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When Microsoft, after a decade-long hiatus, relaunched its now 40-year-old Flight Simulator series in 2020, it reignited interest in a genre that had long been a mainstay of PC gaming. It’s one thing to marvel at the graphics of the new Flight Simulator, though, and another to try to play the game with mouse and keyboard — or the Xbox controller. Few games benefit from custom hardware as much as flight simulators, and while you don’t have to go all out, at a minimum, you’ll want a basic HOTAS-style joystick. The next step up from there is a set of dedicated flight controls, throttles and rudders. The best-known names here are Logitech, with its affordable Flight Yoke System, CH’s Eclipse and Flight Sim yokes and throttles, Turtle Beach’s all-in-one Alpha Flight Controls XPC and Bravo throttle quadrant.
In the past, I only used an old joystick to play Flight Simulator, so when Honeycomb asked me to try their system (which, in the XPC version, now also supports the Xbox), I had a hard time turning it down. At over $550 for the yoke and throttle, we’re talking about a serious investment here — and once you get started, you’ll be tempted to get a set of rudder pedals, too. But in return, you get some very solid hardware that will let you take your flight sim experience to the next level.
Image Credits: TechCrunch/Frederic Lardinois
I’ve tested these controls with both Flight Simulator and the recently released X-Plane 12 — both of which support it out of the box. I should add that I mostly fly single-ending piston planes, so that’s also what I mostly stuck with in my testing, though the Brave throttle quadrant comes with all of the levers and options for two-engine planes as well.
Indeed, it’s maybe the throttle quadrant that most changed my flight sim experience. It features a total of six levers and you can set it up for general aviation flying or for managing commercial jets with up to four engines and thrust reversers. The levers are easy enough to change if you tend to switch between those different modes. One nice feature here is that you can also change the level tension (using a knob on the side of the quadrant) to your liking.
Obviously, that’s what you would expect from a throttle quadrant, but to me, the game changers in day-to-day use were actually the dedicated trim wheel, flap levers and autopilot controls. I’ve always had the hardest time trimming planes in Flight Simulator using the buttons on my joystick, but the combination of the yoke — which takes some strength to pull and push — and the trim wheel make for a far more natural experience. The dedicated flap switch also helps here, and being able to control the autopilot makes all the difference. I don’t know about you, but using my mouse to try to set headings and altitudes in the 3D cockpit never worked well for me. Now, with its dedicated (and backlit) buttons and knobs, I use it far more.
Do I wish that the layout was more akin to the Garmin GFC 500 that I’m used to in the planes I typically fly? Sure — but it’s easy enough to get used to this layout, and the functionality is essentially the same — and using it doesn’t take me out of the sim experience. And that’s really what all of this is really about: being able to focus on the sim in front of you and not having to mess around with your mouse and/or keyboard shortcuts.
The throttle quadrant also features an annunciator panel with 14 warning lights for some of the most typical failures and seven programmable switches. By default, these are set up to control your airplane’s lights, but since the yoke also has those switches, I used one for the parking brake and mostly ignored the rest (though I’ve seen people use it to control some of the more advanced functions of their models).
The yoke is as sturdy as the throttle quadrant and features plenty of buttons to manage your flight sim experience. On the left handle, you’ll find an eight-way hat switch that defaults to controlling your views, a push-to-talk button and two vertical two-way rockers (which by default are set to controlling your trim). On the right handle, there are two horizontal rocker switches and two buttons. There are also five switches to control your lights and four to control your electrical system. And to round it all out, there is a five-position ignition switch so you can properly simulate starting up your engine (and testing your magnetos during your run-up, of course).
As I noted before, it takes a bit of strength to pull the self-centering yoke back (or push it) all the way to its stop. If you’ve ever flown a Cessna and tried to keep that nose wheel off the runway during a soft-field landing, it’s a bit like that. But that also means that you end up trimming the plane just like during a real flight simply because you’ll tire of working the yoke. It’s all about that immersion, after all.
There is a red LED backlight that makes the honeycomb-themed panel light up red. If that’s not your thing, you can tone the light down a bit or turn it off completely.
