I have spent a sizable portion of the past week reading, watching, and listening to vendors promising to make customer engagement more proactive.
Usually, that means another AI agent, another next-best-action claim, or another dashboard designed to prove that a customer is about to churn.
This time, however, the announcements point to something a little more practical:
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Microsoft wants Copilot to follow up on customer work before employees remember to.
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Adobe is helping the NHL personalize fan engagement across 147 countries.
These are different vendors with different announcements, but they both point to a common challenge: customer data is only useful if a business can turn it into a relevant action without making the experience feel intrusive, disjointed, or overly automated.
Editor’s Pick: Microsoft Gives Copilot a Customer Follow-Up Role
Microsoft’s new Copilot release is primarily an AI and workplace productivity story. Yet its potential impact on customer engagement could be much more significant.
The headline feature is Autopilot, a persistent agent that can work independently on recurring tasks and follow-ups. Microsoft says it has its own identity, memory, and workspace, allowing it to continue working when the employee is not actively using Copilot.
Microsoft is also rolling out Dynamics 365 and Power Platform grounding in public preview. In practice, that means Copilot can draw on CRM context such as deal history and support tickets while users work inside Microsoft 365.
In customer service, follow-ups are often lost not because the team lacks data, but because that data is trapped in another system while the real work happens in email, Teams, documents, and meetings. Microsoft is seemingly trying to close that gap.
The question is whether Autopilot becomes a useful safeguard against forgotten actions or another agent that needs constant supervision. A proactive agent can prepare a customer briefing, chase an internal update, or keep a service task moving. It can also create confusion if its permissions, memory, and escalation paths are poorly defined.
For customer engagement leaders, that makes this an important shift. The journey may increasingly be managed in the collaboration tools employees use every day, not solely in a dedicated CRM or orchestration platform.
Adobe and the NHL Put AI-Powered Fan Engagement on Ice
Adobe has become the NHL’s official Creative, Marketing, and AI Partner in a deal that gives the league access to Adobe Experience Platform, Journey Optimizer, GenStudio, Express, and Firefly.
