The first release wave of 2023 kicks off in just a few weeks! You’re invited to get a sneak preview of what’s new at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, streaming live on April 4 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. Tune in live, or on-demand after the live broadcast, for news and demos showcasing some of the hundreds of product features and innovation heading to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

Sign up for the event today for reminders, agenda updates, and instructions to tune in live from your desktop or mobile device.

Business Applications Launch Event

The latest updates across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Register for the event

What to expect at the Business Applications Launch Event

Featuring news and product demos, the event will cover updates launching between April and September 2023 across business rolesfrom marketing, sales, and service to supply chain and financeas well as low-code innovation for everyone in the organization. Tune in to learn about:

• The very latest on AI-powered copilots that work alongside you to help create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions. 
• A preview of new ways to deliver more personalized and engaging customer experiences across marketing, sales, and service.
• A host of new capabilities that will bring more insight, visibility, and automation across supply chain, operations, and finance roles.
• New capabilities for low-code development to help teams manage building apps, storing data, and modernizing customer experiences with improved governance and scalability.
• Updates across Microsoft Power Platform for governance and administration, pro development, ISV experiences, and data integration.

And there’s much more in store. You’ll also see how these solutions work for businesses like yours with demos hosted by Microsoft product experts. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about how to innovate with business applications to grow your business faster than ever. The team behind the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 will also share insights and guide you through how all these updates, advancements, and new tech will help you:

• Expand visibility, reduce time, and enhance creativity in your departments and teams with unified, AI-powered capabilities.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating tasks while automating repetitive tasks.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization with modern collaboration tools.
• Innovate without limits using the latest in low-code development, including new next-generation AI capabilities.

AI innovations

A major theme of this digital event is the evolution of AI. Leaders in the field will show you some of the latest developments in AI that are leading the next generation of business applications. You’ll also have the opportunity to join us for a special session that includes a deep dive into the tech behind next-generation AI hosted by Dr. Walter Sun, Microsoft Vice President, AI in Business Applications. Throughout the event, you’ll receive expert guidance on how to build more agile, customer-focused teams by empowering your solutions with AI and see firsthand how to get more value out of your data, collaboration, and tools.

Insights from the experts

Find out how to enhance the customer experience and operational excellence across your business with a look at real-life scenarios in expert-led demos of new capabilities and features. Gain valuable insights for overcoming your current challenges from other Microsoft customers who will share their journeys. And if you have any questions for the experts, ask them during a live Q&A chat.

For a range of key best practices, strategies, and insights applicable to organizations across many industries, you don’t want to miss this digital launch event.

Register now. We hope you’ll join us. 

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event 

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

9:00 AM10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

The post See what’s new for Dynamics 365 at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Nuance Gatekeeper is a biometric authentication and fraud prevention technology that can be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It offers a streamlined verification process that allows contact centers to identify customers through natural conversation without relying on specific questions, security codes, or secret questions and answers. 

This technology provides a secure and seamless way to verify customer identities so call center agents can focus their attention on serving these individuals. The results include increased customer satisfaction and reduced average call handling times. By using voice biometrics, Nuance Gatekeeper can quickly and accurately verify a customer’s identity, significantly reducing the risk of fraud and protecting customers’ personal data from unauthorized access.   

The integration of Nuance Gatekeeper into the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform (DCCP) is a significant step forward in improving the customer experience and enhancing contact center security. It allows businesses to provide fast, personalized service while maintaining the highest levels of security and compliance. 

We are announcing the opportunity to preview Nuance Gatekeeper services for all customers using the voice channel in their contact centers. Microsoft is inviting interested customers to explore the capabilities of this technology and see how it can improve their operations. Customers must nominate themselves at the Dynamics Insider portal to experience the benefits of this innovative solution firsthand. 

Biometric authentication

As part of DCCP and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Nuance Gatekeeper uses strong biometric authentication to reduce friction and send customers on their way to a fast resolution. They won’t have to share sensitive personal data to authenticate themselves, and they can use voice authentication on an opt-in basis. Customers can opt out of biometric authentication at any time.  

