Community Summit 2024: Microsoft pitches Copilot opportunities to the Business Applications user audience

Microsoft continues to ramp up delivery of Copilot capabilities for the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform community, with the company working “frenetically” in focused areas, according to Microsoft CVP for Business Applications Copilots Vik Singh. In his keynote address at Community Summit 2024, Singh described new agent-focused AI experiences that shift the balance of copilots away from human interaction and toward automated activities.

“Copilots will do more things automatically for you” in the near future, Singh predicted. Over 100,000 companies currently use Copilot in either Dynamics 365 or Power Platform, he said, and the numbers using the tools in Office 365 and Azure are even higher.

More agentic, less human

Singh noted Copilot wins at high profile customers like PG&E, PayPal, and Lumen where uptake ranged into the tens of thousands of users.  He urged customers to think about adopting a Copilot strategy for Business Applications across the various options available today. The “sidecar” agent experience, which provides a traditional chatbot interface and can be found alongside an application, offers a highly user-driven experience, whereas pre-built solutions like Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance provide pre-built models and behaviors that automate more activities, freeing the users of time-intensive tasks. The latest “agentic” scenarios coming from Microsoft or built by clients are either exposed in an application interface, working behind the scenes, or even driving the interface choices of the human users. For example, sales teams may get the most out of a Copilot experience that takes the initiative of prioritizing their account lists based on pipeline analytics rather than waiting for the reps to ask for it. 

In a partner session at Community Summit’s AI Copilot event, Microsoft VP Mike Morton agreed with the idea that more autonomous AI scenarios are coming. 

“AI will do more things more autonomously,” he said, noting that he expected more activities that currently have a manual element to become automated and driven by triggers like an event in an ERP system or an external event like a critical weather condition. “Agent scenarios are not always binary yes or no,” he added. “They will adapt and work flexibly.”

Finding a win

Multiple partners and Microsoft representatives encouraged users to consider starting their investigation of AI with pre-built options, either in Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, or a pre-built Copilot app. The most common suggestion heard by MSDW appeared to be the use of Teams Copilot for meeting transcription and notes. For companies that can allow such recording, multiple sources told Summit audiences that they believe it is the most likely to deliver immediate value.