News

Copilot AI Coming to Dynamics 365 ERP

• By Kurt Mackie
• June 15, 2023

New artificial intelligence (AI) "Copilot" capabilities are getting added to Microsoft 365 Dynamics enterprise resource management (ERP) solutions, Microsoft on announced on Thursday.

The availability of these new Copilot capabilities was not described, and it's not clear whether the public can test them. In essence, Microsoft is planning to add Copilot AI capabilities to Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management at some point.

Newly added on the ERP side are Dynamics 365 Project Operations Copilot capabilities. This AI addition for project managers aims to "dramatically reduce the time spent on project status reports, task planning and risk assessments." Project managers will be able to generate plans by "simply by describing details of the project using natural language," the announcement indicated.

Also newly added on the ERP side are Copilot capabilities for "collections agents and procurement professionals." The Copilot capabilities will give collections agents "quick access to credit and payment history," which will let them "prioritize and personalize customer communication" using Dynamics 365 Finance. Procurement professionals will be able to use Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to "efficiently handle changes to purchase orders at scale and assess the impact and risk to help optimize procurement decisions," Microsoft promised.

Microsoft's Thursday announcement seemed to be a follow-on description to Dynamics 365 Copilot customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities that were announced back in March. Back then, Microsoft had described Copilot previews for Viva Sales, as well as for Dynamics 365 Marketing, Customer Service, Customer Insights, Business Central and Supply Chain Center products.

According to a recent report by veteran Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley, the new Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 products will be added at "no additional cost" for some customers (apparently Premium subscribers), but they will be offered as paid add-ons to subscribers using other plans. Many of the various Dynamics 365 AI features will be released, mostly as previews, sometime this summer.

However, Foley noted that there is still no information on when Microsoft may broaden its preview of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is still at the private preview stage. Microsoft 365 Copilot, when commercially released, "will be a paid add-on to Microsoft 365 E3/E5," she noted.