Videos
How AI Is Transforming Business Applications
Insights
- AI is evolving from a back-office tool into the core engine of enterprise transformation.
- Copilots assist everyday work while agents introduce new capacity through asynchronous, specialized tasks.
- Tight integration across Microsoft 365, CRM, and Teams accelerates adoption and real business impact.
Jared Spataro of Microsoft and Shishank Gupta of Infosys explore how AI is being integrated directly into business applications, from Copilot-powered assistance to agentic AI that can take on complex, time-intensive work. Drawing on real client examples, they discuss how organizations are improving sales conversion, automating approvals, and scaling adoption by focusing on high-impact use cases and seamless integration across the Microsoft ecosystem.
Christine Calhoun:
AI is no longer just a back-office tool.
It's becoming the core engine driving business transformation from automating financial operations to reimagining sales services and HR, AI is reshaping how enterprises run and compete.
Today we'll explore how Microsoft and Infosys are bringing Agentic AI into business applications and what that means for organizations everywhere.
Joining me are two leaders at the center of this change. Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer for AI at Work at Microsoft, and Shishank Gupta, Senior Vice President and Head of the Digital Workplace Ecosystem, and Microsoft Practice at Infosys. I'm Christine Calhoun, studio lead with the Infosys Knowledge Institute. Welcome to you both.
Jared Spataro:
Thank you, great to be here.
Shishank Gupta:
Hello, Christine.
Christine Calhoun:
So first question, how is AI being integrated into Microsoft's business applications and what are some of the most exciting innovations you're seeing today? Jared, let's start with you.
Jared Spataro:
Well, we kind of have two big patterns. The first is Copilot, where we are designing and creating a digital assistant that can help you get your work done. Think of Copilot as being there with you while you're processing your emails and Outlook, helping you to write better or even consume information in Word, helping you to create financial models faster in Excel. So wherever you go, Copilot is meant to be there within the Microsoft 365 portfolio products to help you out. But that's only part one. Part two has to do with actually calling on AI agents to help you get specialized work done. So agents can help you, for instance, do asynchronous research where you send an agent off and give it a set of tasks to research for you, and it will come and do that work for you and then report back when it's done. Agents can also help you with financial analysis that might take hours or even days. So you can think of agents as a way of bringing additional resources onto your team to help you get tasks done that you normally would have called on people to do. Both those patterns are very valuable. When you put them together, you kind of get the new world of work.
Christine Calhoun:
Shishank what are your thoughts on that?
Shishank Gupta:
I think Jared said it right, I think the world is towards finding agents to ease the task and what we do in business. And I think the impact of AI on business is going to be profound because if you can leverage AI in a manner where you can drive business benefits, I think it's extremely useful. And I'll give an example of what we did for one of our clients and we used an out of the box Copilot, this is the same Copilot that we used and our client was already on Microsoft CRM and we worked with the client to identify the right use cases and we worked with the business teams who were the actual users of the CRM system to say, how can we help improve your lead conversion through the out of the box capabilities that the sales Copilot had to provide? So we identified the right use cases, we identified the right stakeholders and business users, and we leveraged that in terms of helping improve. And the good part was with Microsoft ecosystem, the integration of the O365, the Teams, the CRM and obviously the Copilot now was able to seamlessly help the agents on the human agents on the client side, really improve their leads to sales conversion. We started off with about 60 users to begin with and over a period of one year because we said we chose the right use cases and we also had these users who were also the champions of AI within the organization.
We could scale up the adoption of sales Copilot to 6,000 users and that's a huge change. And it only happened because people saw the value and they were able to see the outcomes in terms of the greater closure of the leads to the sales opportunity. So I do think agents are here for real and the Microsoft ecosystem that has today is able to provide that. The other example that I would say is for another of our clients who had a use case again built on a Microsoft technology on approvals for legal and trade approvals. They needed assistance because they had to go through a series of contracts, very manual process, had to get the right signatory workflow of making sure that the right signatures are on each document, each page, depending on what kind of document that was. They were built an agentic agent framework using Power Apps and the Copilot Studio. And we were able to significantly automate that process. Again, more accurate now, less rejections, much faster ease of work for our for our customers. So clearly I think the Microsoft ecosystem with business apps out of the box Copilots is really helping our clients derive the value.