Image Credits: Honeycomb
One thing to note, Honeycomb offers two mounting options: clamps or a 3M micro-suction pad. That pad will lose its strength after a while (though you can buy replacements), but they work quite well. I think most people will opt for the clamps, though. They are easy enough to work with and while using the pads is probably a little bit faster, setting everything up with the clamps is also a one-minute job — and then everything is guaranteed to stay in place. The whole setup does take up a lot of space, though.
To use these controls on the Xbox, you’ll need Honeycomb’s $40 Xbox Hub. There isn’t really much to say here about those. It works as advertised and it does turn the Xbox version of Microsoft’s Flight Sim into quite a bit more of a fully fledged simulation than cruising around with your wireless controller.
In using the yoke and throttle, I kept missing my rudder pedals (I did eventually grab my old Logitech ones and set those up). You can set up the flight sim to handle the rudder for you, but where is the fun in that? (It won’t help you during taxi, takeoff or crosswind landings anyway.) Honeycomb has its Charlie Rudder Pedals in the works and they are currently available for preorder — but they also cost $350. I dusted off my old Thrustmaster T-Flight pedals to use in combination with the Honeycomb setup. That worked like a charm.
Given the price, you better know if you are really into flight simulators or not before you buy this. If you are, then it’s a worthwhile expense if you can afford it. If flight sims aren’t your thing, then you probably didn’t read this far anyway.
There’s a third class of potential buyers here: students working on their pilot’s license. I think the jury is still out on whether a sim is going to help you with that. There is a high chance that without your flight instructor around, you’ll learn some bad habits that you’ll have to then unlearn the expensive way — while paying for your real-world lessons. Plus, so much about flying is about feeling what the plane does and how the engine sounds — something you won’t get from a sim. But as always, talk to your friendly neighborhood CFI and discuss your needs with them.
Honeycomb’s yoke and throttle let you take your flight sim experience to the next level by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Publishing platform Medium is opening up its debut Mastodon instance, me.dm, to its members, the company announced today.
Last month, Medium first teased its plans around the Fediverse — the group of interconnected servers powering a range of open source, decentralized applications, including the Twitter alternative Mastodon and others. It said it wanted to make access to me.dm a perk included with Medium membership, offering a place for authors and readers to discuss the content published on its platform.
The company explained at the time that this would make for an interesting local feed — a reference to how Mastodon users can view a dedicated feed of just the conversations happening on their own instance (server), in addition to those happening more broadly across federated servers (those servers their local server knows about and is connected to).
In addition, Medium said it would tackle some of the onboarding challenges involved with joining Mastodon by making it easier for newcomers to find both the people and topics that matched their interests as part of its onboarding flow.
That’s an area others have begun to tackle, as well, as they aim to capitalize on the potential of the decentralized web. Last week, for example, the magazine app Flipboard announced it would launch its own instance on flipboard.social to address similar concerns. The new Mozilla-backed Mastodon mobile app Mammoth additionally features an onboarding experience that aims to simplify sign-up by sharing suggestions of who to follow from across different categories.
But while there are some similarities with these other Fediverse plays, Medium is the first major tech company to offer users a “premium” Mastodon experience — meaning access to the instance isn’t free as it is elsewhere when signing up directly. Instead, interested users would have to purchase a Medium membership, which currently runs $5 USD per month or $50 per year with its annual plan.
The company believes the exclusivity and the community it will curate on its instance will have immediate value. Already, it’s quietly onboarded 5,000 people from its waitlist onto the instance and is forecasting a community in the “six figures” in size at some point later this year.
Image Credits: Medium
“We want Medium to be the best place to read and write on the internet,” Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine tells TechCrunch. “We want to do it under a single subscription — I think people are tired of having dozens of subscriptions. And I think we’ve also found that ad-driven models have their own kind of corrupting influence,” he continues. “I think that’s why a lot of social media ends up toxic — because people are focused on engagement, rather than substance. So, in order to have the best place to read and write, you have to build the whole thing around an economic model for substance. For us, that means a subscription,” Stubblebine adds.
Plus, the exec points out, the instance will be among those run by an experienced tech company. That means it will run the instance on its own infrastructure and will have its own Trust & Safety team managing moderation. (Today, there’s one person dedicated to the task, but it could scale in time.)