Dynamics 365 Customer Service agents can enroll customers in biometric authentication and verify customer identity in each subsequent call. Nuance Gatekeeper alerts agents to suspected fraudsters and flags fraudulent conversations. Agents have insight into the customer’s full consent history.  

Contact center administrators can configure specific channels to use Nuance Gatekeeper services within their omnichannel environments and determine the parameters for authentication.

Fraud prevention

Stop fraudsters in their tracks while kicking customer interactions into high gear. Nuance Gatekeeper can detect fraudulent calls before they reach the contact center agent while giving legitimate customers the greenlight for personalized support. 

In addition to caller authentication, fraud detection capabilities prevent attackers from usurping your customers’ identities using layered methods including a suspected fraudsters watchlist, and synthetic speech and playback detectors. Additional factors like device, network, and location signals help identify suspicious activity. 

Nuance Gatekeeper checks caller voices against a watchlist to alert the contact center agent about known fraudsters. The agent can then take steps outlined in their organization’s fraud detection policy. If the caller isn’t flagged but the agent finds the caller suspicious, the agent can manually flag the conversation within their workspace in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.  

Fraud teams can use the information gathered by contact center agents to block fraudsters, analyze fraud patterns and trends, and gather data to assist law enforcement. 

Try Nuance Gatekeeper

Sign up for the DCCP Biometric Authentication and Fraud Prevention preview and learn how you can provide next-level security for your customers.

The post Improve customer loyalty and reduce fraud with Nuance Gatekeeper appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Viva Sales, we’ve introduced, and will continue delivering, a cascade of AI capabilities to help businesses and individuals achieve more. Earlier this month, we announced Dynamics 365 Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s GPT capabilities to provide AI-powered assistance across business functions. For instance, a smart news insights capability for Microsoft Supply Chain Platform alerts warehouse and logistics professionals to external events, such as weather or geo-political activities, that might trigger a disruptionand then proactively helps them plan their mitigation with Copilot-powered content. 

GPT-4 will bring more powerful capabilities to Microsoft business applications

The Azure OpenAI service uses large-scale, generative models to unlock new reasoning and comprehension capabilities across our business applications. Our unique and strong collaboration with OpenAI creates a “better together” experience for our customers. We’ve taken OpenAI models and built features on top of them, experimenting with multiple available models, including text-davinci-002 and text-davinci-003, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, the newest and most capable model in the GPT series.

These examples provide insight into how GPT-4 will create new possibilities to bring customers additional business value and where it may be better suited to address certain scenarios. We incorporate various models from OpenAI and Microsoft depending on the product and scenario. Some more complex tasks may be suited for one model, while others could be powered just as welland perhaps more quicklywith a different model.

Here’s an example of an experiment using Power Virtual Agents conversation booster in a fictional customer scenario to help the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) answer this question from their users: What are the documentation requirements for deductions?

In contrast with text-davinci-002 and text-davinci-003, which mostly provide references, ChatGPT and GPT-4 provide more explanatory information along with links to their sources.

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, content ideas uses AI to generate marketing copy. In the following experiment, we asked for newsletter content around three key points:

• Thank you for choosing to receive email from CONTOSO
• Experience these valuable benefits: exclusive offers, sales alerts and new product launch info
• Enjoy $10 off your next online purchase, enter code SPRING2022 at checkout

Then we performed internal testing to evaluate the results from the four models.

As with the IRS example, GPT-4 provides the most detailed response, including a bullet list of benefits. It even added an encouragement not to miss the opportunity, implicitly understanding that a coupon code should have a time component.

Prompt engineering and model tuning

Through our access to OpenAI models, we had the opportunity to engineer context-specific prompts for each scenario we tested. Consider the following example, in which we supplied various levels of context as input for the question, Do you know how to deploy a model on Azure ML?.

