Tact Collaborates with Microsoft to Unlock Business and Customer Data Through Natural Conversation

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Tact, the sales experience platform, today announced a collaboration with Microsoft to integrate its conversational AI-assistant with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Cortana, Microsoft Graph and Sentiment Analysis. The collaboration was announced during a keynote led by Microsoft's Head of Artificial Intelligence Research, Harry Shum, on Wed., May 10 at Microsoft Build 2017 in Seattle, WA.

The power of the Microsoft Graph comes together with business and customer data through the new union between Tact and Microsoft. Sales organizations gain a conversational AI platform that synchronizes data from multiple systems and sources, automates administrative tasks, and turns any connected device into a digital assistant that serves as the seller's main interface for their most essential tools like Microsoft Exchange, calendar, phone, maps, LinkedIn, Dynamics 365 and more. Whether on your phone, through SMS, in chat, or on screen-less devices sellers get a personalized reminder and recommendation system, making them more productive with customers, as well as delivering more accurate data and predictability in forecasts for managers.

Tact and Microsoft are delivering a more natural way for sellers to be productive by:

• Tapping into Bing Knowledge Graph -- which spans 24 billion facts and over five billion relationships between more than two billion people, places, and things -- to proactively alert account teams with breaking news, company facts and competitive insights about a prospect or company.
• Mining through Microsoft Graph API data -- which includes its flagship Office 365 product -- to scan all references or previous interactions with any contact across backlogged files, emails, notes and meetings to ensure sellers have the most updated and necessary customer conversation history.
• Incorporating LinkedIn natively into the conversation so users can rely on their digital assistant to look up contacts, make connections, and provide job and title changes without ever having to switch apps.
• Activating the first enterprise sales skill for Cortana so that sellers can have a conversation about customers, opportunities, budgets and forecasts on any Cortana device, starting with Windows 10, iOS, Android, and the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker.
• Turning Teams into strategic deal meeting rooms since sellers and managers can collaborate in a secure environment aggregated with all the necessary data they need.
• Unifying Dynamics 365 with their other tools and company resources, creating an end-to-end sales experience that offers assistance by scoring and tracking sentiment, proactively monitoring for news that may affect an opportunity, guiding sellers on the best action to take, and bolstering engagement by the seller and manager so organizations maximize ROI on CRM and their other sales tool investments.

Support Quotes:

• "Our vision is to redefine human-computer interaction by making business software more natural and easier to use," said Chuck Ganapathi, founder and CEO of Tact. "With its world-class library of AI resources and extensive reach into global businesses, there is no stronger partner than Microsoft in our efforts to transform and enrich the lives of sellers worldwide."
• "We are at an inflection point for artificial intelligence in the technology industry, and Tact has demonstrated the ability to build an AI service that delivers tangible value to global sales and customer experience organizations," said Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president, AI Business, at Microsoft. "We partnered with Tact because of their disciplined and mature use of natural language understanding and AI, and by pairing Tact with Microsoft's unmatched access to business data we're confident in our ability to spearhead a better, more natural way for sellers to be productive in their work."

About Tact
Led by former Salesforce and Siebel executive Chuck Ganapathi, Tact is on a mission to make enterprise software more human-friendly. Tact's device-native, conversational platform is used by Fortune 500 companies to transform the daily sales experience in the field and maximize the value of their CRM investment. Based in Redwood City, Calif., Tact is a privately-held company, backed by Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Microsoft. For more information, visit https://tact.ai

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