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ChatGPT Integration Added to Microsoft Viva Sales
- By Kurt Mackie
- February 02, 2023
Microsoft announced on Thursday that ChatGPT 3.5 AI model is now available in Microsoft Viva Sales.
Viva Sales leverages the ChatGPT AI model built by the company OpenAI to suggest e-mail responses to questions from customers. It offers options in the Outlook e-mail client to create certain replies. For instance, sales personnel can choose from options such as "Make a proposal," "Reply to inquiry" or "Suggest your own" and the AI will then create content that could be used.
The announcement included a demo and screen images showing a Viva Sales pane within Outlook that creates the suggested text for review. It'll even include cost calculations. This AI-generated text can be used as is or it can be modified before sending.
The AI gets its information from the Microsoft Graph, which pulls from Microsoft's services. The Microsoft Graph can tap data from "Microsoft 365, Windows, and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security, and the customer relationship management (CRM) system (Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce)," Microsoft explained.
The preview of OpenAI's GPT model in Viva Sales is augmenting Microsoft's own "Conversation Intelligence" capability that's already part of the product:
These new GPT capabilities strengthen our existing capabilities of Conversation intelligence, which leverages state-of-the-art natural language technology to automatically generate a call summary, detect questions, calculate conversational key performance indicators (KPIs), extract action items, and more.
Microsoft characterized Conversation Intelligence as being involved in "automatically transcribing calls and analyzing content, sentiment, and behavioral style," per this "Overview" document. Viva Sales also uses Microsoft's "Context IQ" AI technology, which offers predictions, information and people-contact suggestions based on Office 365, Teams and Dynamics 365 data.
Viva Sales was commercially released back in October. It lets users collaborate on business data pulled from customer relationship management systems and will identify customers in e-mails. It also enables "Meeting Insights" in Microsoft Teams, which lets people more easily find meeting content.
Microsoft charges $40 per user per month to use Viva Sales. However, Viva Sales is already included for organizations that have Dynamics 365 Enterprise or Dynamics 365 Premium licensing, per the Viva Sales landing page.
Organizations also will need a Microsoft 365 Enterprise license or an Office 365 for Enterprise license to use Viva Sales in Teams, Excel and Outlook.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.