AI has been one of the key pursuits of humanity, and OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer or GPT, represents a giant leap forward. It forms a solid foundation for ChatGPT, the chatbot based on GPT, which gained massive popularity virtually overnight.
ChatGPT churns out human-like, intelligent replies to the user-input question and prompts. From summarising a web page and providing detailed blog outlines to writing poetry and drafting marketing content in a jiffy, ChatGPT is changing the way everyday people work and think.
But OpenAI is not stopping there! The Microsoft-backed AI pioneer released GPT-4 on 14 March 2023, which now powers Bing Chat, Edge, and ChatGPT Plus.
What’s more? Dynamics 365 is getting its own AI assistant in the form of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which also works with Microsoft 365 applications like Word and Excel. With the introduction of next-generation interactive AI capabilities within its customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning solutions, the workplace and workflows will both change.
But how? What does that imply for Dynamics 365 users? And how does it work in Microsoft 365 apps? Let us explain!
What is GPT-4? What can Chat GPT-4 do?
GPT, at its core, is a large language model that generates human-like responses to questions and prompts in natural language using deep learning to analyse and comprehend human language. It’s a series of generative pre-trained transformer models that have revolutionised the field of natural language processing (NLP). Widely regarded as one of the most advanced language models currently available, its latest version happens to be GPT-4.
It comes with significant improvements on its earlier version, GPT 3.5, which currently powers the free version of the ChatGPT chatbot. But that’s not all—Microsoft has collaborated with OpenAI to incorporate GPT-4 capabilities into its business applications, such as Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. Labelled Microsoft Copilot, this collaboration has introduced a range of AI capabilities to help businesses and individuals achieve more with less.
How can GPT and Microsoft Copilot change the Dynamics 365 experience?
Dynamics 365 Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant based on GPT that provides interactive assistance across business functions like sales, service, marketing, operations and supply chain roles. GitHub data reveals that 88% of Copilot users report being more productive, 74% report being more focused on more satisfying work, and 77% report spending less time looking for information. What’s more, there are other interesting ways how Copilot and GPT can improve the experience in Dynamics 365.
1. Intelligent Automation
Integrating OpenAI’s cutting-edge technology with D365 offers a wealth of benefits, notably the ability to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks. This doesn’t just save precious time but also prevents errors, enabling employees to devote their energies to more high-value tasks, such as scrutinising data and making vital strategic decisions.
Now users can build Power Automate flows more easily using natural language descriptions. With Copilot, creating flows will no longer be time-intensive and technical. You can, for instance, create a simple flow that surfaces a Teams notification and sends an email reminder each time a prospect responds to your marketing form. GPT will analyse and interpret your description in everyday language and automatically generate the workflow.
Simple flows like creating tasks based on emails, creating a record with relevant information based on form response, and sending notifications when the pipeline is closed are effortless for GPT with a specific context and the right data. For complex flows, Copilot is a brilliant tool for finding a starting point and unlocking efficiency by eliminating manual coding and adding triggers.
2. Personalised Customer Experiences
As we embrace the digital era, customers demand more personalised experiences from the businesses they engage with. OpenAI’s innovative natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning capabilities empower GPT-powered Dynamics 365 Copilot to meet these expectations.
For instance, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service enables agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences. It helps in drafting personalised replies to customer queries in chat and email by analysing interactions and gaining insights into unique preferences. Additionally, it provides an interactive chat experience based on knowledge articles and conversation history so that businesses can further customise the customer experience by recommending products or services that align with their interests.
This level of personalisation not only enhances customer satisfaction but also drives revenue growth for businesses, as tailored offerings increase the likelihood of conversions. Dynamics 365 Copilot capabilities are, thus, an essential tool for businesses looking to stay ahead of the competition through the delivery of exceptional customer experiences.
3. Predictive Analytics
With OpenAI-based GPT’s advanced machine learning algorithms fuelling D365’s predictive analytics capabilities, organisations can now leverage data insights to make better-informed decisions. Through the analysis of historical data, Dynamics 365 Copilot has the ability to detect patterns and trends, allowing it to predict future outcomes with a high level of accuracy.
It harnesses predictive analytics to project sales trends, pinpoint potential risks, and optimise inventory levels. This can enable businesses to allocate their resources more effectively, ensure their operational consistency, and ultimately drive improved business performance.
