TekStack has won the AI Lottery – and we’re giving you a piece of the action.

We serve customers in one industry: companies that sell technology to other businesses.  We provide them with tools to grow more profitably, with what we like to call integrated revenue operations. TekStack is built on Microsoft Cloud, with products like Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate integrating to Microsoft 365 productivity tools (think: Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Word, and Excel).

It feels like we’ve won the technology lottery.  Microsoft is giving partners like TekStack a 10-mile head start in the marathon that is business applications.  Here are some of the ways we are enabling AI and Copilot for our customers.

Copilots, Copilots, Copilots

In August, Microsoft announced that Copilot is available for ‘Model-Driven Power Apps’.  And that’s exactly what we are, a Microsoft Certified ‘model driven’ Power App.

I know most people are going crazy with all this Copilot talk. There is a Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a Copilot for virtually every Microsoft Dynamics 365 product on offer.  Well, there also happens to be a Copilot for Model-driven Power Apps.

We’ve configured this Copilot to work with TekStack’s over 300 key tables; things like Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Projects, and more.  These tables store key information in Dataverse which can be trained with Microsoft Copilot.  Basically, a user gets a little console in the top right corner of the app and can prompt Copilot much like you use prompts in ChatGPT.  But instead of generative text, the Copilot is answering your questions like: “Give me a list of all opportunities that have close dates in the past,” (which is a sales manager’s nightmare).  But an easy prompt will produce a list, such as, “Which products tracking over their budget and timeline?”

More Copilots, built by TekStack

There are three use cases we are really excited about offering our customers.

1. Sales Meeting Copilot

Imagine you’re a busy sales rep.  You are back-to-back all day.  Your manager is on your a$$ about next steps and updating CRM.  Our Copilot will do it for you.  TekStack already integrates every email correspondence, calendar meeting, and Teams call transcript with your customers (our security omits internal conversations).  Imagine a Copilot that will:

• Update CRM with call activity, stakeholders, and Opportunity next actions based on call outcomes.
• Recommend a follow-up email based on call transcript. TekStack has built templates for perfect call follow-ups, but to this point, it has needed the seller to combine that format with content from a call.  Now with AI generative technology built by Microsoft, we can make that happen in seconds.  Pitch perfect, timely, every single time.

2. Project Meeting Copilot

Now imagine that same use case for Projects.  Projects are even more complex, as each meeting brings with it new discoveries, new risks, new issues that need to be captured.  But most PMs bounce from meeting to meeting and don’t have time to document the outcomes and assign responsibilities.  By consolidating TekStack’s Delivery module, which tracks project progress, risks, issues, actions, and key decisions, we can generate project meeting follow-up automatically.  We can also add RAID items to the project to be tracked and assigned to the appropriate team member.

3. Time Sheet Copilot

We’re excited about this one.  Companies that either bill their time back to customers, or need to account for project efforts will like this one too.  Because TekStack has access to assigned project tasks, support cases, email correspondence, and appointments in Outlook, we are in the best position to assemble a technical resource’s week so as to figure out where their time went.  This will be a big productivity boon to people assigned to customer work, but will also help companies do a better job analyzing where time is spent so they can use that information to set better expectations for future projects, or work on team enablement and training to reduce the amount of time spent on similar efforts.

The Future is all about Natural Language Prompts

We see a time in the very near future where employees can simply ask a question or form a prompt – written or audio – in Microsoft Teams.  Copilot will answer the question and direct employees to the area of the app where they can find information.

Imagine the productivity potential.  If you need to summarize a customer’s top open issues, or find out what their renewal dates are; Copilot will save tons of time to simply access the prompt in Teams.  TekStack is already deeply embedded in Teams for notifications.  You can even access TekStack information from Teams Channels, so this becomes a natural extension.

In the last year, ChatGPT has shown us the power of generative AI.  This has been the year of Copilots which work alongside employees assisting with tasks and enhancing decision making.  These types of artificial intelligence systems have a much greater application than the predictive AI that we saw coming into business applications in 2017.

It’s easy to discount the Copilot application because of the hype machine around it.  Everything has ‘AI’ and Copilots now.  Especially after predictive AI systems never really took off in B2B settings because the data volumes and data quality was not good enough.  However, don’t discount Copilots, especially from Microsoft.