During its recent Ignite conference, Microsoft made a wide range of announcements, many of which focused on the emerging capabilities of its AI agents, driven by Copilot.
Microsoft has introduced 10 new autonomous agents to D365 which will be rolling out into public preview between 2024 and early 2025. Altogether, they span sales, service, finance, and supply chain use cases. We explain more about these agents below.
New agents
Microsoft’s pre-built agents target core enterprise operations – from CRM and supply chain management to financial reconciliation. While various competitors offer AI agent solutions in some limited areas, Microsoft has created an extensive agent ecosystem that reaches beyond its own platform. The system includes 1,400 third-party connectors and supports customisation across 1,800+ large language models. The scale of adoption is also significant with 100,000 organisations already creating or modifying agents.
- Sales Qualification Agent: Analyses and prioritises inbound leads and crafts personalized sales emails to commence or enhance relationships.
- Sales Order Agent: Built for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, it automates the order intake process, even communicating directly with customers.
- Supplier Communications Agent: Manages supplier relationships, collaborating with suppliers to confirm deliveries and navigate potential setbacks with the goal of preventing supply chain disruptions.
- Financial Reconciliation Agent: Designed for data preparation and cleansing, makes it quicker and easier to organise data for financial reporting commitments.
- Account Reconciliation Agent: Built for accountants and controllers, it accelerates the financial closing process by automating transaction clearing and matching between a company’s sub-ledgers and its general ledger.
- Time and Expense Agent: Responsible for managing time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows, it streamlines the invoicing process and helps organisations manage budgets.
- Customer Intent Agent: Identifies intent from existing and previous customer conversations, and maps issues and related resolutions in a managed library.
- Customer Knowledge Management Agent: By constantly analysing case notes, transcripts, summaries, and other materials, it ensures knowledge articles are always up to date.
- Case Management Agent: Service staff can use this agent to automate common case management tasks including creation, resolution, follow-up, and closure.
- Scheduling Operations Agent: Provides dispatchers with a means to deliver dynamic, optimized schedules to field-service technicians.
While each of these agents has a specific use case, they all share one trait: autonomy. This autonomy enables them to find and alleviate issues and provide users with the time and flexibility to focus on mission-critical tasks.
“These new agents are designed to help sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams drive business value — and are just the start,” said Bryan Goode, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, business applications and platform in a blog post about the launch of the D365 agent suite. “We will create many more agents in the coming year that give customers the competitive advantage they need to help future-proof their organisation.”
With so many business processes accessible through D365 likely to be impacted by the launch of this comprehensive agent roster, users will no doubt be keen to see these security provisions in action. It could perhaps be the catalyst that encourages widespread adoption.
Learn more about the recent announcements from the Ignite conference here or if you have any questions about Agents contact our team who can help. You can also see more about our Dynamics services here,
