Microsoft Dynamics Team
“We need to do something with AI” is becoming a familiar opening to customer conversations. Ask what it needs to achieve and, according to Hugo Mantero-Belard, European Lead for Dynamics 365 on Empiric’s Microsoft team, the answer can be less clear.
For organisations considering Dynamics 365 Contact Center, that leaves questions about what they want to change, how employees will use the technology and which specialists they need to bring in.
We sat down with Hugo Mantero-Belard, European Lead for Dynamics 365, and Jack Gibson, European CRM & Agentic AI Lead, from Empiric’s Microsoft team to explore the questions coming through in their conversations with customers and partners. The discussion covered AI adoption, Contact Center integration and a recent recruitment engagement spanning contact centre architecture and AI delivery.
The article follows our earlier coverage of Dynamics 365 F&O programme setup, bringing the focus onto customer service and Microsoft AI.
What Should Come First in a Dynamics 365 AI Project?
AI is the big conversation we’re hearing from customers and partners. Everyone’s asking what they’re doing with AI, but to use it efficiently and do it right, things need to happen. There’s a process to it.
At the conference, we were hearing about big partners having to bring customers back down to the ground and say: we can put in loads of agents, but what’s that actually going to do? One of the points they made was that there are probably three things to understand before doing anything.
The first is the people in the business. What can we do with AI to make employees’ lives easier? The second is processes. How can we adopt and implement AI, specifically Copilot in our area, to make those processes faster and more efficient? Then the third is technology: how many agents are we going to put in and what are we actually going to use from the Microsoft AI stack to get things done for the customer?
We see customers coming to us saying they want to do something with AI. We ask what they want to do and the answer is sometimes that they don’t really know, but they need to do something because everyone else is.
It was interesting to hear those discussions and see them reflected in our industry. We’re getting AI delivery manager roles and AI architect roles coming through, and Contact Center falls into that AI space very nicely.
We understand the type of profiles that are needed and we understand the process. That includes getting contact centre people in, alongside people who are going to drive the AI initiative throughout the business, eventually across all the business areas as well.
Why Does AI Adoption Need to Happen in Stages?
One of the things that came out of attending the conference was agentic maturity. What are your values? What does the business want? What do the people need?
When AI initially comes into a business, people are unsure. The adoption period is never really as seamless as people want it to be and they need to learn how they’re going to use it. You start with humans driving that initiative, with humans in the loop. Then people begin using it, but still require help and guidance around the best ways to use AI and bring it into the business.
Then you have humans on the loop, so they’re gradually learning how to use it. But it has to be done in stages. It’s never going to be: “Here’s Copilot, here’s Claude, here’s ChatGPT. Here it is, use it, that’s that.”
There has to be an adoption period for how each department can use it well, how the business as a whole can use it well and how it becomes part of the furniture, as opposed to being an add-on to what they already have.
Instead of leading with a rip and replace, tearing a contact centre away from a business and putting something new in, organisations can layer AI capabilities across their existing contact centre investments. That’s the idea behind Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence (CCI). It allows people to modernise through the use of Microsoft CCI while keeping their existing contact centre solution.
How Do the Different Parts of Dynamics 365 Contact Center Work Together?
Contact Center is an AI-driven solution from Microsoft. The discussion breaks down into five areas, starting with customer service. That’s where you have human agents and AI agents working with cases, customer history, knowledge and routing. That’s what the other areas build towards.
The second area is voice and telephony: handling inbound and outbound phone calls and the core communication systems supporting them. You then have digital channels, including AI chatbots, text messages, WhatsApp, social media channels and email.
Those can involve Microsoft’s own capabilities or external third-party systems. Voice and telephony feed into customer service, the digital channels feed into customer service and then you have the Copilot capabilities and integration with wider systems supporting that.
On the AI and Copilot side, you’re developing customised agents for what a business needs. That could involve how different systems work together or how the business supports its telephony requirements in different locations.
One of the benefits is what happens when you’re having a customer conversation. Copilot can take notes and capture the problem, what needs to happen to resolve it and the resolution. It can help give the person handling the request a clear process to work through.
At the end of the day, businesses want to deal with more requests. That’s why they invest in the contact centre and this technology: to handle more requests on a daily basis and make the business more efficient. If you’re taking three days to get back to people, they aren’t going to like that customer service.
