June 4 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) on Tuesday said it

will introduce new artificial intelligence tools for customer

service call centers.

Microsoft ( MSFT ), which has backed ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is

taking AI technology into a number of fields of the business

world with what it calls Copilot technology, which is capable of

summarizing emails and crafting PowerPoint slides as part of the

company's Office software package.

But by taking Copilot to call centers, Microsoft ( MSFT ) will be

putting its technology into a field where it is not the dominant

player, hoping to gain ground against rivals such as

Salesforce.com and Zoom.

For customer support tasks, the new AI tool will be able to

scour a company's help manuals and materials to train chatbots

with better answers to questions that customers might ask in a

chat window. Many of those tasks are already automated, and

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) hope is to make them better, said Jeff Comstock,

corporate vice president of Dynamics 365 Customer Service at

Microsoft ( MSFT ).

But the real benefit is expected to be to human customer

service agents fielding phone calls. Those agents are often

sitting at a computer with multiple applications open at once -

many of them outdated and slow - while trying to find the

information to help the customer.

Comstock said the Microsoft ( MSFT ) tools will aim to take in all of

that information so that customer service agents can navigate

the apps they need with natural language to get answers faster

and easier.

"The service space is, unfortunately, just rife with toil

and drudgery. There's tons of tools, and they have to use lots

of processes just to do the most basic sort of tasks. It's a

brutal experience," Comstock said. "And so, our goal is to help

them in the flow of work to reduce that toil and drudgery."

Microsoft ( MSFT ) said the new contact center software will become

available on July 1.