Stubblebine notes, too, that instance’s domain name — me.dm — could have a draw.
“You have to share the domain along with your username in the Fediverse. To have a short domain is valuable,” he says.
Image Credits: Medium
Coincidentally, Medium is announcing its Fediverse instance’s opening on the same day that Twitter was facing yet another partial outage.
However, the move also comes at a time when there seems to be a broader shift in Mastodon’s direction — and not just because Twitter has become unreliable.
Under Elon Musk’s ownership, there are questions about Twitter’s future — the company has lost advertisers and is in debt to creditors. But there are questions about the future of centralized social media, as well.
That’s further highlighted by the fact that Medium itself was created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. (Williams exited Medium as CEO last year, but remains chairman of the board.) Another Twitter and Medium co-founder, Biz Stone, also sits on Medium’s board.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, is backing Bluesky, another decentralized social concept but one that uses a different protocol than Mastodon. Its future, given its reliance on Twitter’s funding, seems questionable, though.
Stubblebine addresses the oddity of having so many Twitter founders now involved with companies building alternatives but says Medium’s impact on Twitter’s fate is not a huge consideration.
“We didn’t go into this year, thinking that we wanted to compete with Twitter or even that it was possible,” Stubblebine says. “But it seems obvious to me that there’s an exodus from Twitter — and enough of an exodus to create an alternative. We’re not particularly worried about whether or not Twitter lives or dies. We see it more as there’s going to be a new thing and maybe it lives alongside Twitter or maybe it completely replaces it. But regardless, it’s going to be important. And, regardless, that new thing is Mastodon,” he adds.
Medium plans to improve its Mastodon experience as it grows, hoping to provide a place for writers to find new readers for their stories and enable conversations, then roll out more features in time.
It’s not the first company to try to relocate some of the discussions that used to take place on Twitter to its own external community in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition. In addition to Flipboard and its own Mastodon instance, Substack late last year targeted Twitter with its launch of an in-app discussions feature, too.
Meanwhile, Tumblr owner Matt Mullenweg confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon and other Fediverse-connected apps, in addition to others, like Bluesky and Nostr.
Medium itself, by comparison, isn’t integrating with ActivityPub — it doesn’t think syndication of blogs to the Fediverse is the future; its focus instead is on proving a place for the authors to build a community.
Stubblebine also says he’s not worried that offering a premium instance will corrupt the potential of what’s, so far, been a free and open source social web.
However, he does admit there has been some pushback from the wider community about Medium going the premium route.
“Most of the pushback is based on a fear of — sometimes it’s expressed as a fear of capitalism, but, when you dig into it, it’s always a fear of monopoly. This is one of the things that I think is exciting about the Fediverse — there’s really no hope for anyone to monopolize it. So it just leads to healthier business ideas,” he explains. “This is just a business idea that will be one of many on the Fediverse…I think it’s new, so it will probably be a little bit alarming. But in practice, there’s just no way for it to pan out that way,” Stubblebine says.
“I think there’s this unbundling of social media going on right now,” he continues. “And what that gives us is the opportunity to be more opinionated. For me, that’s exciting — I don’t want to be a town square for the entire world. I want to be the town square for people that love reading and writing — and a certain type of reading and writing — thoughtful reading and writing,” he concludes.
Medium launches a ‘premium’ Mastodon instance as a membership perk by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/medium-launches-a-premium-mastodon-instance-as-a-membership-perk/
Serial entrepreneur and seasoned investor Vinod Khosla has some strong, contrarian advice for the venture capital industry: don’t sit on your founders’ boards. Khosla, who spoke onstage at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles this week, spoke about the culture of capital.
“I’m not a big fan of governance; I think if you engage as a team member with a founder, you have much more influence than if you’re sitting on a board and voting,” he said. “Other VCs accuse us of being very active and very engaged — but the flip side of it is they vote on boards. We don’t — no matter how important an issue.”
It’s a non-consensus take in a world where VCs are being asked hard questions about their due diligence, but Khosla added that “it isn’t the VC’s job to sit on a board and vote…there’s a hard line you don’t cross, which is don’t make founders or management do things they don’t want to do by voting.” Khosla says that by avoiding six-hour board meetings, he spends “more time doing decks for presentations for our founders than almost anybody I know.”
