Have you checked out the 2024 Release Wave notes for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform yet? It’s filled with exciting updates and improvements throughout the tech stack. In this blog, we will focus on the Copilot for Sales updates included in the Dynamics 365 release notes.
Note: this blog originally appeared at www.dynamicscommunities.com.
Many Copilot for Sales Updates
First of all, there are a lot of new features and updates to Copilot for Sales, all designed to focus on maximizing productivity and minimizing time spent doing administrative tasks. There are updates to Copilot features within Dynamics 365 for Sales (“Copilot in Sales” – as opposed to “Copilot for Sales”…. which you can find here) – but this article is focused on the Microsoft Copilot for Sales section.
The section is broken into three areas:
- Cross-app experiences
- Microsoft Outlook experiences
- Microsoft Teams experiences
Cross-App experiences
There are 11 new features included in the release notes that fall under this category, which works with Microsoft 365. Most of these features will have public preview in April 2024 and start rolling out to general availability from April through September 2024.
Here is the full list of features coming:
| Feature | Public preview | General availability |
| Highlight sales information such as budget and stakeholders in customer interactions | April 2024 | April 2024 |
| Highlight buying intent and provide relevant next steps | April 2024 | April 2024 |
| Suggest updates to CRM opportunity | April 2024 | May 2024 |
| Detect customer asks and suggest responses | May 2024 | June 2024 |
| Highlight customer issues and provide relevant next steps | May 2024 | June 2024 |
| Highlight key insights about the situation of the deal | August 2024 | September 2024 |
| Generate profiles of key stakeholders | August 2024 | September 2024 |
| Extract customer information to understand deal context | June 2024 | July 2024 |
| Analyze aggregated sales activities | April 2024 | April 2024 |
| Integrate Copilot for Sales with Copilot in Microsoft Word | April 2024 | April 2024 |
| Extend Microsoft Copilot for Sales | April 2024 | June 2024 |
These are all great updates, but there are a few I want to dive a bit deeper into, because I think they have some incredible opportunities.
Suggest updates to CRM Opportunity
This feature uses AI to scan through meetings and emails, suggesting relevant updates to Opportunity records. According to the feature details, this will include updating your Opportunity sales stage, close date and estimate revenue. This help ensures that no relevant data is missed in a sales rep’s inbox and Opportunity stays as fresh and up-to-date as possible. This feels like a huge productivity win to me!
Integrate Copilot for Sales with Copilot in Word
Talk about streamlining! This feature describes how you can generate documents effortlessly in Word using Copilot for Sales. It requires Copilot for Sales to be enabled in your environment (obviously!) and a Microsoft 365 license. It allows users to generate a sales meeting prep document with the following sections:
- Participants & stakeholder information
- Opportunity summary
- Relevant email summaries
- Previous meeting summary
- Open tasks for relevant opportunity
- Open cases for relevant account
I’m hoping these sections can be modified based on an organization’s custom fields – but we can check back on that in April when this feature becomes available.
Microsoft Outlook experiences
There are two features in the Outlook section:
- Integrate Copilot for Sales with Outlook email drafts: Preview April 2024 / General availability April 2024.
- Integrate Copilot for Sales with Outlook email summaries: Preview April 2024 / General availability April 2024.
Both updates use AI and Copilot to deepen the integration inside of Outlook.
Microsoft Teams experiences
There are four features in the Sale Copilot release notes under the Microsoft Teams section. Here is the full list of features coming soon to Teams and Sales Copilot:
| Feature | Public preview | General availability |
| Integrate Copilot for Sales with Copilot in Microsoft Teams chat experience | April 2024 | April 2024 |
| Integrate Copilot for Sales with Teams meeting summaries | April 2024 | April 2024 |
| Collaborate with sales team from Microsoft Teams group chats | April 2024 | June 2024 |
| Collaborate with sales teams using AI-powered planner tasks | February 2024 | April 2024 |
The focus of these new features is to continue enhancing sales processes by delivering AI-powered assistance in the Copilot to improve customer interactions, decrease data entry and facility efficient sales collaboration directly within Teams.