Microsoft AI, Dynamics, and Salesforce: How Do They Work Together?

The rapid evolution of AI has empowered businesses to utilize popular tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce in new ways. By integrating these platforms with the power of Microsoft AI, they transform into intelligent decision-making systems. This enhances robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities and empowers them with AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and intuitive automation. Let’s explore what your company can gain by combining Microsoft AI, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. 

What Do Microsoft AI, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce Bring to the Table?

Let’s start by looking at what each platform offers to businesses. 

Microsoft AI

Microsoft AI is an umbrella term for a suite of Microsoft AI offerings, including Copilot and Azure AI. These offerings allow organizations to leverage data to make smarter decisions. You can optimize your IT infrastructure and find new ways to make workers more efficient while ensuring that the organization complies with applicable laws and industry regulations. 

Gaining access to Azure AI offers businesses the chance to take advantage of Azure AI machine learning models, cognitive services, and AI-powered automation tools. With Azure Machine Learning, you can learn to create, deploy, and manage AI models in a way that allows for integrating predictive analytics into your enterprise applications. 

IT leaders tasked with making decisions can expand their ability to make accurate forecasts, optimize available resources, and automate repetitive tasks. Organizations can improve their cybersecurity defenses with Microsoft Sentinel. This AI-driven security information and event management (SIEM) platform boosts an IT department’s ability to locate, research, and mitigate real-time threats. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamic’s suite of cloud-based business applications provides organizations with centralized CRM and ERP functionalities. It’s designed to help companies improve overall efficiency by streamlining and optimizing workflows through automation. Dynamics 365 leverages automation, AI, and advanced analytics to help companies create scalable, secure applications that fit their business needs. 

The modular structure of Microsoft Dynamics 365 means you can pick and choose which applications to use. That flexibility means your IT department only has to worry about deploying essential components. Businesses can reduce complexity and costs while gaining access to robust business solutions. Microsoft Dynamics works seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions like Power BI, allowing companies to set up a streamlined communication and synchronization throughout their organization. You can leverage Dynamics 365 AI with Azure to make your solutions more powerful.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a CRM designed to help businesses improve customer engagement using advanced technology. It provides you with applications for various business functions, including sales, customer service, marketing, and commerce. The platform also has embedded analytics capabilities, allowing decision-makers to gain data-driven insights into every aspect of their organization. 

Because it has a strong API framework and pre-built connectors, Salesforce can be integrated with Microsoft 365 and take advantage of its Microsoft AI capabilities. Combining Microsoft AI, Dynamics, and Salesforce allows your company to provide unparalleled service to customers while boosting the performance of your workforce. 

How Can You Integrate All Three Tools?

There are several technical approaches you can take to work with all three tools, each designed to enhance efficiency and save time. 

Azure Logic Apps

Logic Apps’ event-driven workflows can trigger actions in each platform. 

1. Go into Azure Portal and create a new Logic App.
2. Set up the connectors for each platform. 
   1. Add a Salesforce connector to fetch or update records.
   2. Add a Dynamics connector to set up data synchronization.
   3. Set up an Azure AI Services connector, like Text Analytics, to process customer data.
3. Start defining your workflow triggers and actions. For example, if someone adds a lead to Salesforce, have an AI-driven sentiment analysis look for customer intent. From there, add insights and sync the lead within Dynamics 365.
4. Create business rules and conditional logic. For example, you can add a transformation to ensure that data gets entered into Dynamics 365 from Salesforce in a specific format.
5. Set up Azure Monitor to review integration logs and workflow performance.

Microsoft Power Automate

Power Automate comes with pre-built templates to integrate Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. From there, you can build trigger-based workflows. For example, you can create one that applies automatic lead-scoring with AI models to Salesforce opportunities and then update scores in Dynamics 365. 

Once you’ve built your workflows, set up bidirectional synchronization between Salesforce and Dynamics 365 using scheduled workflows. For example, you can use Get Records in Salesforce to get new leads, opportunities, and accounts. From there, you can set up condition and transformation logic to map Salesforce fields to matching Dynamics 365 entities. Finally, use Upsert in Dynamics 365 to update the instance with Salesforce data. 

Custom API Integration with Microsoft Azure Functions

You can use Azure Functions to build serverless functions for business scenarios requiring more complex integrations. Serverless functions are single-purpose, programmatic functions hosted by Azure that perform specific tasks when triggered by requests or events. 

1. Go into Azure and set up an Azure Function App.
2. Create Custom API Endpoints 
   1. Add the Salesforce REST Api to retrieve and update records.
   2. Add the Dynamics 365 Web API to push information.
   3. Use Azure Cognitive Services APIs to call Microsoft AI models.
3. Secure API authentication with Azure AD.

Integration Use Cases

Here are some practical ways to leverage your Microsoft AI, Dynamics, and Salesforce integration. 

• Create AI machine learning models that score leads using Dynamics 365 and Salesforce data
• Use Azure Cognitive Services to collect and analyze customer feedback from Salesforce support cases.
• Provide insights to customer service agents in Dynamics 365.
• Review both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce data to create sales forecasts.
• Use Microsoft AI models to look for trends to inform future sales strategies.

Discover the Power of AI With IES

Internet eBusiness Solutions (IES) takes the mystery out of using AI to improve workflows. We help organizations learn to use AI and gain insights from data gathered from different applications. Contact us today to learn more about our services.