2024 Wave 1 Release Notes: Microsoft Copilot for Sales

Posted by: Dian Taylor | on January 30, 2024

Last week Microsoft published the release notes for 2024 Wave 1 and just like we’re used to, this wave has loads of awesome new features! As I do for every release wave, I will be writing another series of articles about the 2024 wave 1 notes for Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service and more! In the first article in this series, I discussed everything on the horizon for Dynamics 365 Sales. You can read it here if you missed it! In today’s article I will walk through the features mentioned under ‘Microsoft Copilot for Sales’ heading, and I noticed that all of these features will be part of a public preview over the next couple of months, which will give us plenty of time to try them out! It’s important to understand that Microsoft Copilot for Sales is a new SKU, which will be available starting February 24th of 2024. It will have a price tag of $50 per user/month. This license will include a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. Keep in mind you’ll need a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license to purchase Microsoft Copilot for Sales. What if you already have Copilot for M365? If you’ve already purchased Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can purchase Copilot for Sales for an additional $20 per user per month. Customers who have a Dynamics 365 Sales Premium license can pay $30 per user per month for Copilot for Microsoft 365 to get the full Microsoft Copilot for Sales experience. You can find more information about Copilot for sales on this page. Your next question is probably about the difference between this new SKU and the Copilot features we have today. According to Microsoft, the Sales Copilot features that are available today will be part of Dynamics 365 Sales and will continue to be available at no additional cost. All the new features that require a Copilot for M365 license are falling under the new Copilot for Sales license. I hope that makes sense! Now let’s talk features! Grab your popcorn, get comfortable and keep on reading!

Cross-App experiences

The features that are highlighted under the Cross-App experiences section in the release notes will allow Copilot to assist sellers even better by looking at customer interactions such as emails and meetings, from which it will be able to extract information, like customer data, customer asks, follow ups, etc. Copilot can compare things like what the customer said in emails and meetings vs what is stored in sales applications like CRM. It can then suggest actions based on those disparities. Let me walk you through the items listed in this category.

Let’s start with the ‘Highlight sales information such as budget and stakeholders in customer interactions’ feature. The release notes mention that ‘Meeting and email summaries highlight budget, stakeholders, customer needs, and timeline mentioned by your customer and provide relevant next steps. The generated email content suggests that you solicit the customer for relevant information in case it’s missing’. I am not exactly sure what this means, but I am guessing that Copilot will be able to generate email and meeting summaries based on certain things that were mentioned by a customer either in an email or in a meeting. The ‘Highlight buying intent and provide relevant next steps’ feature seems to be part of the feature I just mentioned, the difference being that the summaries will also include buying intentions that were mentioned by the customer. Both features show a public preview date of April 2024.

On top of that, Copilot for Sales will also be able to ‘Detect customer asks and suggest responses’. This means that Copilot will be able to identify disparities between what your customers are asking about in emails, meetings, or documents and what is stored in CRM and other places (I.E SharePoint). Copilot will create suggested responses based on the disparities. The same goes for the ‘Highlight customer issues and provide relevant next steps’ functionality, where issues are identified, and action items are suggested by Copilot.
The ‘Highlight key insights about the situation of the deal’ feature has Copilot provide information on the deal status, while giving sellers suggestions regarding information they should bring to the customer.
The ‘Suggest updates to CRM opportunity’ feature plays nicely into this scenario, as it will show Copilot’s suggestions to update opportunity rows. These suggestions are based on emails and/or conversations a seller has had with their customer. Update suggestion examples are: est. close date, revenue, etc. This feature will make it much easier to keep sales data up to date!

The ‘Generate profiles of key stakeholders’ feature talks about how Copilot for Sales generates a profile of key stakeholders based on public and internal data sources like CRM and SharePoint, but I am not sure what this means exactly? This feature will not be in public preview until August, so we’ll have to wait a bit for this one.
All of the capabilities and features mentioned above will be available in Microsoft 365 chat, Copilot for Sales in Outlook and Copilot for Sales in Teams. In order to use any of the above features your organization needs to enable Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Another feature that I am very excited about is the ability to ‘Extend Microsoft Copilot for Sales’. What this means exactly is unclear at this point, however, I did notice the ‘Sales Copilot Power Virtual Agents Bot’ sitting in Copilot Studio! My guess is that this is where we will be able to configure additional functionality for Sales Copilot! According to the release notes we will be able to extend Copilot experiences in Outlook and Teams.

When I saw how the ‘Integrate Copilot for Sales with Copilot in Microsoft Word’ feature works, I was blown away! This feature will allow sellers to use Copilot for Sales inside of Microsoft Word to create sales meeting prep documents with all sorts of relevant information for a deal! Usually, sellers spend lots of time on gathering this type of information before a meeting, but Copilot will do it all for them! If you’ve seen Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Word, then this will look familiar, but this feature allows sellers to also include data from sales (Teams) meetings and other sales documents to create the meeting prep document. Even though the release notes don’t mention the need for a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license to take advantage of this feature, I double checked with Microsoft and they said that is indeed the case. Users will need a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license (or a Copilot for Sales license) and of course Copilot for Sales must be enabled.

Microsoft Outlook Experiences

There are two items under this category in the release notes, but I am not 100% clear on what they mean. The first one is called ‘Integrate Copilot for Sales with Outlook email drafts’ and the other is called ‘Integrate Copilot for Sales with Outlook email summaries’. The way I interpret these features is that Copilot in Outlook will be tighter integrated inside of outlook, meaning we might see some of the copilot buttons sitting inside the outlook application vs the side pane. These features are listed for public preview in April, so we’ll have to wait until then to see if I’m correct!

Microsoft Teams Experiences

There are plenty of updates to the Copilot for Teams experience! I am not sure that the ‘Integrate Copilot for Sales in Microsoft Teams chat experience‘ features does exactly, but my guess is that we will be able to get a combination of access to CRM data directly inside the teams chat. Today we can share CRM cards inside teams, but this feature will most likely be more robust. This feature will be GA in April.
The ‘Integrate Copilot for Sales with Teams meeting summaries’ allows users to access several new capabilities directly from the meeting summary page. My assumption is that after a meeting is completed, the user will be able to see action items, conversational KPI’s, sales keywords and questions that were asked during the meeting, and speaker sentiments.
The ‘Collaborate with sales team from Microsoft Teams group chats’ feature will allow sellers to share email summaries and other outlook information directly inside Microsoft Teams group chats. It also mentions being able to use Copilot to create opportunity summaries in Teams group chats, something we can currently only do in deal rooms.
Being able to ‘Collaborate with sales teams using AI-powered planner tasks’ sounds amazing to me! Copilot will look at conversations for action items. Once it finds them, it will suggest tasks to create for them. If the seller approves the suggestion, Copilot will automatically create planner tasks from the suggestions. These tasks can then get assigned to sellers.

Sellers will see a task app pinned to the related Teams channel providing the sales team with a centralized view of all tasks. Sellers will also be able to see their assigned tasks from a personal task app. This functionality will be available for Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce customers! Keep in mind that this feature will not roll out to all the geographic areas (yet?), it will be available in the following regions: Germany, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United States, Europe, Asia Pacific, United Kingdom, Australia, South America, Canada, India, Japan, France, and Korea.
For more information on Microsoft Copilot for Sales, check out these links: