Microsoft previewed AI capabilities in its product Viva Sales, the company’s app that automatically captures Office 365 and Microsoft Teams data into any CRM tool. The idea is to eliminate manual data entry and improve on conversational intelligence using artificial intelligence (AI).

The announcement, made Thursday, explains how the app is built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 technology, and how it automatically generates email replies based on the AI.

The AI-generated email replies aim to give sellers a lead when closing deals and help sellers stay on top of customer emails and spend a fraction of the time doing it, Lori Lamkin, corporate vice president, Dynamics 365 sales and marketing at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

Research commissioned by Microsoft found that managing email consumes more than 66% of a seller’s day. 

The app combines data from Microsoft 365 Graph and the connected CRM such as Dynamics 365 or Salesforce to build suggested replies using GPT-3.5. Suggested replies start from a prompt, either by Viva Sales or entered by the seller.

Previously, the salesperson would load the CRM system, review product information and notes, and spend 15 minutes writing a personalized response. With the AI technology, the salesperson would receive a notification at the top of the email application offering to help craft a response. There are pre-set options to reply.

Selecting “make a proposal,” for example, Azure Open AI automatically generates a suggested reply that includes content from the CRM data, from a mention of the product to the number of units requested. The message is then copied to the email, where adjustments can be made.

“We are committed to creating responsible AI by design,” Lamkin wrote. “Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.”

Those principles are put into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society, she wrote. The goal is to advance the company’s framework for the safe deployment of AI technologies for more responsible outcomes.