Generative AI has left its mark on computing, and it's only the beginning. The world of business applications will never be the same. For several years now, we have been iterating on and shipping copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365, and I'm pleased to announce our next wave of value. Today's customers demand tailored experiences that cater to their individual needs. They expect businesses to be responsive on all communication channels and to treat each individual with knowledge of their overall relationship and journey.

With global volatility and inflation impacting organizations across all industries, business agility has never been more important. Leaders turn to finance teams to get real-time insight into business performance and recommendations on future initiatives that will help them thrive amid disruption. But finance teams are overwhelmed with manual tasks, cobbling together data, and disconnected teams. Achieving game-changing business agility begins with augmenting the human ingenuity of your people with intelligent process automation. When it comes to reimagining processes with AI, automation, and analytics, many finance leaders don't know where to start.

The advent of next-generation Artificial Intelligence(AI) is ushering in a new era of heightened productivity and efficiency. This is spurring novel breakthroughs in the supply chain domain. With AI's transformative influence, the conventional ways of operations managers collaborating with suppliers, vendors, and third-party service providers are being revamped to streamline the entire process. By collaborating with suppliers and utilizing state-of-the-art AI, Supply Chain managers can enhance supply chain performance and avert logistics disruptions triggered by diverse external factors. We're excited to launch Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news.

Talk of the town, an unsaid threat in the minds of many professionals, a competitor's catalyst for sleepless nights, and just a source of uncertainty and amazement for many, ChatGPT has crawled its way into our existence with an ear-crashing drumroll! With 13 million active individual users, a valuation of $29 billion, and many such unbelievable numbers, Chat GPT is impossible to ignore! The Chatbot that has taken the world by storm of late, you do know what it is, right? If not, which is shocking, let's get acquainted! Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is the fine-tuned version of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, trained using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales users will get new features later this month with an emphasis on conversational intelligence and Teams integrations. Dynamics 365 Customer Service will be more tightly embedded in Microsoft Teams. Contact center agents will be able to collaborate with co-workers by sharing AI-generated conversation summaries to resolve customer issues faster, and Teams chat will be embedded within Dynamics 365, which enables customer records of sales and service cases to be shared in Teams outside of their department or with supervisors and peers. Microsoft also previewed Azure Communication Services, a bundle of software workflow APIs that route public switched telephone network or VoIP calls within apps. All of the above features will also be compatible with Microsoft Digital Contact Center, a contact-center-as-a-service platform released earlier this year.

Contact centres for financial institutions have traditionally been a core touch point for customers to access various types of immediate support – from queries to complaints to fraud alerting. Today their role hasn't necessarily changed. However, the value organisations place on them certainly has. The focus is shifting from fitting customers around business processes to reshaping contact centres around customers' needs. For years, the role of contact centres was limited – often confined by traditional 9-5 working hours. It was predominantly aimed at driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

To remain competitive and thrive, organizations must differentiate their brand through outstanding customer service experiences. As customer expectations and business needs continuously shift, enterprises need the agility to rapidly create, maintain, and optimize those experiences with the latest technologies, including sophisticated AI, without relying on external vendors. What enterprises need are options that keep them in control--a choice of no-code, low-code, and pro-code AI development tools that offer the freedom to quickly build the conversational AI applications they need. After the recent launch of the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, organizations now have those options. Some organizations want the flexibility and agility to build their own conversational solution in-house on an end-to-end software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is quick to deploy, monitor and tune; one that can easily be self-managed by their subject experts.

Field service organizations have traditionally operated under the break-fix model--that is, responding to a device failure after the customer reports an issue. This operating model has grown antiquated due to rising costs and inefficiencies in labor and operations. It is also proving less than effective in satisfying the customer's growing expectations. The field service industry is evolving quickly in new and exciting directions with cutting-edge technology continuing to enter the arena. These innovations in technology and workflows are helping to transform field service by providing customers optimal device uptime, along with greater visibility, efficiency, and profitability.

If sales were simple, then every seller and every sales organization would be successful. We're seeing a fundamental shift in the way customers want to engage--instead of relying only on direct contact with sellers, customers more frequently use digital channels to get answers to questions and even to make purchasing decisions. The seller is moving from guiding every step of the sales process to being a trusted advisor. To fill this role, sellers must regroup and look for other ways to make a difference to their customers. One way is through understanding the complete 360-degree view of the customer.

Netcracker Technology announced that GlobalData has named Netcracker as the sole leader in its first competitive landscape assessment of the network service orchestration market. The analyst firm evaluated 11 companies on a wide range of criteria, including portfolio scope, third-party solution integration, lifecycle management and real-world deployments. Comm100, a global provider of omnichannel customer engagement solutions that connect brands with their customers, announced an integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM that will allow users to see and update customer information directly inside the Comm100 agent console – giving them the tools to deliver personalized and contextualized customer experiences. This integration makes it easy for agents to tailor their live chat conversations based on current customer data without needing to toggle between multiple applications while chatting. LivePerson, Inc., a global leader in conversational AI, announced the acquisition of German conversational AI company e-bot7.