‘They connect to both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, so sales reps can nurture and close deals without even opening their CRM,’ says Jared Spataro, Microsoft CMO for AI at work.
Microsoft appears to be clapping back at artificial intelligence business applications rivals, namely Salesforce, with a set of offers aimed at speeding up sales teams on AI products.
The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant first plans to allow access to an artificial intelligence accelerator program for sales teams on April 1, followed by public previews for two new AI agent offers in May, according to a statement Wednesday.
But the statement uses Salesforce by name, alongside Microsoft’s own customer relationship management (CRM) offer Dynamics 365, as an example of software sales representatives will no longer have to open once they start using Sales Development Agent and Sales Chat Agent.
“They connect to both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, so sales reps can nurture and close deals without even opening their CRM,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at work, said in the statement. “They can be fine-tuned to connect to all your business data, ensuring accurate, actionable responses.”
[RELATED: Microsoft To Grant Users More Access To Autonomous AI Agent Capabilities]
Microsoft Sales Agents
CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
The Microsoft statement even includes a quote from Richard Thompson, CEO of British solution provider ANS, on revenue growth experienced after migrating from Salesforce to Microsoft’s CRM.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth since migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales,” Thompson said in the statement. “Our sales organization has experienced an increase of 133 percent year-over-year revenue per head with 111 percent year-over-year growth overall. When we layered on Microsoft 365 Copilot, sellers realized 30 minutes of time saved per day, while pipeline generation has increased by 20 percent.”
Marc Benioff, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Salesforce, dismissed concerns that agentic artificial intelligence could mark the end of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications as a “Microsoft narrative” and put down the tech giant’s Copilot AI offerings as “repackaged” ChatGPT during his company’s latest quarterly earnings call Wednesday.
The question from an analyst appeared to come from statements Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on a podcast in December, when Nadella said that business apps will “collapse” in the agent era.
“They are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic,” Nadella said. “The business logic is all going to these agents. And these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD (create, read, update and delete), right? So they’re not going to discriminate between what the backend is. They’re going to update multiple databases and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the backends.”
On the Salesforce call, Benioff said that agentic AI “doesn’t operate by itself.”
“It operates with data, with a data cloud that has to be federated through your company to all your data sources,” he said, appearing to reference his company’s own Data Cloud offer.
During the call, Benioff also put down rival AI agents as imitations of what Salesforce offers. “Beware the false agents,” he said. “Go out there and take a look. Who’s really talking about it and who’s really delivering. … We are the No. 1 AI CRM. We are the leader of the digital labor revolution.”
New Microsoft AI Offers
The Microsoft AI Accelerator for Sales aims to bring sales teams AI products, expertise and services, with access to Microsoft AI experts for leaving legacy CRM systems.
The accelerator will also help with fine-tuning AI agent output to meet business needs, according to Microsoft.
One of the new AI agents set for public preview in May, Sales Development Agent, promises to complete sales for low-impact leads, turn contracts into qualified leads and work autonomously to research leads, set up meetings, reach out to customers and perform other tasks to grow the sales pipeline.
This agent leverages price sheets and other company data in the CRM, web data and other Microsoft 365 data including emails and meetings to personalize responses, according to Microsoft.
The other AI agent set for public preview in May is the Sales Chat Agent, which aims to give sales reps actionable takeaways from CRM data, pitch decks, meetings, emails and the web.
Reps can ask the agent questions in natural language, prompting for a list of deals at risk of falling through, what to know before a meeting with a customer and for a plan for closing a deal, among other examples.
Users can access the agents through Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, according to Microsoft.