The reality, added Khosla, is that “most board members today in startups have not earned the right to advise” because many have not themselves built startups. Khosla has a history of criticizing some of the mainstream wisdom by VCs. Onstage, he pointed to a TechCrunch piece he wrote in 2013, titled: “70-80% Of VCs Add Negative Value To Startups.”
The advice comes at a reflective time for the industry. Exacerbated by meltdowns like FTX, or anecdotes about companies reportedly lying about key information, the venture industry has seen some loud examples of things that can go wrong.
In January, for example, Sequoia’s Alfred Lin spoke to TC’s Connie Loizos about his FTX investment. “I think the thing that gets me to reassess is…it’s not that we made the investment. It’s the year-and-a-half working relationship afterward, and I still didn’t see it. And that is difficult,” he said.
Other investors similarly spoke about the need for investors to rethink how to interact with founders. 01 Advisors, built by Dick Costolo, Twitter’s former CEO, and Adam Bain, Twitter’s former COO, said onstage that their biggest misses as a firm have been around backing the wrong people. The firm spoke about a questionnaire that helps them better vet a founder’s potential strengths and weaknesses (they say they use this to make investment decisions). Echoing Khosla comments, the duo also spoke to the importance of not taking a board seat so they can instead be a founder’s first call.
Of course, giving up a board seat as a VC can mean giving up some oversight, along with the checks and balances that can help a founding team stay on track. As critics of the industry’s loosening approach to board seats have told TechCrunch previously, board meetings are relatedly important for senior managers who may want more time with their investors, not less. (If only the founder is talking to the startup’s venture backers, that means everyone else is out of the loop, essentially.)
While Khosla’s anti-board perspective may ruffle feathers with some of the VCs in the room, LPs don’t appear to be pushing back against it. Khosla and his firm, founded in 2004, is raising about $3 billion across three new funds, according to regulatory filings. The outfit plans to raise $1.5 billion for a Fund VIII, $1 billion for a second opportunity fund and $400 million for a new seed fund. Last year, the firm raised over $550 million for its first Opportunity Fund after taking in $1.4 billion for its Fund VII.
If you have a juicy tip or lead about the venture world, you can reach Natasha Mascarenhas on Twitter @nmasc_ or on Signal at +1 925 271 0912. Anonymity requests will be respected.
Vinod Khosla’s advice for top VCs? Don’t sit on your founders’ boards by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/vinod-khoslas-advice-for-top-vcs-dont-sit-on-your-founders-boards/
Twitter says it has resolved issues with images and links on its platform. Earlier today, many users were unable to view links and images on the social network due to “an internal change.” According to reports on third-party web monitoring service Downdetector, the issues began at around 11:50 a.m. ET.
“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company had said in a tweet. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.”
Clicking on a link brought up an error message that said “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information.”
This latest outage comes about a week after Elon Musk slashed more than 200 jobs in the latest round of layoffs at the company. The cuts involved Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford and newsletter app Revue’s Martijn de Kuijper.
After Elon Musk took over Twitter last October and fired thousands of employees, many feared that the social network would slowly fall apart. This is not the first time that Twitter has faced issues in the past few months.
Just a few days ago, many parts of the social network, including the timeline, were broken for users all over the world. Last month, Twitter started showing users that they were over their “daily rate limit,” while another bug was preventing people from following other users. In December, the social network faced glitches and showed users a “rate-exceeding limit” error.
Update 01/03/2023 1:10 PM ET: Article was updated to note that the issues have been resolved.
Twitter fixes broken links and images caused by ‘internal change’ by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/twitter-images-and-links-are-currently-broken/
Qualtrics was once a hot startup before SAP bought the company in 2018 for $8 billion. It was a fine exit, making the founders rich, but it never was really a good fit. SAP spun out the company just two years later, before taking it public in 2021.
On Sunday, the company filed an 8-K form with the SEC indicating it has an offer to go private again in a $12.4 billion deal with Silver Lake and the Canadian Pension fund that values the company stock at $18.15 per share.
