Executives from Microsoft and its partner HSO on Monday shared new insights into the efficiency gains made possible by Work IQ – especially in the context of its support for Microsoft business applications – and the due diligence required to achieve such gains.
The Microsoft and HSO leaders were participating in a roundtable discussion on Dynamics 365 and AI with more than a dozen customers at Community Summit NA.
Until recently, Work IQ understood how people work across Microsoft 365 apps, including who collaborates with whom and which content is most important. Then the company announced it’s going beyond productivity data and extending Work IQ to bring data, process knowledge, and operational context from business applications, including Dynamics 365, into Copilot so agents can reason over and make decisions with that critical, often company-specific information stored in systems of record.
If customers need to know whether they can deliver the inventory needed to support revenue, for example, they can pose a simple question in natural language without the need to click through the system and find the field needed to locate that answer. Work IQ teaches their agents the language of the business and the individuals supporting it.
By factoring in business process insights, along with structured and unstructured data about how a company gets things done, Work IQ can make the inquiries, data access, and conversations more efficient in terms of token usage, said Georg Glantschnig, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Agentic ERP Applications at Microsoft.
“The system doesn’t have to try 50 different things; agents that are using brute force just try every different version until they get to the end,” Glantschnig said. That added intelligence ensures an agent remembers the correct path and does something only once — as context is carried from one conversation to the next — thereby lowering costs and time while improving accuracy; that’s a point Glantschnig reinforced in the roundtable and other sessions at Community Summit NA.
The latest advances in Work IQ could cut token usage as much as 80%, estimates Dewain Robinson, Vice President of AI and Training at Dynamic Communities and a Microsoft AI expert.
Glantschnig noted that customers can take other steps, such as limiting or minimizing application customizations to make data access simpler to help contain complexity and costs.
Martin Boggess, Vice President of Manufacturing & Field Service at HSO, said his customers are increasingly ready to embrace Work IQ as the intelligence layer for processes that require agentic orchestration, such as procure to pay and order management.
But when it comes to the cost of those implementations, he noted the importance of customers documenting their processes thoroughly. Based on the level of uniqueness, AI could deliver real cost benefit — or it could cost more than it’s worth in cases where there’s too much complexity, Boggess said.
“Digging into the uniqueness of how you’re using those processes is critical, and that’s what I try to help customers with,” Doggess said.
Customer Lessons
Customers attending the roundtable shared lessons learned from their AI and transformation journeys, including the need for executive support, the benefits of controlling the level of app customization (as outlined above), and not viewing AI as a cure-all.
Randy Burket, Director, Information Technology at Syndicate Sales, a manufacturer of products used by retail florists, said his firm has been using Copilot for some time and is increasingly working with agents. Strong backing from his CFO has been key to rolling out AI technology successfully. “Our CFO is heavily involved and on board, which is a blessing because that can be a pain point if you’re an IT director,” Burket said.
Syndicate Sales executed a large-scale Dynamics migration, going from a system with 10,000 customizations to no customizations; the out-of-the-box approach is often cited as optimal to avoid complexity that impedes projects such as AI rollouts. “Leadership support was a big deal on that. They wouldn’t let them do (customizations) unless they could prove there was a business case,” Burket said. Four years in, the company has not launched any extensions.
Jacob Stern & Sons Inc., an importer, processor, and distributor of specialty agricultural products, uses Copilot and agents but is careful to educate users that not every business issue should be viewed as an AI use case.
“AI may not be the answer for every problem, and you actually have to have a problem to have a solution,” said Carolina Soldatelli, Director of Business Applications at Jacob Stern & Sons.
