Ever since Kamal and I joined forces and started delving into Copilot, we’ve been seeing it everywhere, just like mushrooms, as Kamal mentioned in his article. It’s really helping us get a handle on the big picture of what’s going on.
Copilot is also playing a role in the business application landscape, providing AI assistance and integrating with Outlook, Excel and Teams.
It’s all about making things easier and secure. Copilot lets you work with data, automate tasks, and create apps using everyday language. It’s like having a friendly assistant to help you get things done.
How can this friendly assistant help out Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management fans and users?
Is it good to go? Can we push its limits, since we like to extend the standard solution?
Here is what we have found, and we have been testing what’s already out there. Feel free to let me know what you’re thinking of trying out and what you’ve already played around with.
Copilot for Dynamics 365 F&SCM app
Copilot for Dynamics 365 is like having a helpful AI sidekick for your business. It helps sales, supply chain management, finance, and other teams to work better and faster. With a chat interface, it gives quick summaries of sales and account-related news. You can use it with Outlook and Excel for smoother data management and tap into its AI powers to summarize records and create email content.
In Dynamics 365 Finance, the Copilot features support, for example, collections managers by giving a quick overview of customer accounts, overdue invoices, and payment history. It also makes it easier to reach out to customers and shows this info on the Collections coordinator’s workspace.
The in-app help guidance gives you helpful answers to your questions and, for example, lets you see what’s in inventory.
Enable Copilot capabilities in finance and operations apps
Discover the types of experiences that await users
Copilot is showing up all over the place, even in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. It’s got three different ways to use it, and it’s helping out finance and operations users with AI features.
- You can think of Copilot as a sidecar that hangs out with the application. It can chat about data or give in-app assistance (how-to) using AI to provide support to users in a natural way.
- The app has built-in Copilot features, embedded, that boost its abilities with smart functions. AI is at the heart of the app’s user experience.
- External agents working to coordinate and sync activities across different apps and processes, making sure everything is integrated and connected.
I have been playing out mainly with the embedded and external agents. Think of the embedded solutions as your advisor. It offers a quick summary of the situation, shares valuable insights, and drops hints about what needs to be done, providing you with a sense of guidance and support.
For example, there’s a feature called “Improve efficiency using Customer page summary”. It shows you the status of a specific customer, our previous business with them, and what’s going on right now.
Here is the big picture of the different features planned or already available in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management and the kind of experience. The details of each one are available in the release plans.
Push its limits and extend Copilot
Imagine having the perfect solution customized for your business needs, like having a reliable partner providing quick and accurate information to improve your operations. This includes a use case such as a procure-to-pay process, with features like purchase order summaries, workflow purchase order and invoice approval summaries, and vendor account summaries.
That’s the sidecar experience – a customizable and efficient way to drive your business forward, offering a natural language chat experience that helps users work with application functionality and data.
The ability to customize Copilot includes extending it with the low code experience of Copilot Studio and Power Automate.
Get ready for the new AI-ERP era, where sidecar experience extensibility shows a lot of potential and encourages us to explore further.
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Stay tuned and don’t hesitate to get in contact
Magno