Transform Your Sales Process with Microsoft’s Sales Order Agent

One of the highlights of this year’s EMEA Directions was, of course, the topic of agents. This is the next logical step in the whole AI/copilot game.

Especially the so called “Sales Order Agent”.

Nice name – but what can we expect?
The Sales Order Agent helps your sales team spend more time with customers, while ensuring better order accuracy and faster fulfillment, according to Microsoft. Nice marketing text, but what does it do?

The agent will “watch” a specific email account, e.g. the one where you receive orders from your customers.

As soon as there’s traffic, the agent does its job:

It will then create a sales quote for your customer based on the message received:

The outgoing mail, including the sales quote, is prepared for your review. So the agent won’t send anything automatically without a “human” review.
As you can see in the mail from the customer it says “What options do you have in stock”. The customer is not asking for a specific item, he is asking for a group of items and what is in stock. This work, analyzing your inventory, is also done by the agent – that’s cool.

Let’s see what the agent has prepared:

In this case, the agent makes several suggestions to your customer regarding your actual inventory.

The customer now specifies their order and the agent recognizes that this is not a new mail and continues with the existing and ongoing sales process for this customer.

After the final order from your customer and your review, the agent automatically converts the quote to a sales order and sends the email to your customer with the order confirmation.

A short demo from Microsoft can be seen here:

So let’s conclude:

• Sales Order Agent “observes” a specific mail inbox
• It recognizes orders oder Inquiries from your customer and handles them
• It recognizes that there is an ongoing sales process and continues with it
• If your customer makes changes during the process (amount, item, add, remove), the agent will handle this as well.
• Only emails related to the sales process are handled by the agent.
• There is ALWAYS a “human” review that needs to be done
• The final conversion from sales quote to sales order is also done

All in all, for what we know now, an amazing new feature and the next step in the Copilot/AI “game”. Microsoft also says that it works together with EDI and/or e-commerce tools, but this is something we will have to look at exactly once the feature is available for preview, which would be December 2024.

Also the next agents are already in the works by Microsoft, for example the “Bookkeeper” agent. And of course there are many, many, many processes in Business Central that can be handled by an agent, so no user has to waste any more valuable time on tedious, repetitive and boring tasks!