By: Aniket Pandya
Microsoft is tapping the power of AI to provide customers of its Dynamics 365 business applications suite with new features. The company announced a series of capabilities at its Ignite conference today focused on bringing intelligence to business processes, including a pre-built chatbot designed to field customer service queries.
Customers including HP and Macy’s are already using the new chatbot to help handle customer queries so that people can get their responses faster. Microsoft plans to release more of these AI-powered features in the future, though the company didn’t offer any insight into what those would be.
For those customers who don’t want to buy a whole Dynamics 365 bundle, Microsoft is splitting up its products into modules that can be purchased individually on a subscription basis. The company is starting with Dynamics 365 for Talent, the human capital management suite. It’s spawning two modular apps called Attract and Onboard, which are designed for different parts of the recruiting and hiring process.
As the name implies, Attract is designed to help companies find the right candidates and profile their applicant pools. Onboard helps with getting new hires set up with a business’ internal systems, training, and team connections.
In the future, Microsoft will make more of these products available to customers, so it will be possible to try out one or two modules without buying into a larger package of features.
Microsoft is also further tightening the connections between LinkedIn and Dynamics 365 for Sales, its CRM product. The company will soon let sales reps send InMail directly through Dynamics 365, and will bring in profile pictures from the professional social network into contact records within its CRM.
All of this news comes as part of Microsoft Ignite, the company’s massive conference in Orlando, Florida. In addition to the Dynamics news, Microsoft also revealed updates to its cloud platform, a new version of SQL Server, and more.