Microsoft is giving businesses a GPT boost in Teams and Viva Sales – AI News Update

Just a week later announcing it would “extend” its OpenAI partnership, Microsoft is already boosting enterprise productivity through GPT – and, presumably, shows how its estimated $10 billion investment in OpenAI can start to add value, pronto.

Smarter, more personalized meetings

Yesterday afternoon PT Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted an announcement about the general availability of Microsoft Teams Premium.

According to a blog postTeams Premium “brings the latest technologies, including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 powered big language models, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized and protected, whether they are one-on-one meetings, large meetings, virtual meetings or webinars”.

The offering includes auto-generated meeting notes, recommended tasks and personalized highlights, plus real-time AI-powered translations from 40 spoken languages.

Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer of Microsoft, tweeted for teams to move to leverage GPT was an “exciting direction” and added, “We’ve been dreaming about these capabilities for years.”

Microsoft seeks to make salespeople more productive

Today, Microsoft also previewed a new generative AI experience in live salesthe seller experience app launched last summer (and generally available in October) that combines productivity tools and business processes.

The company says Viva Sales (which is an extension of Viva from Microsoft employee experience platform) “brings together all of customer relationship management (CRM) technology, Microsoft 365, and Teams to deliver a more streamlined, AI-powered sales experience.” The conversational intelligence capabilities of the Viva Sales app include automatic call summary generation, question detection, conversational KPI calculation, and action item extraction.

The new capabilities of Viva Sales, powered by Azure OpenAI Service and GPT-3.5, add auto-suggested email content to the mix. For example, Viva Sales can remind salespeople when it’s time to follow up with a prospect or customer, based on information from the salesperson’s CRM and the Microsoft 365 chart. Now Viva Sales can also generate automatically a pre-formatted email response with personalized text and next best deals, as well as details on prices, promotions or deadlines.

Responses are generated based on CRM data, communication intent, and the Microsoft Graph, which “provides access to rich, people-centric data and insights in the Microsoft cloud, including Microsoft 365, Windows and Enterprise Mobility and Security”.

Sellers can choose from a set of predefined response categories or enter a custom text prompt to generate email content.

Efficiently Compose Popup Emails in Microsoft Outlook

“Viva Sales is focused on making salespeople more productive using the tools they already know and love,” Charles Lamanna, vice president of enterprise applications and platform at Microsoft, told VentureBeat.

Now, he explained, “we’re helping salespeople write emails better and faster, right in Outlook,” adding that the app injects context-specific elements that are critical to salesperson success.

“It pulls from your CRM, whether it’s Salesforce or Dynamics, it pulls notes and information from past meetings, it pulls from the email itself, to create an incredibly amazing email for you – that you can approve and inject and tweak and tweak to make you super productive,” he explained.

The app uses the OpenAI API inside Azure Cognitive Services, which Lamanna says offers “very strong privacy safeguards – your data is your data. We do not train, recycle or adjust models based on your data, which is critical for these enterprise clients. »

New features coming in 2023

Lamanna said that the live sales app continually adds generative AI to various scenarios that help salespeople “get out of the grind” and do less data entry and repetitive tasks.

“There will be many, many, many more features in this vein over the course of 2023 with a focus on how best to bring people back into conversations with customers,” he said.