73 IN FOCUS: MICROSOFT COPILOT VIEWPOINT Next-generation sales AI agents can guide revenue teams to new levels of performance For decades, customer relationship management (CRM) systems required sellers to do the heavy lifting: enter the data, read the dashboard, remember the follow-up, research the account and decide where to spend their time. The next generation of AI-powered sales reverses that relationship. CRM will remain the system of record, but AI is becoming the system of guidance. Most sales teams are not short on data. They are short on clarity. More fields, dashboards and reports only add to the interpreting a seller already struggles to do. AI changes that by telling sellers where the highest-value hour will come from, what changed since their last touch and what to do next. The shift is moving through three stages. Assistive AI, where most teams are today, summarises meetings and drafts follow-ups. Guided AI recommends which leads, accounts and opportunities deserve attention and suggests the next best action. Agentic AI takes action on the seller’s behalf – researching accounts, qualifying leads, updating records and maintaining pipeline hygiene. Velosio deploys Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot with AI at the forefront, not as an add-on like most other implementers. Picture a seller leaving a customer meeting. They open a mobile app and tell an AI agent what happened – the new stakeholders, the decisions made and the follow-ups they want, including a recap to attendees. The agent updates the records in Dynamics 365, adds the new stakeholders, drafts the recap email and creates the tasks. It also recommends next steps from historical data, including the patterns of the team’s top sellers. The real prize is not just automation; it is enablement and guidance. AI helps the median seller behave like the top seller, operationalising the sales process and giving them time back, while delivering a next-generation experience. It raises the floor for the whole team and gives managers a view of execution based on reality, not Friday-afternoon data entry. Success depends on four things: clean enough data, clear sales process, responsible AI governance and a change-management plan. Get them right and it becomes a genuinely differentiated revenue platform. Get them wrong and AI just amplifies the confusion. AI will not replace great sellers. It will remove friction, improve focus and help more sellers behave like top performers. David Buggy is vice president of customer engagement and Power Platform at Velosio DAVID BUGGY: VELOSIO Photo: Adobe Stock/goodluz
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