Although Microsoft’s annual Inspire event is aimed at Microsoft partners, we round up the announcements that directly affect customers.
Unsurprisingly, AI featured heavily at Inspire, with numerous announcements on Copilot and other AI-infused products:
Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing
Although a date for general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot has yet to be announced, details on its pricing have been released. When Microsoft 365 Copilot is released, it will cost $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers. UK-specific pricing has yet to be announced.
Microsoft 365 Copilot puts thousands of skills at your command. By basing its answers in your business data like documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, and contacts, and combining them with your working context, Copilot will deliver richer, more relevant, and more actionable responses to your questions. Copilot is integrated into the apps millions of people use every day including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Further details of this announcement can be found here.
Microsoft Sales Copilot
Incorporating Viva Sales (along with a product rebrand), Microsoft announced Sales Copilot, designed to be a seller companion, and accessed in the tools where sellers work, whether that is Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems like Salesforce.
In addition to the functionality provided by Viva Sales, new Sales Copilot-specific functionality was announced:
- Automatically generated opportunity summaries, including status, progress, and highlights of key changes, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Create contextual emails that use customer CRM data to pull in product, customer, and opportunity information, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Prepare for customer meetings with a summary view including account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news, and more—in Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Get real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings prompted by competitor or brand mentions by the customers.
Bing Chat Enterprise
Since launching the new Bing in February, corporate customers who have been eager to empower their organisations with powerful new AI tools but are concerned that their companies’ data will not be protected. To address this, Microsoft have announced Bing Chat Enterprise, giving organisations AI-powered chat for work, but with commercial data protection.
Bing Chat Enterprise is currently rolling out in preview to organisations licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Standard, and Business Premium at no additional cost. It will also be available as a stand-alone subscription in the future for $5 per user, per month.
Combining Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights into new AI-driven solution
To help businesses to increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalised customer journeys, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will now merge to form a new offering for both customer data platform (now called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data) and customer journey orchestration (now called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys) as a single solution. This new solution has a different pricing and licensing model and will be available from September 1, 2023. Please read our full blog post about this announcement here.
New Copilot functionality for Customer Insights will be available in preview in August: use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys and easily style your email, forms, and event registration pages.
Migrate to the cloud with Microsoft AIM
To enable customers to take advantage of AI capabilities in every line of business, Microsoft have introduced AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move), making it easier to move to the cloud. AIM offers organisations a tailored path to move critical processes to the cloud with confidence, providing customers with access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, expert assessments, investment offers, tools, and migration support.
Power Automate Process Mining
Process Mining, infused with next-generation AI, enables businesses to understand what is happening across their organisation, maximise process insights, use out-of-box recommendations to reduce the complexity of processes, transform operations, and drive continuous process improvement with automation and low-code apps. Power Automate Process Mining will become generally available on August 1, 2023, with further details announced by Microsoft shown here.
Summary
As with all Microsoft events, it is always exciting to see what new innovations are on the way and Inspire 2023 was no exception. It is clear that AI is becoming more and more widespread across all of Microsoft’s core product offerings, and we will endeavour to keep you updated as developments continue. If you are an existing Strategy 365 client and wish to discuss the above announcements, get in touch with one of our experts today.
