p>\n Allows you to enter expense report receipts easily, using OCR to capture necessary details to expedite expense submissions.<\/p>\n Uses AI to analyze demand forecasts and inventory levels to optimize and reduce waste.<\/p>\n Enables predictive and preventative maintenance by analyzing data collected from machines and equipment.<\/p>\n Creates marketing copy tailored to your brand.<\/p>\n Predicts future demand using historical data and uses this insight to accurately forecast necessary inventory to avoid stockouts and create replenishment requests to your vendors.<\/p>\n Uses AI to predict if sales invoices will be paid on time, enabling you to optimize your collections process and minimize outstanding receivables.<\/p>\n Provides predictions for your future cash flow based on historical data with Azure AI.<\/p>\n Now that we\u2019ve looked at the new features AI will enable let\u2019s take a closer look at Copilot, specifically.<\/p>\n The shift to the Dataverse not only enabled tight integration across business applications due to their common infrastructure foundation but also opened up the ability to harness the powerful AI features available in the Power Platform. Dynamics users can take advantage of AI capabilities with Power Virtual Agents, AI Builder, Viva Sales and Microsoft Copilot.<\/strong><\/p>\n Microsoft Copilot<\/a> is the recently released AI assistant embedded across Microsoft business applications that can suggest optional actions and content recommendations within the context of the task at hand, harnessing the power of your data combined with search (using Bing and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search) and Microsoft Graph.<\/p>\n Microsoft Copilot can provide AI assistance across several Microsoft 365<\/a> and Dynamics 365<\/a> products within your enterprise. Together, these tools provide game-changing results, leading to efficiency and productivity for your team.<\/p>\n Note: At the time of writing this article, Microsoft announced that, along with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot will be a more role-based experience with Copilots that can work on domain-specific tasks with application context and leverage data across your Dataverse. In the above features described, those associated with Copilot are explicitly called out within the feature name.<\/p>\n If you have questions about data security and compliance, you can rest assured that Copilot accesses your data in a secure and compliant way and does not use customer data to train models. Microsoft also prioritizes information accuracy. Copilot cites public sources to see the origin of the content generated and what it has referenced to enable factual accuracy.<\/p>\n For Details on Copilot capabilities with Microsoft 365, check out this Microsoft article<\/a>.<\/p>\n To ensure you get the most out of your applications and unleash the full power of Dynamics, it starts with a solid foundation built on people, process and data quality.<\/p>\n Technology tools are meant to empower us to do great work. Still, without the process to standardize this work and use new tools, it results in poor data quality and adoption of new technologies, which will result in less efficiency!<\/p>\nUnleashing the Power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Features<\/h2>\n
Dynamics 365 Sales<\/h3>\n
Relationship Analytics<\/h4>\n
Who Knows Whom<\/h4>\n
Predictive Lead Scoring<\/h4>\n
Cross-Sell\/Up-Sell and Product Recommendations<\/h4>\n
Sales Insights<\/h4>\n
Demand Forecasting<\/h4>\n
Conversation Intelligence<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot (formerly Viva Sales)<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Field Service<\/h3>\n
Resource Scheduling Optimization<\/h4>\n
Predictive Work Duration<\/h4>\n
Predictive and Preventative Maintenance<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Customer Service<\/h3>\n
Conversational Analytics to Identify Trends and Issues in Cases<\/h4>\n
D365 Customer Service Copilot<\/h4>\n
Real-Time Insights<\/h4>\n
Intelligent Routing<\/h4>\n
Biometric Authentication<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (Formerly D365 Marketing, which will combine with Customer Insights<\/a> into a single solution)<\/h3>\n
AI-Powered Customer Journey Orchestration<\/h4>\n
AI-Powered Customer Segmentation With D365 Customer Insights Copilot<\/h4>\n
Content Generation With D365 Customer Insights Copilot<\/h4>\n
Spam Checker<\/h4>\n
Automated Scheduler<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (to be combined with D365 Marketing as a single offering in September 2023)<\/h3>\n
Generate Suggested Segments<\/h4>\n
Get Insights on Segments With D365 Customer Insights Copilot<\/h4>\n
Find Similar Customers<\/h4>\n
Predict Customer Lifetime Value<\/h4>\n
Predict Product Recommendations<\/h4>\n
Predict Subscription Churn<\/h4>\n
Predict Transactions Churn<\/h4>\n
Audience Segmentation With Copilot<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Finance<\/h3>\n
Fraud Protection<\/h4>\n
Business Performance Analytics<\/h4>\n
Collections Management With D365 Finance Copilot<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Project Operations<\/h3>\n
Project Plan Creation With D365 Project Operations Copilot<\/h4>\n
Project Status Report Creation With D365 Project Operations Copilot<\/h4>\n
Use OCR for Receipt Capture<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management<\/h3>\n
Inventory Optimization<\/h4>\n
Sensor Data Intelligence<\/h4>\n
Dynamics 365 Business Central<\/h3>\n
Brand Descriptions With D365 Business Central Copilot<\/h4>\n
Sales and Inventory Forecasting (Extension)<\/h4>\n
Late Payment Predictions (Extension)<\/h4>\n
Cash Flow Analysis<\/h4>\n
Microsoft Copilot<\/h2>\n
Preparing for Change<\/h2>\n