Microsoft Boosts Viva Sales with GPT Seller Experience

Microsoft yesterday previewed generative artificial intelligence capabilities being added to Viva Sales, built on Open AI's GPT-3.5, to help sellers stay on top of customer emails.

The AI-generated email replies give sellers a head-start to keep the conversation moving to deal close, representing both a productivity boost and enhanced employee experience.

Viva Saleswill now generate suggested email content for a variety of scenarios, such as replying to an inquiry or creating a proposal&, complete with data specifically relevant to the recipient, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines.

Leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and GPT, Viva Sales provides access to data and insights in the Microsoft Cloud. Viva Sales can remind sellers when to follow up with a prospect or customer and then auto-generate a preformatted email response with personalized text and next best actions, along with details such as product descriptions, proposals, and deadlines. When responding to an email, Viva Sales provides sellers in-the-moment suggested responses based on categories such as "make a proposal," "reply to an inquiry," or "suggest your own." The reply is enriched with the combined data from Microsoft Graph, which provides access to people-centric data and insights in the Microsoft Cloud, including Microsoft 365, Windows, and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.

"By auto-suggesting customizable content, sellers can spend less time composing emails and searching for sales data from colleagues and databases," said Lori Lamkin, corporate vice president of the Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Platform at Microsoft, in a blog post.

"For sales teams, the adage time is money is more relevant than ever before. Time wasted on low-value tasks literally leaves opportunities to sell and engage prospects on the table. At Microsoft, we want to use AI to help sellers focus time on what matters most—making meaningful connections, building trust, and creating long-term relationships," Lamkin continued.

This roll-out follows Microsoft's announcement last month that it will invest up to $10 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Microsoft previously invested $1 billion in OpenAI and its Azure cloud platform was made the company's exclusive cloud computing provider.