“Our exclusivity agreement with Silver Lake is a next step in the process announced by SAP on January 26th. As the process continues to play out, we’re committed to achieving the best outcome for our company and our shareholders, as we maintain our focus on delivering for our customers around the world,” the company said in a statement.
Translated, that means the principle stockholder SAP began looking for buyers in January, and this is the best offer it received. It will probably continue to look for a better one, but if it doesn’t come along, it will surely take this one.
It’s certainly been a long, strange trip for the company. This time, SAP, which owns 71% of the company, would recoup its initial investment, but not much more (although it did probably gain some additional money when the company went public).
Anand Thaker, a martech consultant who keeps close watch on the companies, says it’s a reasonable deal for both parties. “SAP needs cash and this seems like an excellent opportunity for them to return those funds to the coffers. Silver Lake is likely to come out healthy of funds from the pending VMware deal [with Broadcom],” he said. That deal is still subject to regulatory approval.
Qualtrics raised $400 million as a startup, per Crunchbase, and was poised to IPO when SAP swooped in in 2018 with an offer the company basically couldn’t refuse. It was a big number, and the founders took it. Bill McDermott, who was CEO at the time, saw it as a way to get more direct access to customer data, the holy grail of data for any company.
It also had the added benefit of being cloud native, and maybe having engineers who had built a SaaS product from the ground up could help SAP, which was in the process of transitioning to the cloud at the time. McDermott subsequently stepped down, eventually landing as CEO of ServiceNow, and his replacement, Christian Klein, probably wasn’t as attached to something that wasn’t acquired under his watch.
As Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, told us at the time of the spin out, the company could still keep the benefits of the acquisition with the spinout, while recouping some of its investment, and that’s probably how Klein saw it.
“SAP doesn’t lose anything in regards to their […] data and experience vision, as they still retain [controlling interest in Qualtrics]. It also opens the opportunity for Qualtrics to partner with other ERP vendors [and broaden its overall market],” he said at the time.
Qualtrics is a customer experience company. It operates on the side of the equation where companies can ask you about your experience in the form of a survey, like the one I got from my dentist last week after my cleaning. It also can be used to query sentiment inside an organization, as well.
The stock is up 1.43% on the news in mid-day trading.
Qualtrics has $12B offer on the table to go private by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/qualtrics-has-12b-offer-on-the-table-to-go-private/
Welcome to the final episode of Inside Startup Battlefield. Thank you so much for listening to our miniseries all about TechCrunch’s pitch competition. Now, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for — the winner is announced!
In this episode, we get to know the winner of the 2022 Startup Battlefield competition. We’ll hear what’s next for their company and get insight from TechCrunch staff, VCs and audience members on why they were the right choice. New episodes of Inside Startup Battlefield drop every Monday. Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.
Inside Startup Battlefield: Say Hello to the Startup Battlefield Winner by Maggie Stamets originally published on TechCrunch
A lot of music streaming services and discovery apps have followed a formula for introducing new artists and songs to their users: an AI-powered vertical feed that highlights clips of songs. SoundCloud is the latest app to try this feature out.
The company is testing a vertical feed discovery feature both on its iOS and Android apps with a select number of users. SoundCloud users included in this test will see a new “Discover” page — along with a “Following” page — under the Feed tab. Until now, the tab only showed new tracking from artists that you were following and reposts from friends.
SoundCloud says the Discover page will show songs “based on your listening history and musical taste.” The app will also show a line explaining the reason why a particular song is showing up in your recommendations. These captions will look like “Because you follow A” or “Because you liked B.”
Image Credits: SoundCloud
Importantly, SoundCloud is rolling out 30-second previews across both Discover and Following pages. Artists can select their own clip to highlight or rely on Musiio’s AI tech — a startup SoundCloud acquired last year to improve discovery.
Image Credits: SoundCloud
If you think the song matches your taste you can “like” it to add it to your “Liked tracked”. If you want to listen to the full version, you have to tap on the play button, which will also show you the information about the track on a new page. The revamped page design also makes it easier to comment on the track or add it to a playlist. At least, SoundCloud is not replacing the like button with a plus button like Spotify.