A practical example of this is Copilot in Dynamic 365 Supply Chain Center, which can proactively flag variations in external issues, such as weather, financials, and geography, that can potentially impact critical supply chain workflows. Copilot’s predictive insights can then notify managers and supervisors across materials, inventory, carrier, and distribution centres about the impacted orders with automated emails. This keeps everyone in the loop proactively and automatically so that mitigating potential future disruptions becomes much easier.
Additionally, the new Copilot-based predictive lead scoring in Dynamics 365 Sales generates a score to quantify the potential of lead conversion. The query assists feature taps into the lead data and suggests intelligently structured leads that can be further refined.
Furthermore, using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marketers will be able to generate deeply personalised customer segments based on their customer data using natural language. Copilot can provide recommendations about new segments that could have gone unnoticed previously by handling complex calculations and targeting customers who match the defined segment profile.
4. Improved Security and Fraud Detection
Security has become increasingly vital in the current digital era. And Dynamics 365 is now even more secure thanks to OpenAI’s advanced security features in Microsoft Security Copilot.
OpenAI’s machine learning algorithms have the ability to identify and prevent various cyber threats, such as phishing attacks and malware. This provides a safeguard for businesses to secure their data and systems from possible security breaches, thus lowering the potential risks of financial loss and damage to reputation.
It’s a combination of GPT’s advanced large language model and a security-focused Microsoft platform. The latter includes an evolving set of security-specific skills and is augmented by Microsoft’s unique global threat intelligence and more than 65 trillion daily signals. That ensures enterprise-level data security and privacy compliance for Dynamics 365 users.
What’s more, Security Copilot’s cyber-trained model comes with a learning algorithm that can evolve based on security-use cases so that it can better detect new threats and expedite appropriate responses quickly.
So, it’s not just a language model that monitors existing security issues but also an unrivalled system that is able to continuously learn and improve. This truly enables users and businesses to simplify security complexities and defend their data at the speed and scale of AI by complementing human efforts, catching what people miss, filling the security-skill gaps, and ensuring round-the-clock visibility into threats.
5. Enhanced Collaboration
OpenAI is revolutionising the way businesses enhance collaboration among diverse teams and departments. By integrating D365 with Microsoft Teams, employees can collaborate seamlessly in real-time, exchanging valuable data and insights to arrive at informed decisions. Furthermore, OpenAI’s state-of-the-art natural language processing capabilities empower Teams to assist with essential tasks, such as scheduling meetings and responding to emails, enabling employees to prioritise more strategic assignments and maximise productivity.
Microsoft Copilot in Teams makes collaboration and communication much easier and more productive. It gets you up to speed, organises ideas, and summarises conversations quickly. With Copilot in Teams, you will never miss out on key points, while most of your common tasks, like creating agendas, identifying the right people, and scheduling the next meetings, all become easier and more accurate with Copilot’s access to chat history and calendar details.
6. Productivity and Efficiency
With the power of automation, productivity and efficiency can soar greatly with Copilot-generated tailored customer responses to save time for high-value activities.
One of its real-life applications is in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which has been elaborated on earlier. It not only enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty but also eliminates the need for rigid scripts or canned responses, thus, saving time and costs.
Likewise, Dynamics 365 Sales users can leverage GPT-backed Copilot to craft persuasive sales proposals that resonate with their target audience. Additionally, they can create more impactful and compelling messages that will result in higher conversions and increased revenue in less time. Since sellers spend typically 66% of their time checking and responding to emails, Copilot brings a great opportunity to allow them to spend more time engaging with their customers instead of spending hours on clerical tasks.
Moreover, copilot in Business Central simplifies content creation when it comes to creating product listings for ecommerce. Using predefined product attributes, like material, size, and colour, it is easier than ever to generate engaging product descriptions within a few clicks. The AI-generated content is customisable in terms of tone, format, and length for further precision and personalisation.
But that’s not all, with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can effortlessly develop fresh email campaign content. It suggests campaign content based on the context and data from ongoing customer interactions plus other internet sources to improve the accuracy and relevance of such marketing campaigns.
7. Conversational Intelligence
Another advantage of Dynamics 365 Copilot comes as Microsoft Teams integration that enhances the live meeting experiences for everyone. Copilot in Teams can pull your customer relationship management data and enterprise resource planning data to enable sellers and marketers to drive contextual and engaging conversations with customers within Teams.
