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Microsoft is focusing on AI agents as one way to expand the market for its Microsoft 365 Copilot platform for business. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Microsoft announced two AI agents for sales that double as a competitive response to Salesforce in an area where both companies are placing big bets.
Sales Agent and Sales Chat, unveiled Wednesday morning, are designed to work in conjunction with Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 business applications and with Salesforce, whose CEO, Marc Benioff, has criticized Microsoft’s AI initiatives while rolling out Salesforce’s competing Agentforce platform.
The company also introduced a new program intended, in part, to help businesses “migrate off legacy CRM vendors,” without citing Salesforce by name in that case.
Both new Microsoft agents automate data retrieval and customer outreach for sales.
Sales Agent identifies and qualifies potential customers, schedules meetings, and follows up on leads. It can complete some basic sales independently. The tool gathers information from customer databases, company pricing sheets, and Microsoft 365 emails and calendars to personalize its responses.
Sales Chat gives sales reps summaries and insights based on customer relationship management records, emails, meeting notes, and online sources. Users can request information with natural language prompts, such as identifying at-risk deals or preparing for upcoming meetings.
“They connect to both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, so sales reps can nurture and close deals without even opening their CRM,” wrote Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Microsoft AI at Work, in a post Wednesday. “And they can be fine-tuned to connect to all your business data, ensuring accurate, actionable responses.”
Microsoft says the new agents will be available in public preview in May, accessed via Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat for businesses.
The announcement follows Microsoft’s introduction last fall of ten AI agents for its Dynamics 365 applications, including a prior version of its sales agent.
Along with its new sales agents, Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new program called the “Microsoft AI Accelerator for Sales,” to help businesses create and implement agents, with help from Microsoft AI experts.
The program is “designed to help more customers experience a new way of working with copilot and agents, transform your sales organization and migrate off legacy CRM vendors,” wrote Bryan Goode, Microsoft corporate vice president of Business Applications and Platform, in a post Wednesday.
Benioff has been vocal in his criticism of Microsoft’s AI investments, questioning the long-term value of its capital spending and calling Microsoft a “reseller of OpenAI.” He also criticized Microsoft’s Copilot, comparing it to the infamous “Clippy” assistant and suggesting it exposes user data to security risks.
“Be aware of the false agent,” Benioff told analysts last week. “Go out there and take a look who is really talking about it and who’s really delivering.”
Brian Millham, Salesforce president and COO, said on the same call that Agentforce was deployed by thousands of brands in its first quarter of availability, describing adoption as faster than the company expected.
However, the company’s revenue forecast for the year was lower than expectations, which Reuters attributed in part to slower-than-anticipated adoption of Agentforce.
Oracle, IBM, and ServiceNow are among the other major companies developing and offering agentic AI technology for sales and business applications.
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, observed in a LinkedIn post last month that Benioff’s “borderline obsession” with Microsoft’s AI initiatives follows a playbook that the Salesforce CEO published many years ago — positioning one’s company as or against the market leader to create drama and media attention.
“It can be, as Marc notes, great marketing in the short term to highlight competitors,” Shaw wrote at the time. “Of course, the challenge is that long term success requires actual competition. We’re still waiting.”
Microsoft released a list of two dozen customer case studies Wednesday in an effort to show how its corporate customers are using Copilot and agents.
The company says more than 160,000 organizations have used its Copilot Studio to create more than 400,000 custom agents in the past three months.
Despite the competitive jabs, Microsoft and Salesforce seem to have similar visions for the potential of AI agents to change the nature of work and the workforce. The core idea is to augment human capabilities and automate tasks to boost productivity, efficiency, and overall business results.
“What we are seeing is Copilot, plus agents, disrupting business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company’s Jan. 29 earnings call.
