Microsoft teases sales agent automation for M365 and Dynamics 365

Redmond says you could ask one for a 'list of deals ... at risk of falling through'

Microsoft today announced two software agents that automate certain business functions for Dynamics 365, its enterprise resource planning and customer relationship suite, and Microsoft 365, its cloud productivity suite.

They're not presently available but will reach public preview in May, the software giant insists.

Redmond is also launching a program called Microsoft AI Accelerator for Sales, to help business customers ditch legacy CRM systems and implement agents and AI services within sales organizations. That happens on April 1, 2025, which – coincidentally – is April Fool's Day in North America, Europe, and parts of South America.

In addition, the Windows-cloud-AI impresario published a set of testimonials titled "Agents of Change" from more than two dozen customers that have found Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio worthwhile. The goal, presumably, is to convince skeptics and the subscription shy that AI agents can perform meaningful business operations.

Agents extend the natural language processing capabilities of large language models with code plumbing that connects to applications and interfaces. They make it possible to issue a text command to a Copilot-enabled app like Outlook and have the underlying AI model carry out the described task. The idea is that this is more efficient than manual interface navigation and button clicking.

With varying degrees of success, agents can also automate more complicated tasks, like booking flight tickets with an airline, given appropriate setup and permissions.

Microsoft's new agents include Sales Agent and Sales Chat Agent, accessible via Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. If you were hoping for product naming with a bit more humanity, well, remember how things went with Tay.

Sales Agent "can work autonomously around the clock to grow your pipeline – researching leads, setting up meetings, and reaching out to customers," said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Microsoft's AI at Work group, in a post provided to The Register that makes us wonder whether Redmond's agents respect business hours with their robo-outreach.

Compare that to Sales Chat Agent, which "gives sales reps actionable takeaways from CRM data, pitch decks, meetings, emails, and the web – so they can spend less time digging and more time selling."

These agents can work with both structured data, like CRM records, and unstructured data, like Outlook email messages, and can "reason" over accessible factoids in pursuit of some goal.

Spataro suggests 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" are the sorts of interactions that would work with Sales Chat Agent.

Among the various Agents of Change blurbs from those sold on agents, beauty brand Estée Lauder's dalliance with Copilot Studio sees three pages of attention lavished on the firm's ConsumerIQ agent.

The customer success tract describes a scenario in which an influencer is gushing about an organic lip gloss on TikTok, which is a thing that evidently happens. Estée Lauder's ConsumerIQ agent, it is suggested, could let the company's marketing team "tap into the company's decades of data to learn how customers use lip gloss in markets around the world" so they could bring their own version to market.

"This is now as simple as asking a question and getting an answer," said Jayesh Mehta, a brand technology leader at Estée Lauder and a member of its AI Task Force, in a statement. "Bringing the information [to] the fingertips as opposed to waiting for somebody to go research and bring that output three days later."

Microsoft claims that almost 70 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot and that more than 160,000 organizations have used Copilot Studio to date, collectively creating more than 400,000 custom agents in the past three months.

That's allegedly up 2x quarter-over-quarter, which may or may not be impressive. Creating custom agents is one thing, adopting them for regular usage is another.

As a counterpoint to such bullish celebration, a recent report from investment firm TD Cowen claims Microsoft has cancelled data center leases in the US, a move said to signal a downward revision of AI demand projections. ®