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We\u2019ve been hearing all artificial intelligence, all the time from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry\u00a0over the last several weeks. Microsoft is the latest to trumpet its AI capabilities for sales people with the general availability of Dynamics 365<\/a> coming on November 1st.<\/p>\n Microsoft announced last summer that it was going to be combining its ERP and CRM<\/a> into a unified solution, and this is the culmination of that announcement. Like many large organizations, Microsoft tends to deliver the news in waves \u2014 it\u2019s coming, it\u2019s in beta, it\u2019s here.<\/p>\n While the news smacks of \u201clook at me too,\u201d Microsoft points out it has been working on AI long before its biggest competitors like Salesforce and Oracle, which recently announced their own AI capabilities at their respective customer conferences, Dreamforce<\/a> and Oracle Open World<\/a>.<\/p>\n Microsoft has built in a couple of intelligence features into the release designed specifically for sales and service personnel.\u00a0First, there is Customer Insights, a stand-alone cloud service, which enables\u00a0users to bring in a variety of internal and external data sources. Companies\u00a0can\u00a0integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. The solution\u00a0includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don\u2019t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).<\/p>\n It\u2019s been\u00a0designed as a stand-alone service that can work with any of the Dynamics 365 CRM components \u2014 sales, customer service or field service \u2014 and can also work with any external CRM tool with open APIs. This last point is particularly telling because it\u2019s giving customers who might not be using Dynamics 365 (but are using other Microsoft tools like Outlook)\u00a0access to this feature.<\/p>\n The second piece is called Relationship Insights, which as the name suggests gives sales people information about the status of their customer relationships at any given moment. It\u2019s built on the\u00a0on the Cortana Intelligence Suite<\/a>, which Microsoft introduced in 2015\u00a0and uses tools like\u00a0sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of the deal closing and the next best action to take.<\/p>\n If this sounds familiar, it should because it\u2019s very similar to what we\u2019ve been hearing over the last month from a variety of CRM vendors. While you might legitimately wonder why sales and service people are the recipients of all the wonder that is AI in the enterprise, it seems like a reasonable starting point to improve the\u00a0likelihood of making\u00a0sales and understanding your customers better, an increasingly important capability\u00a0in the mobile-social-cloud age.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to remember that we are really just at the rudimentary beginnings of where this type of technology could eventually take us. Over time we will see this intelligence added to bots (and other delivery methods) to hide the complexity of the underlying software and guide users to an answer or solution. The idea is to increase our productivity over time, although we are a long way from achieving that goal just yet.<\/p>\n