Image Credits: SoundCloud
Given how TikTok and short videos have played a part in uncovering new artists, many platforms are now drawing some inspiration from the vertical feed method. Spotify has been testing it for a few years now, but it hasn’t fully rolled it out yet. ByteDance-owned Resso, which operates in India, Brazil and Indonesia, relies on a vertical feed — but it makes you listen to full songs rather than short clips. Other music discovery apps like Smores and HotDrop have also relied on a mixture of AI and short clips to help users find new tracks.
SoundCloud wants to be the first major platform to bring all these ingredients together to fuel discovery. The company didn’t specify how many listeners visit its platform per month. In a recent blog post, SoundCloud said it has 130 million “engaged fans.” Besides that, the company said that it hosts more than 320 million tracks from over 40 million creators.
The streaming service slashed 20% of its workforce last August due to “a significant company transformation and the challenging economic and financial environment.” In the last few years, the company has introduced programs for fan-powered royalties, which lets smaller artists earn money from user subscriptions or ad revenues only based on artists they listen to. This eliminates the model where established artists would get paid more on a pro-rata basis because of a higher number of total streams.
SoundCloud is testing a TikTok-like feed for music discovery by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/soundcloud-is-testing-a-tiktok-like-feed-for-music-discovery/
Cannabis startups have to navigate some rough waters: They can’t access federal funds or work with traditional banks, and they have to find customers across a fragmented market while adhering to local laws. But at least on the advertising front, a new Twitter update might signal smooth sailing ahead.
Twitter updated its advertising rules to allow cannabis companies — including those selling products containing THC and CBD, in addition to related accessories — to advertise on the platform under a strict set of guidelines in states where those products are legal. Twitter is the first major social media company to allow these companies to advertise.
Twitter’s advertising business has been hit hard since Elon Musk took over last year. It’s no surprise, then, that the company is trying to diversify its revenue funnels. Multiple cannabis companies told TechCrunch that this could be huge for the industry that has until now been locked out of the top advertising channels.
Tweet, tweet, pass: Twitter unlocks a budding growth opportunity for cannabis startups by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/cannabis-startups-twitter-advertising/
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is Alex and we are here to do our Monday show, a kickoff for the week that covers startup news, tech news, and a little bit of the money that powers both. Sound good? Here’s what we have for you this morning:
And that is our show! Hugs, and talk to you soon!
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday and Wednesday, and at 6 a.m. PT on Fridays, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together, and more!
We’d give an arm and a leg for an ARM IPO filing by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/wed-give-an-arm-and-a-leg-for-an-arm-ipo-filing/
Microsoft today introduced what it’s calling the “next generation” of AI product updates across its business apps portfolio. They touch on both Power Platform, Microsoft’s set of low-code tools for building apps and workflows, and Dynamics 365, the company’s suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Charles Lamanna, CVP of business apps and platform at Microsoft, described the updates as the logical next step on Microsoft’s automation journey. Powered by tech from AI startup OpenAI and built using the Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft’s service that provides enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI’s API, the new capabilities follow the rollout of OpenAI text-generating AI models in Power Platform four years ago and the more recent debut of generative AI capabilities in Viva Sales, Microsoft’s seller experience app.
“Over the last four years, we’ve been on a journey to bring generative AI and foundation models to the workplace,” Lamanna said via email, noting that Microsoft has a longstanding partnership with OpenAI to commercialize the vendor’s tech in Microsoft’s own products and through the Azure OpenAI Service. “And we’ve now reached the point where the tech and product can enable transformative outcomes for customers.”
In Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s launching what it calls Copilot (borrowing branding from GitHub’s Copilot service), which — broadly speaking — aims to automate some of the more repetitive sales and customer service tasks.
For example, in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, Copilot can help write email responses to customers and create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM, such as product and pricing information, Lamanna says, and combines them with insights from the recorded Teams call.
“We securely and intelligently access information from customers’ CRM, ERP and other enterprise data sources at runtime,” Lamanna added. “We use large language models to combine the enterprise data with underlying knowledge to produce responses tuned for each customer. Importantly, we don’t use customers’ data to train the models.”
