The 2025 Release Wave 1 has been released, and it’s filled with some great things. Something I am excited to see is the sales qualification agent, which claims to boost your sales qualified pipeline leveraging AI. Let’s dive in and learn more about this agent coming to the Sales app!
The new Sales Qualification Agent in Dynamics 365 Sales will automate the lead qualification process by integrating data from both the CRM system as well as external public sources to efficiently build a qualified pipeline.
The agent does a number of things, per the release notes:
- Autonomously researches information about every lead from CRM data & public web sources.
- Makes a recommendation on whether that lead should be qualified & pre-generating an email with highly personalized talking points.
- Agent surfaces most important actions you should take on your leads.
- New UI follows sales reps across lead & opportunity grids.
Here’s a screenshot of that “new UI” that accompanies agent details:
How Does it Work?
Let’s dive in a bit more to this agent: it is actually comprised of three separate agents that work together:
- Research Agent
- Prioritization Agent
- Engagement Agent
The research agent will use data from your Dynamics 365 Sales system and public web sources, “as well as existing Copilot skills,” to get key Account and customer data. It promises to enable quite a few items (all provided below directly from the release notes):
- Decide whether to engage with the lead using the agent-generated recommendation.
- Get a 360-degree picture through lead and account summaries.
- Confirm that the lead has a valid email address and has consented to emails and phone calls.
- Know who can make an introduction (coworkers who know the lead).
- Verify that the lead’s company’s finances, priorities, and business environment are aligned with their solution area (Account 10-K, strategic priorities, and so on).
- Get suggestions for who else at the lead’s company to contact.
- See existing opportunities tied to lead/contact and account.
- Review a personalized email, composed using talking points generated from the synthesized research, to send to the prospect.
The prioritization agent evaluates the strength and accuracy of the data and identifies the leads with the highest likelihood to close. It claims to enable sellers to (all provided below directly from the release notes):
- Get the list of leads to focus on instantly.
- Stay on top of triaging high-quality leads as the new UI follows you across lead and opportunity grids.
And finally, the engagement agent will generate a personalized email to engage the leads and maximize response rates, based on the data from the research agent.
Considerations
While the benefits to this sort of agent sound great (who doesn’t want to remove manual work for a sales rep? More time selling is always the answer!), there are some immediate considerations that came to my mind:
Data Quality
I’m lumping together two parts to this: your CRM data and the external data sources that are part of the research agent. Tools like these are always only as good as the data AI can get out of your existing CRM system. If your sales reps aren’t using accurate and up-to-date data, you won’t get what you want out of this agent. Moreover, I’d love to learn more about what assurances or control we have over the “public web sources” the agent will pull from.
Privacy & Compliance
Ah yes, the age-old question of does this fit in my corporate policy and how we (mis)trust and (mis)use AI in our organization. This is especially important since the release notes mention “public web sources” (as discussed above).
Final Thoughts
What an exciting time to be working in Dynamics 365 Sales! Copilot in Sales and Copilot for Sales have revolutionized how our sales reps work within CRM. This sales qualification agent may be the next step in the AI revolution! Or, it may be yet another AI tool that falls flat. How will you know if this will work for your sales team? Easy, take it for a test drive!
This feature hits public preview in March. Turn on access to public preview items in your Sandbox system and play around with it. Use your real CRM data and see if it works. Then, make a plan for implementation (test it out with your sales reps please – better yet, make them part of the pilot team!) and train your users on the benefits and features they will have when it hits general availability this April.
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