Microsoft Viva is giving your sales a ChatGPT boost

Microsoft’s growing involvement with OpenAI, the company behind the all-so-familiar ChatGPT, is seeing the company’s sales-focused software set to get a major boost.

It’s set to start with Microsoft Viva Sales, which will see a GPT-3.5 implementation that the company says will “help sellers stay on top of customer emails and spend a fraction of the time doing it.”

In doing this, Microsoft hopes to improve the experience not for its clients’ customers, but the clients that will actually use the tool. It reckons that a productivity boost and enhanced experience are on the cards.

ChatGPT in Microsoft Viva

At launch, it will pull data from Microsoft 365 Graph and the connected CRM (it cites Dynamics 365 and Salesforce).

Sellers will be able to type a prompt which will then see ChatGPT drawing up a suggested reply, which can be tailored along the way. Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Platform corporate VP, Lori Lamkin, said in a product announcement that it will be able to handle a variety of emails, from inquiries to proposals.

End users are set to get a significant boost from this addition, says Microsoft, which carried out a research study that saw sellers spending two-thirds (66%) of their days managing emails. 

Microsoft’s use of AI has been on the up in recent months, with its current offerings including natural language technology that can generate call summaries, detect questions, calculate conversational KPIs, and extract action items, and this is just the latest addition of what is likely to be a whole flurry.

Pricing for Viva Sales sits at $40 (£30.20) per user per month on an annual plan, plus taxes. TechRadar Pro has asked Microsoft to confirm that the new ChatGPT capabilities will be added into the existing package for no extra charge.