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.
That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the preview of a new generative AI-powered experience in Microsoft Viva Sales that helps sellers communicate more effectively with prospects and customers.
Viva Sales will 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. By auto-suggesting customizable content, sellers can spend less time composing emails and searching for sales data from colleagues and databases. Why is this important? According to new research commissioned by Microsoft, managing email consumes over 66 percent of a seller’s day.1 This new AI-powered capability helps sellers recapture this valuable time, empowering them to focus time on what matters most.
Microsoft Viva Sales
Through monthly product updates, we’re rapidly adding new innovations to Viva Sales.
Leveraging the power of Azure OpenAI Service and GPT, Viva Sales provides access to rich, people-centric data and insights in the Microsoft Cloud. Viva Sales can remind sellers when it’s time 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 upon categories such as “make a proposal”, “reply to an inquiry,” or “suggest your own”. The seller simply selects the option to suit their needs and a reply is generated for the seller to review, edit to their liking, and send. 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 the customer relationship management (CRM) system (Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce®). This allows sellers to improve their overall communication and deliver a superior customer experience—all in the flow of work.
These new GPT capabilities strengthen our existing capabilities of Conversation intelligence, which leverages state-of-the-art natural language technology to automatically generate a call summary, detect questions, calculate conversational key performance indicators (KPIs), extract action items, and more. With the addition of auto-suggested email content, sellers can free up even more time to focus on priorities.
Watch the Viva Sales generative AI demo below.
Responsible AI
We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. We take a cross-company approach through cutting-edge research, best-of-breed engineering systems, and excellence in policy and governance. Alongside OpenAI’s leading research on AI alignment, we are advancing a framework for the safe deployment of our own AI technologies that are aimed to help guide the industry toward more responsible outcomes.
Learn more about Viva Sales
Viva Sales launched in general availability in October 2022, and the response from our customers has been amazing. We are rapidly adding new innovations to Viva Sales through our monthly product updates. To try it out, please sign up here. To learn more, visit the Viva Sales webpage, and to stay informed of upcoming updates, read the monthly update blog.
1Sales Teams Need a Transformation, Microsoft is Ready to Deliver, Futurum.
