Technical teams — technicians, service engineers, field ops managers — and their end customers
Office & knowledge workers
General users & developers
IT service desks & enterprise ops
Integration hub — stack-agnostic; acts as glue across ERPs, CMMS, DMS, IoT and field tools
Customer-facingInternalStack-agnostic
Locked to M365 stack — internal use only
Vendor lock-inInternal only
Standalone point solution — custom dev needed for any external deployment
Custom dev required
Strong ITSM platform but heavy, complex, and slow to customize for field service
Complex deploymentITSM-focused
Technical documentation
Unique PDFs, manuals, SOPs, images, spreadsheets, videos
Indexes entire documentation bases — thousands of manuals, datasheets & procedures — and retrieves the right answer fast, every time
ReliableFast retrievalSource-citedNo hallucination
SharePoint search available but AI answers are not grounded in docs
Hallucination riskNo citations
File uploads possible but limited context window; not designed for large doc bases
Hallucination risk at scaleContext limits
Knowledge base exists but designed for IT articles, not OEM manuals or schematics
IT-focused KBNo industrial indexing
Technical doc specialization
Built for OEM manuals, schematics, service procedures & field reports — understands industrial document structure
Generic LLM — no understanding of P&IDs or service manuals
Generic LLM
Custom GPTs possible but require significant manual setup
Generic LLM
Now Assist can summarize tickets but has no understanding of technical documentation
Ticket-focused
Knowledge capture & update
Interviews, service reports, live documentation
Interview staff, generate service reports, and keep documentation up to date with live conversations — via voice or chat
Voice captureChat captureAuto-update KB
AI voice agent
Dedicated phone line backed by AI
Dedicated phone number backed by an AI agent — technicians call to troubleshoot issues, file reports, and query the knowledge base hands-free
Phone numberTroubleshootingReportingKB queries
Basic voice via Teams; not designed for field use or technical workflows
Voice mode available; general purpose — not adapted to industrial reporting
Virtual Agent handles chat; no voice interface for field operations
Connected workflows
ERP, CRM, accounting — automated actions
Connects directly to Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, e-conomic and more — auto-create invoices after a job, draft customer responses, trigger follow-up actions
DynamicsZohoe-conomicAuto-invoicing
Office automation (emails, docs, meetings); no industrial workflow templates
Office only
Requires custom dev for any specific workflow
Custom dev required
Strong ITSM workflow engine; designed for IT ops, not field service operations
IT ops focusAdd-on pricing
SAP · Microsoft 365 · Dynamics · Zoho · e-conomic · CMMS platforms · custom ERP/DMS — built to connect, not replace
Deep M365 & Azure; limited outside Microsoft ecosystem
Vendor lock-in
Wide API; no pre-built industrial ERP connectors
IntegrationHub with SAP & ERP connectors; enterprise pricing for each
Add-on pricing
RFP / RFQ automation
Unique Drafting and answering tenders
Ingests RFP/RFQ documents, drafts answers grounded in your knowledge base, and exports ready-to-submit responses
Doc-groundedAuto-draft
Generic doc drafting in Word; no tender-specific workflow or doc grounding
Manual setup
Free-form drafting; no document-grounded structured RFP responses
No grounding
Customer portal
Unique Branded self-serve AI for end customers
Deploy a branded customer-facing AI portal scoped to curated documents — customers get self-serve support without accessing internal knowledge
White-labelScoped accessBranded subdomain
Not available — internal employee tool only
Possible via API — requires significant custom dev; no doc scoping or access control
Customer Service Management portal exists but scoped to tickets, not technical product docs
Time-to-first-value
From contract to live in production
< 6 weeks — guided onboarding, doc ingestion, and first workflows live in under two months
< 6 weeks
Weeks for office productivity; months to build any industrial-grade workflow
Months
Days for basic use; weeks-to-months for custom industrial GPTs
Weeks–months
Quarters — enterprise rollout cycles, professional services required
Quarters
Data used to train public models
Never — zero training on customer data, guaranteed
Varies by tier — risk on lower tiers; enterprise opt-out required
Tier-dependent
Default tiers train on conversations; Enterprise opt-out required
Training risk
Enterprise policy — no training on customer data; Now Assist uses partner LLMs
Low — EU-hosted SaaS by default; on-premise license available for full data isolation
Microsoft cloud; US jurisdiction by default
US jurisdiction
Proprietary docs exposed to US-based servers without Enterprise
High risk
Enterprise-hosted; data residency options exist but US-default
US-default
Data residency & deployment
EU-hosted by default · Or on-premise license available · GDPR-native
EUOn-premise optionGDPR-native
EU residency available; no on-premise option
US-hosted by default; no EU residency on standard plans
EU hosting available; no on-premise or air-gapped option