Where Does Integration Fit into a Contact Center Programme?
The integration area links closely with AI. You’re looking at different systems, including third-party applications as well as what’s within Microsoft’s immediate capabilities: Power Platform, Azure, custom APIs, CRM and ERP.
Being able to integrate those with Contact Center means the information is in the right place and easier for people to find. That supports the customer service operation and the other areas of the business connected to it.
For the organisation we’ve been supporting, the biggest help has been through two areas: AI/Copilot and integration.
How Did One Organisation Resource Contact Center Architecture and AI Delivery?
A recent engagement brought together the contact centre and wider AI requirements we’ve been discussing. A global organisation was struggling to secure specialist Microsoft talent to support its transformation across Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Teams Telephony, Copilot and agentic AI.
The requirements combined niche technical knowledge with experience of enterprise-scale delivery. The organisation needed expertise across Contact Centre architecture and telephony integration, alongside the ability to translate business requirements into practical AI use cases. Finding candidates with that combination of emerging technology expertise and delivery experience had proved particularly difficult.
We drew on our two dedicated specialist desks covering Dynamics 365 CCaaS and AI, accessing Microsoft contractor networks aligned with the requirements across both disciplines. The search resulted in the placement of two former Microsoft specialists, each bringing expertise relevant to a different part of the programme.
The D365 CCaaS Technical Architect brought specialist knowledge of Dynamics 365 Contact Center and omnichannel architecture, including Microsoft Teams Telephony integration. Their expertise matched the requirement for technical capability across the organisation’s contact centre and communications environment.
The D365 AI Delivery Manager supported enterprise AI delivery across Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service. The role focused on translating business requirements into practical use cases involving Copilot, Copilot Studio and agentic AI.
The organisation secured both specialists through Empiric for roles that had proved difficult to fill.
What Should Businesses Consider as Microsoft’s AI Products Develop?
Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence, shortened to CCI, came into public preview in October. Realistically, it’s going to be one of the most important announcements for Contact Center, as it’s a way of Microsoft connecting with the wider market and having its product used more widely, potentially driving more sales through Contact Center and more companies looking to adopt the tool.
The idea is not to replace your existing platform. The idea is to bring Microsoft AI, automation, quality management, biometrics, conversation intelligence and the capabilities of the Copilot agents being built for Dynamics 365 Contact Center and allow that to run across an existing contact centre solution. That could be Genesys, Five9 or Cisco Webex Contact Center, or people who are already adopting Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
The key details to pull from the product are the AI-powered customer self-service across voice and digital channels and automated quality assurance, with real-time evaluations and coaching listed by Microsoft as coming soon. Coaching is about allowing people to adopt the tools and use the AI agents effectively.
Voice biometrics for authentication is going to be really important for fraud reduction. When you’re looking at financial services or defence, customer data is really important and needs to be protected.
There’s also the Customer Conversation harness in Copilot Studio (the framework for building agents that handle customer conversations over voice and chat), for building customer-facing voice and chat agents. Copilot Studio alongside these external contact centre tools becomes much more viable. Then there’s access to enterprise data, customer history and knowledge sources. There’s a lot more information going into this AI-first approach and CCI that’s going to be accessible through the tool.
For customers and partners, they both sit in a similar boat with this new tool. No one knows how it’s going to fully affect the market at this point, but it creates a new AI-led modernisation approach. It allows organisations to layer AI capabilities across their existing contact centre investments and could help the business deal with customer requests faster and improve the customer experience. On my side, I think it reinforces the growing importance of AI and specifically Copilot Studio as a platform for building both employee-facing and customer-facing solutions and agents. It’s worth staying close to this product if you’re working around contact centres and customer experience globally, not just Microsoft technologies. It has relevance for AI-driven transformation in enterprise, mid-sized and smaller businesses, especially where there’s already a Microsoft environment.
Planning Your Dynamics 365 Contact Center Team?
Hugo and Jack’s discussion starts with the people and processes AI is intended to support. From there, the requirements extend into customer service, telephony, digital channels and the systems Contact Center needs to work with.
Their recent engagement shows how one organisation resourced that work through two distinct appointments, covering contact centre architecture and AI delivery across service operations.
If you’re planning a Dynamics 365 Contact Center implementation or building Microsoft AI capability, speak to Hugo and Jack about the specialist talent your programme needs.
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