Over in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot can draft “contextual answers” to customer queries via chat or email and provide an “interactive chat experience” for customer service agents that draws from knowledge bases as well as case history. These complement the new “conversation boosters” feature in Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft’s chatbot builder, which lets companies connect a bot to resources like a website or knowledge base to use that data to respond to questions that the bot hasn’t been trained on.
In turn, conversation boosters complements a new “GPT” model in Microsoft’s AI Builder tool that lets organizations embed text generation features into their Power Automate and Power Apps solutions. Lamanna says that, for example, a researcher could use it to summarize text from weekly released reports and have it sent to their email, while a marketing manager could tap the GPT model to create targeted, generated content ideas by entering specific keywords or topics.
Given Microsoft’s recent foray into generative text — i.e. Bing Chat — one might be reluctant to build an app using the company’s tech lest it go off the rails. But Lamanna asserts that conversation boosters and the GPT model — plus Copilot, for that matter — are “grounded in reality” by each customer’s CRM, ERP and other data sources.
“AI-generated content is always clearly labeled, and users are encouraged to verify the accuracy before using it. When relevant, we also cite the sources from which the answer was retrieved to better enable the user to verify the accuracy of the response,” Lamanna said. “We have monitoring and controls in place to allow us to quickly respond with manual intervention in case any issues slip through the above lines of defense.”
There’s nothing to prevent users from not taking the time to verify the content’s accuracy, of course. Time will tell whether that becomes an issue; studies on automation bias, or people’s tendency to place too much trust in AI, suggest that it might.
Fortunately, the rest of Copilot’s capabilities are less potentially problematic.
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can receive suggestions about customer segments that they might not have previously considered and create target segments by describing the segment in their own words. They can also get ideas for email campaigns, typing in requests to see topics from Copilot, which generates them by pulling from an organization’s existing marketing emails as well as “a range” of internet sources, Lamanna says.
Microsoft’s playing catch-up in some respects. The CRM elephant in the room, Salesforce, has for years been injecting (or at least attempting to inject) its CRM family of products with AI-powered capabilities. Startups like Glint have embraced AI, too, mostly to automate customer service workflows. But as an increasing number of marketers say they plan to sprinkle AI throughout their content strategies, it might not matter who’s first to the punch, necessarily, but who deploys it first at scale.
“CRM and ERP have long been mission-critical customer and business data sources; however, they frequently require burdensome tasks like manual data entry, content generation and notetaking,” Lamanna said. “Dynamics 365 Copilot automates these tedious tasks and unlocks the full creativity of the workforce.”
Beyond the sales realm, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft’s business management system, tries to streamline creating ecommerce product listings. Lamanna says that Copilot can generate product attributes like color, material and size with descriptions that can be tailored by adjusting things such as the tone of voice, format and length.
It’s a bit like Shopify’s recently-introduced AI-generated product descriptions tool, a fact that Lamanna indirectly acknowledged. He pointed out that Business Central customers using Shopify can publish products with AI-generated descriptions to their Shopify store in “just a few clicks” (after they’ve reviewed them for accuracy, hopefully).
Elsewhere, riding the wave of automation in the supply chain industry, Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can proactively flag issues like weather, financials and geography that might impact supply chain processes. Supply chain planners can then choose to have Copilot automatically draft an email to alert any impacted partners.
Lamanna argues that even simple AI-imbued processes such as these — automating emails — can lead to a measurable boost in productivity.
“According to our recent survey on business trends, 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. AI-powered assistants are now table stakes for business apps,” Lamanna said. “We believe Dynamics 365 Copilot will help employees get work done faster so organizations can spend more time on the creative, innovative aspects of their jobs — like building long-term customer relationships.”
As always, the truth lies clouded in some marketing fluff. But what’s clear is that Microsoft isn’t slowing its investments in AI and automation. It was just in January that Microsoft invested billions more in OpenAI, and the company’s eager to see a return on investment.
Copilot will be included in existing Dynamics 365 licenses like Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise at no additional cost, Microsoft says. It’ll launch in preview beginning March 6, with general availability to follow sometime down the line.
Microsoft brings an AI-powered Copilot to its business app suite by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/microsoft-dynamics-copilot/