In a fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, sales leaders constantly grapple with the challenge of achieving growth, staying ahead of competitors, and making informed decisions quickly, often with limited resources. The good news is that the potential of AI in sales has moved from being a concept to reality. With the introduction of innovative solutions like the Sales Research Agent within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, companies are beginning to see a significant shift in their decision-making processes and team capabilities, but how can you assess whether these groundbreaking technologies are reliable enough to support essential business decisions.
Microsoft recently announced an update on the Sales Research Agent, which is now in public preview as of October 1. Alongside this, they have developed a new assessment tool called the Microsoft Sales Research Bench. This benchmark is designed to evaluate how effectively AI solutions address the complex, strategic inquiries sales leaders have regarding their business operations and performance metrics. In the coming months, they plan to release the comprehensive evaluation package for the Sales Research Bench, allowing others to assess various AI solutions on their own.
AI Research Agent in Sales
The Sales Research Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales equips business leaders to tackle complex challenges through intuitive conversations with their data. It employs an advanced multi-modal, multi-model, and multi-agent approach, enabling it to delve into intricate and customized business frameworks, all while drawing on deep expertise in the sales domain. This powerful agent offers fresh, actionable insights, presenting information through clear narratives and rich visualizations specifically designed for various business contexts.
For sales leaders, this innovation provides the opportunity to independently access reliable, real-time analyses that previously required extensive time and manpower to compile, often spanning days or even weeks. With AI’s capabilities, users can now gain deeper insights into critical areas like pipeline dynamics and revenue performance.
Image: Screenshot of the Sales Research Agent in Dynamics 365 Sales
What Sets the Sales Research Agent Apart
- Its innovative turn-key experience offers more than just a typical AI chat interface, it delivers a comprehensive user experience that includes text narratives and data visualizations designed specifically for business research. This is seamlessly aligned with the natural language of sales leaders.
- Integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, it effortlessly connects to your CRM data and utilizes schema intelligence for your custom setups. It thoroughly understands your business logic and the sales landscape, just as you would expect from a high-caliber business application.
- Thanks to its multi-agent, multi-model architecture, the Sales Research Agent can create a tailored research plan, assigning each task to the most suitable specialized agents, ensuring the best approach for every challenge.
- Before presenting its business assessment and analysis, the agent meticulously reviews its work to ensure top-notch quality. If its findings do not meet its own standards, it will not hesitate to revise and improve.
- To foster transparency, the agent clarifies its reasoning with straightforward language for business users, while also providing SQL queries for those with a technical background, allowing customers to easily validate its results.
The Importance of Verifiable Quality
New AI tools seem to appear every day, flooding the market with varying claims about their ability to deliver quality results for critical business decisions. So, how can you discern which solutions are genuinely ready for enterprise use? To avoid relying on anecdotal evidence or intuition, vendors offering AI solutions must establish trust by providing clear, consistent metrics that showcase their quality. This should highlight strengths, pinpoint improvement areas, and compare performance against other options.
Even though there are many innovative efforts in AI evaluation, businesses need benchmarks specifically designed to meet their unique requirements. Current benchmarks often fail to capture the complex, strategic questions posed by sales leaders in their business language, overlook the significance of schema accuracy, and neglect the importance of quality in both text and visual representations. This is why Microsoft is proud to introduce the Sales Research Bench.
Check out this Microsoft blog post for an in-depth look at the Sales Research Bench methodology and the architecture of the Sales Research Agent.
Why a Research Agent Matters for Sales Leaders
For those making key business decisions, the implications are significant:
- Accelerated Decision-Making: With real-time, AI-driven insights that you can have confidence in, decisions are made faster and with greater assurance.
- Continuous Improvement: Through evaluations, developers can swiftly pinpoint where the greatest measurable impact can occur and direct improvement efforts accordingly.
- Trust and Transparency: A thorough evaluation process ensures that you can depend on the outputs, as they have been tested against scenarios that truly matter to your business.
The future of sales is proactive, informed by data, and relentlessly focused on quality. With Microsoft’s Sales Research Agent and the Sales Research Bench evaluation framework at your disposal, sales leaders can step beyond the noise and anchor their decisions in demonstrable quality. It is not merely about having the most intelligent AI, it is about gaining a reliable partner in your business transformation.
Working with New Dynamic
New Dynamic is a Microsoft Solutions Partner focused on the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Platforms. Our team of dedicated professionals strives to provide first-class experiences incorporating integrity, teamwork, and a relentless commitment to our client’s success.
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