Additionally, Microsoft is enabling customer service agents to develop powerful virtual agents quickly with its new conversation boosters for Power Virtual Agents. Using the capabilities of Azure OpenAI and Bing, GPT suggests appropriate answers from the internal knowledge base and business website.
This conversational awareness based on real-time context allows expedited service delivery for customers but also enhances their experience, thus, boosting satisfaction and loyalty.
8. Business Chat
Dynamics 365 Copilot also comes with Business Chat, a GPT-based new experience for users across all Microsoft business and office applications. Designed to work alongside each user, Business Chat collects contextual information from all solutions, applications, emails, documents, calendars, and contacts and helps them stay on the same page and spend less time digging for the information they need.
Powered by GPT, it works like a chatbot for everyone using Dynamics 365. Users can chat with it in natural language. With a contextual awareness of conversation, Dynamics 365 data, past interactions, and other online knowledge bases, Business Chat provides appropriate answers or suggestions. Users can validate these replies, make any necessary changes, and take quick actions, thus, streamlining their workflow without losing focus.
This helps service agents to ask Business Chat questions and receive AI-driven answers to resolve customer queries quickly, improving service time and quality. Likewise, marketers can also quickly get marketing campaigns and content recommendations, which they can quickly tweak and implement in all engagement channels. This helps make teams productive and adds fluidity to the daily workflows so that everyone remains mission-focused.
9. Unlock Creativity
Apart from Dynamics 365, Copilot also enhances the user experience in Microsoft 365 applications. People spend hours using Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more.
From proposal documentation and meeting presentations to reporting and emailing, Microsoft 365 apps are tools that improve collaboration and communication within a business.
With the natural language processing capabilities of GPT, Copilot now works on top of all these apps so that users never have to struggle with cumbersome and repetitive writing tasks. It also makes them more creative and provides clerical assistance to save time and manual effort. For instance, Copilot in Word enables users to write, edit, and summarise texts automatically with simple prompts. This allows them to extract key points from long documents, like meeting summaries or project proposals, while also ensuring relevance through Dynamics 365 data integration. In addition, these AI-generated texts can further be fine-tuned to match the desired tone and length, making things even easier. Copilot also provides a similar feature using GPT in Dynamics 365 Marketing, which helps marketers generate up to 20 email content recommendations using AI and a few key points. They can further personalise these recommendations and expedite customer engagement.
Similarly, Copilot in PowerPoint also allows for time-saving through automatic slide creation from existing documents. It also provides speaker notes with sources of information, while ensuring precision and conciseness of presentation with desired tone. In Outlook and Teams as well, Copilot enables auto-summarisation of lengthy emails or meetings with multiple participants, in addition to, a smart feature for generating quick responses that are contextual and engaging.
10. Data Management
Lastly, Copilot and GPT improve the way Dynamics 365 users interact with business data. In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marketers and service agents can use natural language to explore customer information, such as age, preference, average spending, and more. This enables users to find and analyse customer sentiments and build smart segments using GPT and Copilot without needing a data analyst. And, with a little fine-tuning, they can be ready to implement the Copilot insights into their campaigns and segmentations,
In Excel, too, Copilot allows users to simplify their experience and analyse data faster. Copilot understands user-generated prompts to uncover hidden patterns, explore what-if scenarios, and provide formulas. Plus, it also generates data and reporting models based on user queries and their variations using different criteria.
What’s next?
With such a feature stack, OpenAI’s GPT and Copilot both are all set to change the way people work, and businesses function. Leveraging AI-powered LLMs trained on large data, GPT can help people take massive leaps in productivity and efficiency in many areas of their work. With AI-generated recommendations that are based on company data—Dynamics 365 system, Microsoft 365 documents, calendar, Teams chat and meetings, contacts, and other relevant information, businesses and employees can together deliver high-quality outcomes in less time and cost.
The potential of GPT technology to streamline business processes and unlock fresh perspectives from data is undoubtedly thrilling. At Dogma, we eagerly anticipate the possibilities that Dynamics 365 can bring and the benefits it will provide to our clients. We’ll stay vigilant for any advancements and keep you informed.
Note
Copilot may not be publicly available for all customers. However, Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, an invitation-only, paid preview, will roll out to an initial wave of 600 customers worldwide.
