Microsoft recently announced Viva Sales, a CRM automation tool, which includes a series of AI-powered features to cover tasks that salespeople have to manually perform manually.
Microsoft natural language processing, speech recognition, and other machine learning tools are tapped by the AI to keep track of actions taken in Teams collaborations or plumb calendar and email data that gets connected with a specific sale.
"We definitely see the beginning of a significant investment in applications for the end users," Dan Gottlieb, senior director analyst at Gartner, said. "While that may seem silly to say -- given the size and scope of CRM applications in general -- this is an example of what I think we're going to see a lot more of in the next wave of CRM sales tech."
Kate Leggett, Forrester Research vice president & analyst, said any automation which eliminates the requirement to manually summarize calls, take notes, and schedule follow-ups to make CRM data more accurate. "This allows the seller to concentrate on the conversation at hand -- and the insights that they bring to the conversation," Leggett said, "instead of reactive note taking that is often done at the end of the day, [which can be] error-prone and incomplete."
"[We're] really breaking down the silos between office data and CRM data," said Lori Lamkin, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience applications. "We can use AI to crunch these two separate data sources and provide a much richer set of insights and historical understanding of the customer that can help you be more effective."