Microsoft’s Latest AI Assistant Is Meant for Marketers, Customer Reps and Work Apps

AI ‘copilot’ will help answer customer calls, summarize sales meetings and generate marketing pitches

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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Microsoft Corp., having brought artificial intelligence to its battle with Google over search, is now turning to the latest AI technology to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market such as Oracle Corp., Salesforce Inc. and SAP SE.

The software giant is introducing an AI assistant—called Dynamics 365 Copilot — for applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. It can help marketers come up with customer categories to target, and write product listings for e-commerce. The new capabilities are being released in preview form on Monday and are being tested by hundreds of early customers. For example, Italian aperitif maker Campari is trying out the marketing tools to concoct targeted campaigns for events around the Negroni cocktail.