Laura Hyde |
Microsoft has launched its new AI Accelerator for Sales to help customers “transform” their sales organisation with Copilot and agents. The programme will include two new agents – Sales Agent and Sales Chat – designed to help teams close deals faster.
The Microsoft AI Accelerator for Sales programme, which will be available for eligible customers from 1 April, gives users access to AI experts at Microsoft, AI assistants in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Sales and custom agents with Copilot Studio to automate bespoke sales processes. Microsoft will also offer AI model fine-tuning, allowing organisations to personalise the output of agents. The programme gives customers access to pre-built agents to accelerate time to value for common sales processes, including a new Sales Research Agent that uses deep reasoning to help with strategic decisions.
“[This] exclusive programme is designed to help more customers experience a new way of working with copilot and agents, transform your sales organisation and migrate off legacy customer relationship management (CRM) vendors,” said Bryan Goode, corporate vice president of business applications and platform at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s new Sales Agent and Sales Chat have been designed to empower every sales employee and to move away from legacy CRM systems.
Sales Agent can turn contacts into qualified leads enabling sales representatives to close deals while the agent ensures no lead is left behind. Sales Agent works autonomously to research leads, set up meetings and reach out to customers. According to Microsoft, it can also complete sales on low-impact leads by drawing on company CRM data and Microsoft 365 data to personalise responses.
Sales Chat has been designed to speed up the sales cycle to enable teams to spend more time selling by providing “actionable takeaways” to simple, natural language prompts like ‘what should I know going into tomorrow’s meeting with this customer?’.
Both agents can be accessed in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat and they connect to both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, enabling sales representatives to work without opening CRM systems. They will be available in public preview from May.
“Nearly 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 use Copilot – and in the last quarter alone, organisations built more than 400,000 custom agents in Copilot Studio,” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for AI at Work at Microsoft. “On WorkLab, we’re sharing stories from companies across industries, from Estee Lauder to Newman’s Own to Holland America, using Copilot and agents to optimise costs, grow revenue, and transform their business.”