Only a week after saying it might “lengthen” its OpenAI partnership, Microsoft is already giving enterprise productiveness a giant GPT-powered enhance — and, presumably, exhibiting how its estimated $10 billion funding in OpenAI can begin including worth, pronto.

Extra clever and personalised conferences

Yesterday afternoon Pacific Time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted an announcement concerning the basic availability of Microsoft Groups Premium.

In keeping with a weblog put up, Groups Premium “brings the newest applied sciences, together with Massive Language Fashions powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make conferences extra clever, personalised, and guarded — whether or not it’s one-on-one, giant conferences, digital appointments, or webinars.”

The providing consists of automatically-generated assembly notes, really useful duties and personalised highlights, in addition to synthetic intelligence (AI)-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages. 

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief science officer, tweeted that the Groups transfer to harness GPT was an “thrilling route,” and added, “We’ve dreamed about these capabilities for years.”

Microsoft seems to be to make sellers extra productive

In the present day, Microsoft additionally provided a preview of a brand new generative AI expertise in Viva Gross sales, the vendor expertise utility launched final summer time (and made usually accessible in October) that blends productiveness instruments and enterprise processes.

The corporate says Viva Gross sales (which is an extension of Microsoft’s Viva worker expertise platform) “brings collectively any buyer relationship administration know-how (CRM), Microsoft 365 and Groups to supply a extra streamlined and AI-powered promoting expertise.” The Viva Gross sales app’s conversational intelligence capabilities embody mechanically producing a name abstract, detecting questions, calculating conversational KPIs and extracting motion objects.

The brand new Viva Gross sales capabilities, powered by Azure OpenAI Service and GPT-3.5, add auto-suggested electronic mail content material to the combination. For instance, Viva Gross sales can remind sellers when it’s time to comply with up with a prospect or buyer, based mostly on insights within the vendor’s CRM and Microsoft 365 graph. Now, Viva Gross sales can even autogenerate a preformatted electronic mail response with personalised textual content and subsequent finest actions, in addition to with particulars about pricing, promotions or deadlines.

The responses are generated based mostly on CRM knowledge, the intent of the communication, and Microsoft Graph — which “gives entry to wealthy, people-centric knowledge and insights within the Microsoft cloud, together with Microsoft 365, Home windows, and Enterprise Mobility and Safety.”

Sellers can select from a set of predefined response classes or enter a customized textual content immediate to generate the e-mail content material.

Writing context-specific emails effectively in Microsoft Outlook

“Viva Gross sales is concentrated on how do you make sellers extra productive utilizing the instruments they already know and love,” Charles Lamanna, company vp of enterprise purposes and platform at Microsoft, advised VentureBeat.

Now, he defined, “we assist sellers write emails extra effectively and extra rapidly, proper within Outlook,” including that the app injects context-specific components which might be key to vendor success.

“It pulls out of your CRM, whether or not it’s Salesforce or Dynamics, it pulls from previous assembly notes and knowledge, it pulls from the e-mail itself, to construct an extremely superb electronic mail for you — which you’ll approve and inject and edit and tweak to make you super-productive,” he defined.

The app makes use of the OpenAI API within Azure Cognitive Providers, which Lamanna identified has “very sturdy privateness ensures — your knowledge is your knowledge. We don’t practice or retrain or tune fashions based mostly in your knowledge, which is crucial for these enterprise clients.”

New options coming later this 12 months

Lamanna stated the Viva Gross sales app is frequently including generative AI to varied eventualities that assist sellers “get out of the drudgery” and do much less knowledge entry and repetitive duties.

“There will probably be many, many, many extra options on this vein over the course of 2023 with that concentrate on what’s the easiest way to get folks again in conversations with clients,” he stated.