Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales(preview)

I’m sure you have all heard of the new Copilot feature that Microsoft announced in March of this year. Essentially, Copilot is an AI-powered productivity tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand users’ requests and provides personalized recommendations, tips, and assistance. This means that users can ask Copilot questions and get instant answers, guidance, and suggestions to help them work more efficiently. Copilot is designed to be available across multiple Microsoft 365 applications that we are already familiar with, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, etc. and is intended to be context-aware, meaning it understands the user’s specific needs and the task at hand. However, Microsoft is has also extending the copilot functionality to business applications like Dynamics 365 Customer Service (you can read an article I previously wrote on this here), Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, Viva Sales (read the article about the viva sales here), Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management! In this article I am going to discuss Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, which has been in preview since June of this year. NOTE: I am not sure in which regions Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales currently is available as I was unable to find any documentation about it, however it worked for my environment in the Canada and US region.

Install Copilot from AppSource

Before you enable Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, you’ll need to install it in your environment from App Source. My recommendation is to first log into AppSource using your Dynamics 365 credentials. If you visit the D365 Sales Copilot install page on app source first, you’ll see a 404 error. Make sure you go to AppSource first and log in with your environment credentials first. Once you’re logged in, you can go to the Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot page, from where you can initiate the install. Clicking the button will prompt a screen where you’ll have to enter some details, like your name, title, etc. Then it will load the Power Platform Admin Center, from where you’ll need to select the environment where you want to install Copilot in. Click ‘Install’ and the installation will be initiated. This only took a few minutes to complete. This process will change in the next month or so, when we will be able to just enable Copilot Sales from within Dynamics 365 Sales. Please read the updated article on how to install Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 here.

Enable Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales

Once the installation has been completed, you’ll need to enable Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales. You can do this from the Sales Hub. You’ll need to navigate to make.powerapps.com, click ‘Apps’ from the sitemap and open the Sales Hub by clicking the three dots (…) on the right side of the Sales Hub and click ‘Edit’. This will open the app editor. Once the app editor loads, you’ll need to click ‘settings’ on the command bar and click ‘Upcoming’ on the left side of the window.

From here you can enable ‘Copilot Email Assist’ and ‘Sales Copilot Chat’ by setting the toggles to ‘Yes’. Make sure to publish your changes for them to go into effect. Another setting you should be aware of for this to work is the auditing setting in Dynamics 365 Sales. Auditing needs to be enabled and the ‘Log Access’ (this represents auditing user access) setting also has to be turned on. You can modify your audit settings by navigating to the PPAC, opening your environment and accessing settings > audit settings.

Functionality

There are two pieces to the functionality that is currently available in the preview of Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales. Just like you’ve seen in Viva Sales (which is now rebranded and part of Copilot Sales) (if you aren’t familiar with this then please take a look at this article I wrote about it) Copilot Sales for Dynamics 365 also has the suggested email replies functionality. There is also ‘chat’ functionality, which does a couple of things. NOTE: At the time this article was written, most of the Chat capabilities are currently only available for opportunities. First of all, Copilot chat can give users a summary of an opportunity. For complete opportunity summaries to be generated, there are certain columns in the opportunity table that need to be populated. NOTE: Not all of these columns have to be populated to generate the summary.
Update: At a later time admins will be able to configure which columns are used to generate the opportunity (and lead) summaries. I will write a follow-up article on how to do this. )

These fields are:

• name
• parentcontactid – also used for catch-up
• parentaccountid
• budgetamount – also used for catch-up
• estimatedvalue – also used for catch-up
• actualvalue
• currentsituation
• customerneed
• proposedsolution
• description
• statecode
• stepname – also used for catch-up
• salesstage
• estimatedclosedate – also used for catch-up
• actualclosedate – also used for catch-up

It also helps to have data in the opportunity product table, but I noticed it still works without it.
The second thing Copilot chat can do is a quick overview of any changes that were made to the opportunity in the last week. This is called Opportunity Catch-Up. When a user opens an opportunity, Copilot will show the user this ‘catch-up’ information to the user. Fields included in the Catch-Up functionality are listed above as well. Users will also be asked if they want to see any changes to the opportunity since their last login. I.E if they haven’t logged in for a day or a few hours, they can just see the updates since that login.
Contextual News uses Bing to show the latest information about an organization. Users will see the ‘Show latest news’ button in the Copilot chat when they open an account, contact or opportunity row in the application.

The last item available in Copilot chat, is Meeting Preparation. This feature gathers important information from emails and meeting notes that are related to the row populated in the meeting’s ‘regarding’ column. If a user has a meeting coming up in the next 24 hours, they’ll get a reminder. Clicking on the reminder shows a list of all upcoming meetings for the next 24 hours. Once users see the list of meetings, they can select a meeting and click on the “prepare” button to find a summary of what needs to be done before the meeting.

End user experience

When a user first signs in after Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales has been enabled, they can access Copilot by clicking the Copilot icon on the right. This will expand Copilot in the side pane. There are 3 introduction screens that the user will have to click through before they can access the copilot functionality. On the third screen the user will see the ‘Try Copilot’ button. Once clicked, they can start interacting with Copilot.

When a user opens Copilot from within an opportunity, the opportunity summary screen loads automatically. At any time users can enter: ‘summary for <opportunity name>.’ in the Copilot chat window, which will also trigger the summarization of that particular opportunity.
When on an opportunity, a user enters ‘latest news‘ in the Copilot chat, they will get the latest news for the account related to the opportunity. If users are accessing Copilot chat from an account, or contact row, the news related to the account will show. From the Copilot response, users can also click the ‘Show more on Bing’ button below the response. When this button is clicked, a separate window opens the Bing search results.
To access the ‘Meeting Preparation‘ functionality, users can enter ‘todays meetings’ or ‘meetings’ in the Copilot chat. This will prompt Copilot to prepare the user for any meetings that are scheduled in the next 24 hours. Copilot will put this meeting summary together based on notes and recent emails that are associated with the row that is populated in the ‘regarding’ field of the meeting. I’m sure you understand that Copilot can only give meeting prep if emails or notes are available.

Compose draft email replies

As I mentioned earlier, Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales also has the ability to help users draft an email message. When a user opens the email form in Dynamics 365 Sales and accesses Copilot, the ‘Compose’ tab is loaded in Copilot. From there users can describe the email they want to create, and Copilot will draft the email for them. Users have the ability to copy and paste the suggested email reply from Copilot into the email. Changes can also be made before sending the email to the prospect or customer. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!