Without context, known as “zero shot,” the response from GPT-4 is random, not knowing which scenario is intended. The response with some context is more targeted. The most comprehensive context, which included retrieval augmented generation (RAG) from the desired sources, resulted in the most targeted response.

Along with engineering more context-rich prompts, we went under the hood to tune some models with training samples from domain-specific languages. For instance, the Power Automate “describe it to design it” capability shipped in October 2022 uses a model trained with samples that better represent the cloud flow language. For details, see our blog post explaining how we build fine-tuned models.

Our experimentation, tuning of input and models, and collaboration with OpenAI enable us to quickly develop and deliver the best AI-powered capabilities to our business users. And we’re doing it in a way that helps mitigate harm and provides our customers with provenance-checked results by implementing our Responsible AI practices.

Next steps

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer?  Take a tour and get a free trial!

Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Dynamics 365 Copilot and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post How we can use GPT-4 to continually improve AI models in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Our customers run Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications globally and must meet multiple tax compliance and other regulatory and local business practice requirements (we call them localizations). These requirements are complex and change frequently, especially in many countries within Latin America (LATAM).

As a part of our continuous commitment to customers and partners and following our strategy of expanding the out-of-the-box country coverage, in 2023 release wave 1, we will ship localizations for seven additional LATAM countries: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay.

Microsoft localizations for these new countries were built in collaboration with Finnie, S.A., an affiliate of Artware SRL based on their LATAM localization solution. To better align with other Microsoft out-of-the-box localizations, this third party localization solution was redesigned utilizing the rich capabilities of Globalization Studio tools and services and integrated into  Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations applications.

This expansion helps LATAM and global partners to focus more on delivering extra value to customers by extending these out-of-the-box localizations from Microsoft to meet more specific vertical or other customer requirements which might be different in each country. Our flexible, easy-to-use Globalization Studio tools and services make localization easier to extend and maintain for Microsoft partners and customers.

With this release, we are extending the out-of-the-box support to 51 countries/regions and 67 languages. Together with partner localization solutions and our no-code/low-code Globalization Studio tools and services, this expansion makes it easier for our customers to run their businesses globally (currently our customers use Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications in over 200 countries/regions).

LATAM Country Localization Overview

The new LATAM localizations have over a hundred new features covering key globalization areas in Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations, including:

• tax determination and calculation,
• electronic invoicing and invoicing processes,
• tax audit and reporting,
• banking and payments,
• business documents,
• and other areas (like fixed assets localization, etc.)

Our solution also contains cross-LATAM features which have common functionalities for the new countries in LATAM. These common features include tax setup and master data, invoice processing from various sources (sales orders, purchase orders, projects, etc.), common tax reports, and check and payment processing among other features. These cross-LATAM features reduce duplication, so only country-specific features, like electronic invoice formats, reports and business document layouts belong to a given country localization.

A sneak peek on localization for Chile

The first country localization released is Chile. We made it available in Public Preview in version 10.0.33 (the “May” release).

As for any localization, localization-specific fields, and functionality work on a LE (Legal Entity) basis, so to enable the Chilean localization you need to choose Chile as Primary address for your LE. As any new functionality in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, the new localizations for LATAM are under Feature management, so you will need to enable “(Preview) LATAM globalization expansion” feature to see it.  

After you have completed the setup, you will see LATAM and Chile-specific user interface elements in your LE. For example, a LATAM tab is displayed on the Sales Order form in the associated screenshot. Within the LATAM tab, region-specific fields for processing the invoice have been added.

The feature populates all required data to produce an Electronic Invoice for Chile and generate required tax reports.

Timeline

We are releasing the localizations for the Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay as Public Previews first. Later, based on customer and partner feedback, we will make them generally available. You can find more details on the timeline and the list of features in the 2023 release wave 1 plan.

Call for action

We value your feedback please take part in Public Previews as the new LATAM localizations become available per our release plan! And stay tuned we are planning a Tech Talk to cover these localizations in more detail and more!

The post Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations extends out-of-the-box country coverage in Latin America appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.