Salesforce introduced another major update to Agentforce today, but Microsoft also announced new agentic AI functionality to offer something of an alternative. With Sales Agent and Sales Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot aims to act as a revenue generator for businesses.
The new Sales Agent is equipped to turn contacts into qualified leads, allowing human sales colleagues to get straight to work on potential deals. This AI agent takes a look at 365, your CRM, your own company data and online resources available for any information needed.
In addition, Microsoft is launching a new Sales Chat today. With this, sales personnel should be able to take immediate action based on CRM data, pitch decks, meetings, emails or Internet resources. Microsoft cites as examples that employees use Sales Chat to discover potentially languishing deals, retrieve information for subsequent customer calls or generate an outline for closing a new contract.
How advanced?
“Nearly 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies” are reportedly already deploying Copilot. Microsoft highlights such adoption figures, but the question is how exactly to interpret this. After all, “Copilot usage” can be interpreted very broadly, from the renamed Bing Chat tool that can be accessed with a press of the Copilot button on newer laptops to any domain-specific integration into 365 applications.
More concrete is the example of Microsoft customer ANS, whose CEO Richard Thompson says he has seen tremendous growth from the migration from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales. Now it seems that this migration was a while ago, as Thompson speaks of a 133 percent increase in annual sales per capita. That means the migration took place before Salesforce’s Agentforce was rolled out.
Few steps ahead
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff lashed out hard at Microsoft late last year. For example, he called Copilot “the new Clippy” when Techzine attended a press conference. Salesforce not only seems to have a clearer idea of what AI agents should be able to do, it is also innovating faster than the competition. For example, it has been rolling out more and more integrations and capabilities and giving its own agents more autonomy with each new release, the most recent being Agentforce 2dx.
Below is a detailed look at what Salesforce announced today:
Salesforce sets new standard with Agentforce 2dx: AI agents become proactive