Microsoft unveils AI-powered Dynamic 365 Co-pilot: How impactful will it be for marketers?

Microsoft has recently introduced an AI assistant called “Dynamics 365 Co-pilot”. It provides interactive, AI-powered assistance across all business applications that handle tasks like sales, marketing, and customer service.

The new capabilities have been released in preview. It is being tested by hundreds of early customers.

Microsoft also stated that its next round of AI announcements, scheduled for March 16, will focus on "workplace productivity."

According to a recent survey on business trends conducted by the tech giant, approximately 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs.

Dynamics 365 Co-pilot makes use of recent advances in generative AI to automate "tedious" tasks and unleash the workforce's full creative potential.

Microsoft claims that its new AI assistant will analyse a company's materials and a customer's case history and provide answers based on that knowledge for customer service representatives.

Marketers can have plain-English conversations with their customer data software. It helps them develop targeted customer groups and get suggestions for additional segments that they may not have considered.

According to Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's vice president for business applications and platforms, the bot will also help marketers get creative and offer recommendations for email campaigns based on topics and requested tones. For which, users can choose from categories such as formal, luxury, or adventurous.

It is also noted that the company last month unveiled AI technology that helps salespeople write emails.

Over the recent years, AI has evolved to be the key component for marketers to do various activities, from analysing consumer interests and data, to generating unique ideas to conducting market research to campaign optimization and whatnot. Ideally, it helps marketers improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns by being relevant to audiences’ interests and preferences.

By the day, as AI evolves, so do the use cases for AI in marketing.

In this regard, we believe Microsoft’s new Dynamics 365 Co-pilot can take it a step further and assist marketers in many ways.

Sharpen and scale customer segments:

Sharpening customer segments helps marketers reduce the risk of losing customers by putting relevant information in front of the right audiences. As Microsoft's co-pilot assists marketers by suggesting new target audience segments, marketers will be able to tap into potential target audience segments that they had previously overlooked and tailor campaigns with greater efficiency. Besides, as the new tool allows marketers to interact with customer data platforms, they could easily create segments with just a few clicks by describing what is needed. As an outcome, marketers can sharpen and scale customer segments in a simplified way with the help of Microsoft's co-pilot.

Truly AI-driven "Next Best Action":

The AI-driven Next Best Action is important for brands to provide the most optimal experience for a customer. Marketers can easily gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs using Microsoft's co-pilot. It in turn will help marketers implement an AI-driven "Next Best Action". This way, marketers can leverage co-pilot to boost customer engagement, retention, and conversions.

Automate Personalized Content Creation:

As the tool provides content and ideas for email campaigns, brands can increase the efficiency of their marketing spend in the first place. As co-pilot can create personalized content as per each segment of the audience's preferences, it is more likely to resonate with the target audiences and produce positive results. More importantly, marketers will be able to save a significant amount of time by automating the personalization of content.

Scale Content Creation for Experimentation:

While speeding up the work on one side, co-pilot will help brands drastically scale up the content creation process. It allows marketers to come up with multiple variants of creatives in a short time and experiment more. Furthermore, it saves brands from wasting money on ineffective content. Consequently, marketers can serve the best-performing content to their target audiences and maximise campaign effectiveness.

Although marketers cannot solely rely on AI tools—as they tend to make mistakes and humans need to double-check them—Dynamics 365 Co-pilot can undoubtedly make life easier for marketers in many ways.