Microsoft will release two new AI Agents for its Dynamics 365 Contact Center "early in 2025".
The first is its Customer Intent Agent, which discovers new intents by listening in on customer conversations across all channels.
It then analyzes the case notes, transcripts, and summaries to map issues and uncover the key troubleshooting steps agents may take to resolve each query.
The second agent is its Knowledge Management Agent. Leveraging intelligence from the Intent Agent, this crafts new knowledge articles.
Additionally, it isolates opportunities to update existing articles, suggests changes, and puts these forward for review.
Customer service teams - including both human and AI Agents – may then leverage the knowledge articles to autonomously solve customer issues.
Businesses can build such a customer-facing AI Agent for the Dynamics 365 Contact Center via the Copilot Studio. For voice, they may also leverage the native conversational IVR, powered by the Studio.
Either way, the AI Agent may interact with a customer and – if connected to the correct systems – solve many of their problems.
Of course, there will still be cases that stump the virtual agent. After all, many customers will ask questions that buck the norm.
As such, escalation paths to a live agent – who receives a summary of the conversation so far – remain necessary.
Nevertheless, when AI Agents work together, the contact center can pick up on new intents, create a plan of action to handle them, and then do so autonomously.
As such, the announcement beckons the self-learning contact center.
Hinting at this, Bryan Goode, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms at Microsoft, wrote in a company blog post:
Collectively, these agents are trained to autonomously learn to address new and emerging issues via self-service, improve the quality of issue resolution across channels, and help drive time and cost savings.
Of course, some rival vendors may offer similar solutions. For instance, Verint provides three “bots” that the business can chain together to create a comparable continuous learning cycle.
Nevertheless, Microsoft may demonstrate its customer service innovation streak by releasing these AI Agents so early into its contact center journey.
Some may have doubted this, given how the tech giant only entered the space six months ago.
However, it’s planting a stake firmly in the ground by making its CCaaS platform a recipient of two of its first ten AI Agents for enterprises.
As such, the platform may receive another significant PR boost – alongside another it recently received when HCLTech, the global business services provider, announced the Dynamics 365 Contact Center as its “preferred” platform for CCaaS migrations.