Microsoft is looking to silence some of its biggest critics by providing an automated solution powered by its AI that will save companies millions per year.
During its Microsoft Ignite conference, the company announced ten AI-powered agents it plans to make available to businesses through its Dynamics 365 platform that are tailored for automative services in the customer service, finance, and supply chain sectors.
According to Microsoft, these new sales agents have the power to potentially save companies as much as $50 million per year or the ability to save on staffing to the tune of 187-full time employees.
Microsoft’s AI agents are tasked with a range of financial activities they can help businesses automate including:
- Sales Qualification Agent “frees up time for the seller to spend on higher value activities by researching and prioritizing leads in the pipe and developing personalized sales emails to initiate a sales conversation.”
- Sales Order Agent “automates the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers, capturing their preferences.”
- Supplier Communications Agent “autonomously manages collaboration with suppliers to confirm order delivery, while preempting potential delays.”
- Financial Reconciliation Agent “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.”
- Account Reconciliation Agent “automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger.”
- Time and Expense Agent “autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking and approval workflows.”
- Customer Intent Agent “continuously discovers new intents from past and current customer conversations across all channels, mapping issues and corresponding resolutions maintained by the agent in a library.”
- Customer Knowledge Management Agent “analyzes case notes, transcripts, summaries and other artifacts from human-assisted cases to uncover insights.”
- Case Management Agent “automates key tasks throughout the case lifecycle — creation, resolution, follow up, closure — to reduce handle time and alleviate the burden on service representatives.”
- Scheduling Operations Agent “helps optimize schedules […] accounting for issues such as traffic delays, double bookings, or last-minute cancellations that often result in conflicts or gaps.”
Microsoft sees its commercial AI-agents pulling from an organizations M365 data sourced to form simple prompt and responsive actions to “increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact.”
Salesforce made headlines recently as it criticized Microsoft’s artificial intelligence efforts as a “disservice to not only our whole industry but all of the AI research that has been done.” Unfortunately for Microsoft, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has an argument based on the relative perception of the AI market as it stands.
Lots of financial investments but there seems to little in concrete and positive return on investment for most organizations.
There has been a lot of handwringing about the future AI will provide but not a lot of what it can currently do to make itself financially viable for consumer or corporate interest, until now.
Microsoft Dynamics AI service agents are among the first clear instances of the company’s AI working to provide clearer directional capitol for its users, and thus, address Benioff’s as well as the wider industry of Microsoft’s overhype of generative workflows and solutions.
In addition to the ten templated AI agents, Microsoft will also start evaluating a new section to its Copilot Studio that will allow businesses to craft their own custom agents for hyper-focused financial executions.
Microsoft will start rolling out its new AI-agents later this year with plans for additional agents being previewed in 2025.
