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Microsoft rolls out sales agents, connector to Salesforce

Microsoft joins the autonomous sales agent fray.

Don Fluckinger
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Published: 05 Mar 2025

Microsoft previewed two sales-facing agents Wednesday, and they will initially connect to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.

The first, Sales Chat, gets sales reps up to speed on a customer's recent activity and assists in meeting prep by scanning CRM data, pitch decks, calendars, emails and the web. The idea is to save reps the time they usually spend researching leads online and in internal documents, said Bryan Goode, corporate vice president of business applications and platform at Microsoft.

The second, Sales Agent, is an autonomous agent that can interact with a rep's contacts to develop sales pipelines. It can close low-level deals, elevate conversations to the human rep when needed, and determine which contacts are too far off the radar to pursue and close them as leads. To personalize its outreach, the agent can tap into price sheets, the web and past communications such as email.

Both will be released for public preview in May. Microsoft joins Oracle and Salesforce in releasing generative AI agents tailored to sales and CRM apps. Microsoft will release its Salesforce connector for both agents at their inception, but also at a time when Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has openly slagged Microsoft Copilot technology on the trade show circuit.

Connectors to other companies' CRM systems will come later, Goode said, and customers of other CRMs can now build their own connectors to more than 1,000 different apps in Copilot Studio.

AI as sales assistant

Brent Leary, founder of consultancy CRM Essentials, pointed out that Microsoft has an advantage over Salesforce: integration with front-office productivity such as Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel that sales reps use on top of the CRM.

The sales agents also focus on another of Microsoft's strengths: Copilot.

"Microsoft put so much into Copilot, and it feels like all this agentic AI stuff has really moved so quickly that the emphasis moved away from their big strength of copilots," Leary said. "I think Microsoft is playing a little bit of catch-up, but I do like what they're doing and how they're approaching it, and it's something that they needed to address pretty quickly."

Both sales agents can be accessed in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. Goode sees a next phase of sales work as one in which reps won't even open their CRM applications. Instead, they will talk to their copilots, which will in turn update CRM data and perform other tasks on behalf of the reps.

"We really have, I'd say, a differentiated point of view on how AI comes together; certainly, Salesforce doesn't have the same perspective," Goode said. "There are very few others in the market that have the same point of view, which is that we believe every human should have a copilot [and] ... we think that every business process should have an agent."

Microsoft also announced AI Accelerator for Sales, a products-and-services bundle for customers to migrate to the Microsoft 365 Copilot-Dynamics 365 universe. It includes Copilot, Dynamics 365 Sales, the two new sales agents, custom agents with Copilot Studio to create bespoke automations, AI model fine-tuning, and access to Microsoft AI experts to help customers set up and maintain their agents.

Furthermore, Microsoft said other Dynamics 365 agents, including Customer Intent, Customer Knowledge Management, Case Management, Scheduling Operations and Sales Order agents, will be available in March.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.

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