On the heels of debuting conversational AI to search, Microsoft is leveraging artificial intelligence in corporate applications that have traditionally been dominated by competitors like Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Dynamics 365 Copilot is an AI assistant debuting in preview as part of the software giant’s business suite. Based on technology from OpenAI, it is designed to handle tasks including sales, marketing, customer service and supply chain. It can also draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. Targeting customers and categories for sales pitches and writing product listings for e-commerce are also among its skills.

“These AI capabilities allow everyone to spend more time on the best parts of their jobs and less time on mundane tasks,” Charles Lamanna, CVP of business applications and platform, wrote in a blog post. Data entry, content generation and note-taking are among the areas for which Dynamics 365 Copilot was designed.

The assistant is engineered with a focus on customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), the goal being to accelerate innovation and improve outcomes. “Dynamics 365 Copilot takes advantage of recent advancements in generative AI to automate tedious tasks and unlock the full creativity of the workforce,” according to Lamanna.

“Business applications are the latest Microsoft programs to get an AI makeover so far this year as the company adds language-generation tools and chatbots to everything from its Bing Internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software,” Bloomberg reports, noting that “the strategy follows a successful debut for an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot last year and Microsoft’s expansion of its investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in January.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company is overhauling its entire product lineup using artificial intelligence from OpenAI. In the business applications category, Nadella “ultimately wants to use AI to break down silos between formerly separate programs, each with their own workflows and acronyms,” Bloomberg writes. Microsoft says Dynamics 365 is the first to blend ERP and CRM into a single workflow, with “one AI copilot that can retrieve information and help workers.”

Built using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which provides enterprise access to the OpenAI API, the new Dynamics 365 Copilot capabilities “follow the rollout of OpenAI text-generating AI models in Power Platform four years ago and the more recent debut of generative AI capabilities in Viva Sales, Microsoft’s seller experience app,” TechCrunch reports.

The company has “been on a journey to bring generative AI and foundation models to the workplace,” said Lamanna. “We’ve now reached the point where the tech and product can enable transformative outcomes for customers.”