IBL News | New York
Microsoft will launch Sales Agent and Sales Chat in May, two AI sales agents accessible in Microsoft 365 Copilot and designed to work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.
The software giant also introduced a new program intended, in part, to help businesses “migrate off legacy CRM vendors,” without citing Salesforce by name in that case.
Microsoft wants to “empower every employee with a Copilot and transform every business process with agents” and “apply this ambition to sales, the revenue engine for every business.”
- Sales Agents can work autonomously by researching and identifying potential customers, setting up meetings, and contacting and following up on leads. It can complete some basic sales independently. The agents gather information from customer databases and CRM and company data like pricing sheets, the web, and Microsoft 365—such as emails and meetings—to personalize every response.
- Sales Chat gives sales reps summaries, actionable takeaways, and insights from CRM data, pitch decks, meeting notes, emails, and the web. It works with simple prompts like “Give me a list of deals that are at risk of falling through,” “What should I know going into tomorrow’s meeting with this customer?” or “Help me create a plan to close this deal.”
Meanwhile, Salesforce announced its updates to Agentforce on Wednesday morning, dubbed “2dx”.
Its CEO, Marc Benioff, has criticized Microsoft’s AI initiatives while rolling out Salesforce’s competing Agentforce platform.
Benioff has called Microsoft a “reseller of OpenAI.” He also criticized Microsoft’s Copilot, comparing it to the infamous “Clippy” assistant and suggesting it exposes user data to security risks.
Oracle, IBM, and ServiceNow are among the other major companies developing and offering agentic AI technology for sales and business applications.
