Dive Brief:
- Microsoft is adding two sales-focused AI agents to its agentic portfolio, the tech giant announced Wednesday.
- Sales Agent and Sales Chat connect to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, helping workers keep track, grow and close deals, Microsoft said. Sales Agent autonomously researches leads, sets up meetings and reaches out to customers using data from a company’s CRM, Microsoft 365 and the internet. Sales Chat can help sales reps prepare for client interactions via natural language prompts.
- Customers will access both tools in public preview in May via Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. Customers can also fine-tune the agents to get more accurate and actionable responses.
Dive Insight:
AI agents are proliferating in the enterprise as vendors reduce barriers to entry and integrate them into existing services and platforms.
ServiceNow announced expanded capabilities to ease workflow management between agents last month and plans to add thousands of pre-built agents to boost adoption. The vendor, a longtime proponent of enterprise automation, said it has nearly 1,000 customers using AI agents already, including EY and Rolls-Royce.
In recent months, Snowflake has also launched an agentic AI offering aimed at simplifying data integration, retrieval and processing. Salesforce, Google, SAP and AWS have rapidly expanded their AI agent portfolios and tailored offerings for customers, too.
Enterprises have expressed interest in the latest flavor of AI. More than 2 in 5 businesses are planning to build 100-plus AI agent prototypes, according to a Tray.ai survey of U.S.-based enterprise tech pros. Most of the more than 1,000 respondents expect agents will become core to operations by year-end, powering more than one-quarter of processes.
Microsoft said organizations built more than 400,000 custom agents in Copilot Studio during the last three months. Enterprise customers span industries and their use cases vary.
Carnival subsidiary Holland America Line created a sales agent to help customers pick and purchase cruise experiences. Professional services firm Accenture developed an agent to automate past-due payments and expedite collections. Telecommunications company Vodafone built an agent to streamline the request for proposals process to increase revenue opportunities for the sales team.
The Estée Lauder Companies is also using an agent it developed, called ConsumerIQ, to help employees market its products and develop new ones by analyzing archives and company data, Microsoft said.
Some organizations are further behind when it comes to deploying AI agents despite enthusiasm. Nearly 90% of those surveyed by Tray.ai said their organization needs to upgrade its tech stack in order to adopt the technology.
Analysts have warned of exacerbated risks related to security and the workforce should implementation occur before leaders work to strengthen governance.
