How to use Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for max productivity

Do you ever have those days where everything just clicks? You’re one step ahead, checking things off the to-do list, and on top of all the details. If you want to have more of those days, then you need to check out Copilot in Dynamics 365. 

This AI assistant is available across the full suite of Dynamics 365 apps: sales, customer service, supply chain management, finance, marketing, field service, commerce, and project operations.

In this article, we’ll explain how to set up and configure Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service. We’ll also look at the most valuable use cases for both of them. 

• Using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales
• Using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Wrapping up: Learn more about prompt engineering for AI assistants

Sales teams can use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales to boost day-to-day productivity.  Using the integrated chatbot, you can summarize opportunities and leads, catch up on what’s new in the sales pipeline, draft emails, read the latest news about accounts, and prepare for sales meetings.

If your Dynamics 365 organization is located in North America, Copilot chat is enabled by default in all of the Dynamics 365 Sales apps. Easy-peasey. If you’re in another region, check out the official documentation for prerequisites and setup instructions.

Once Copilot is enabled for your org, you’ll see the Copilot icon on the top right of your screen. Click that to expand the Copilot pane and display three suggestions for how Copilot can help: Get info, Ask questions, and Stay ahead.

You can also type a question into the textbox at the bottom of the app or click the sparkle icon to launch the prompt guide. This guide is also divided into Get info, Ask questions, and Stay ahead. These menus bring up easy-to-use prompts that send Copilot to work with just a single click.

On the Copilot pane, you’ll also notice a tab for Email. Before anything will populate in this tab, you need to start a new email on a lead, opportunity, account, or contact. Why? When Copilot drafts an email, it personalizes it to the person you’re writing to—it needs to know who that is.

The Get info part of the prompt guide makes it easy to summarize leads and opportunities, get the latest news for accounts, and show your sales pipeline.

Navigate to the Get info category of the prompt guide by clicking on the sparkle icon.

In the sub-menu, explore the options to learn more about your sales pipeline.

• Show my pipeline: This displays your open opportunities ordered by the estimated close date.

• Get latest news for account: If a specific account is open, Copilot will use Bing to pull news that mentions that account. If no particular account is open, Copilot will pull news about your top accounts.

• Summarize opportunity: If you have a particular opportunity open, Copilot will summarize it. If you don’t have an opportunity, you’ll be prompted to select an opportunity.

• Summarize lead: If you have a lead record open, Copilot will provide a summary of it. If you don’t have a lead open, it’ll prompt you to select one from a list of leads assigned to you.

The next set of prompts is under the Ask questions heading of the prompt guide.

These one-click prompts include the following.

• What’s new with my sales records: This will summarize the latest updates for opportunities, leads, and accounts assigned to you.

• What’s newly assigned to me: View a summary of leads and opportunities that were assigned to you in the last 15 days.

• What’s changed for opportunity: When you have a specific opportunity open, Copilot will summarize the changes that happened in the last seven days or since you last signed in.

• What’s changed for lead: When you have a particular lead record open, Copilot summarizes changes from the last seven days.

The final category in the prompt guide is Stay ahead.

This menu will open up several options.

• Prepare for sales appointments: Copilot will summarize important facts and notes for upcoming meetings on your calendar in the next 24 hours. Meetings must contain notes in the Timeline.

• Show emails that need follow up: View emails that need replies. To be included in this list, emails must meet the following criteria:

  • They've been in your mailbox, unanswered, for the past three to seven days. Email that's been unanswered for longer than seven days falls off the list.

  • They contain a buying intent, a question, a query, or an action item.

  • They have the Regarding field as a lead or an opportunity.

One of Copilot’s biggest time-savers is its ability to draft emails. To activate this functionality in the Copilot pane, first start a new email. This will open up the Email tab in Copilot.

Describe the email you’d like to draft, then click the arrow button.

As requested, Copilot will create a draft email based on your input. You can then choose from the options at the bottom of the email. 

• Add to email: This will move the drafted text to your open email on the left side of your screen

• Copy: This will copy the drafted text to your clipboard

• Knob icons: Use these to adjust the tone of the drafted email to formal, professional, or friendly. You can also click the … to try again or start over.

With Dynamics 365 in Customer Service, agents can use Copilot to work more efficiently, resolve customer issues faster, and automate some of the time-consuming tasks of day-to-day work.

You can only use Copilot features in the Customer Service workspace app if they’ve been enabled on the agent experience profile. Let’s walk through how to set that up.

Navigate to the Customer Service admin app.

On the left-hand navigation, under the Agent experience group, click Workspaces.

Find the Agent experience profiles section and click Manage.

Select the agent experience you’d like to modify (default profiles can’t be edited).

Find the Productivity pane section. Ensure the Copilot help pane is On. If it’s not, click Edit and toggle it on. This will let agents use Copilot features such as suggesting responses, asking questions, and writing emails.

Next, locate the Copilot AI features section.  Ensure the appropriate options are enabled. Click the Edit button if you want to change anything.

Depending on your location, licensing details, and security roles, you may need additional steps to get things working. Check out the full documentation for more details.

After enabling Copilot for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you’ll see the Copilot icon on the top right of your screen. Clicking that will expand the Copilot pane and show instructions on how to get the most from your AI assistant.

You can ask Copilot free-form questions, just like you’d ask your boss or coworkers, and get answers. One area in particular where Copilot shines is finding resolutions for cases.

For example, let’s say you’ve been assigned a case related to mineral build-up in the water supply of a coffee machine. With that case open, go to the Ask a question tab in Copilot and ask, “Can you help me find a resolution to this case?”

Copilot will get busy searching the knowledge base for similar cases and resolutions, bringing back suggestions on how to resolve the issue.

Scrolling down the response, you can also click Check sources to pull up the specific knowledge articles Copilot used to find its answer.

Whether you’re assigned a new case, or you’re helping someone else with a case, wouldn’t it be nice to get a quick summary of the case without having to review all the details across various tabs? Well, Copilot makes that easy!

Open up a case and click the Summary section. This is collapsed by default, but when you expand it, Copilot will summarize the important details of the case.

Here’s an example of the summary it generated for this case.

Writing emails from scratch can be time-consuming, which makes it the perfect task to offload to Copilot.

To draft an email, open an account or contact. From the Timeline section, create a new email.

On the Copilot pane, the Write an email tab should activate, prompting you to describe the kind of email you want. The options in this section will depend on the details in the contact. For example, if the contact doesn’t have associated products, the option to write an email about product/service details will be grayed out.

Select the type of email you want to write, such as Empathize with feedback. Copilot will then draft an email for you, adding any relevant details from the contact and their related records.

Scrolling to the bottom of the email, use the Copy button to copy the text over to the email on the left of the screen. Or you can Start over to get a new draft.

Hopefully you’ve been inspired to use Copilot in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service apps. We’ve covered some very specific use cases, but the more you know about generative AI, and prompt engineering specifically, the better you’ll be at getting the answers you need. To dig deeper, check out these additional resources:

• How to Use Microsoft Copilot in Your Day-to-Day Work

• Introduction to Microsoft Copilot

• ChatGPT and Generative AI: The Big Picture

• Getting Started on Prompt Engineering with Generative AI