According to an article by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the social network X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft's AI assistant Copilot (which first appeared nearly a year ago and is supported by OpenAI's GPT-4) is steadily infiltrating various product lines of the world's most valuable tech company and will not stop until it covers "all roles and functions." Recently, Microsoft announced the full release of two new versions of Copilot targeting specific industries: - Copilot for Sales, a product first unveiled at the Ignite conference in November 2023, aims to connect the Copilot AI chatbot with two leading customer relationship management (CRM) systems widely used by global sales teams: Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Microsoft's own Dynamics 365 Sales CRM. - Copilot for Service, which was previewed at Ignite and released in December, aims to assist call centers and customer service personnel. Prior to this, these two products were only available in preview versions to select Microsoft customers, such as Avanade, a business solutions and software provider joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft established nearly 24 years ago. According to Microsoft, the preview versions have received positive feedback. Copilot for Sales: How it Helps Teams Save Time In a company blog post by Emily He, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Applications Marketing, Avanade utilized Copilot for Sales to perform functions such as updating Dynamics 365 sales records from Outlook, summarizing email threads, generating email drafts, and providing intelligent meeting summaries. These AI features helped Avanade employees demonstrate that they are the preferred choice for customers while improving their work efficiency. Microsoft also linked back to an earlier blog post from November 2023, where several Avanade employees praised the benefits of Copilot for Sales, including summarizing lengthy email threads, estimating time savings of up to half an hour to an hour per week for employees. They also mentioned that Copilot's accessibility features were helpful for neurodiverse employees, although specific details were not provided. According to Microsoft's pricing information, Copilot for Sales is priced at $50 per user per month, billed annually. However, existing Copilot for Microsoft 365 users can access the sales-specific version for $20 per user per month. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Sales Premium users must pay an extra $30 per month to access Copilot for Sales. Copilot for Service: "Unlocking Trusted Knowledge for Organizations" One of the earliest applications of generative AI in enterprises, and one of the most awkward applications to date, is for customer service interactions. Remember when car dealerships used ChatGPT for customer service chatbots, and customers started taking advantage of them, demanding huge discounts and engaging in completely unrelated business? Nevertheless, it is entirely reasonable for business decision-makers and leaders to use GenAI for this purpose. Before the era of generative AI, we had customer service chatbots for many years, mostly based on decision tree mechanisms similar to telephone banking, and customers seemed to accept them, albeit reluctantly, sometimes considering them as obstacles to reaching human agents. Now, Microsoft has introduced Copilot for Service, aiming to provide a more reliable and less comically fragile AI tool for customer service. The design of Copilot for Service focuses more on backend tools rather than frontend tools, helping human customer service and response personnel gather information from various sources within the organization without switching between different applications, databases, wikis, manuals, or hundreds of knowledge articles in certain cases. As Emily He stated in her blog post: "Typically, an organization's knowledge is distributed across different systems—customer records and case histories reside in one or more customer relationship management systems, while information is scattered across knowledge base articles, public websites, offline files, and more. As a result, agents are tasked with navigating multiple applications to not only access critical insights but also manage customer interactions, collaborate with internal teams, and take action... Without expensive development time, businesses can unlock AI-driven generative conversations in their knowledge bases within minutes by pointing to their data. For agents, they can leverage this knowledge through Copilot, embedded directly into their chosen desktop software like Salesforce, as well as other tools they use daily, such as Outlook and Teams." Therefore, the full release of Copilot for Service today includes integrations with common customer support tools and applications, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Copilot can filter data relevant to specific conversations, product or service issues, or other tasks for customer service representatives. Microsoft also promises to "roll out more capabilities in Microsoft 365 applications later this month, integrating data from CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Salesforce Service Cloud," such as email summarization and generation, meeting scheduling, and customer case summaries. Similar to Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service has been previewed and used by specific customers, including tax service company RSM. An employee of the company commented on its effectiveness: "Six months ago, we launched a pilot program focused on leveraging Microsoft Copilot for Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio, which provides a framework for building AI-driven business processes. We have been committed to executing our own use cases, focusing on practical AI, and we are excited to now apply this productivity-enhancing technology to help customers implement AI in their businesses." Copilot for Service, like Copilot for Sales, is also available on an annual subscription basis, priced at $50 per user per month, with existing Copilot for Microsoft 365 users paying $20 per user per month.