The new Business Card Scanner in Dynamics 365 CRM

A brand-new function called Business Card Scanner is now available to everybody via the mobile app, following the roll-out of Microsoft Dynamics 365 October Wave 2.

The Business Card Scanner utilizes the new AI Builder functionality and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to ‘read’ business cards and pre-populate forms.

Out of the box, it is available on the Lead & Contact entities. However, you can add the control into other forms, as there would not typically be enough information on a business card to make this worthwhile.

So, how do you access it?

Firstly, open the Dynamics app on your phone or tablet. Navigate to the quick create menu, by clicking the three dots in the bottom right corner and pick either Lead or Contact.

Then click on ‘Scan Business Card’ and take a picture of the business card in portrait mode. This will read the card and populate the form for you.

This uses the new AI builder, which allows you to take a picture of a business card and it will read the information on there to determine what the content of the form fields should be.

This is one of the default functions that come with AI Builder.

Think this sounds cool? That’s because it is!

This is the beginning of the roll-out of the AI builder to the general public, with the low code AI Builder bringing enterprise capability to smaller organizations, which could save you a lot of time inputting data.

As one of the first steps to introducing AI capabilities to the Dynamics 365 platform, it’s quite a monumental one.

As more AI functionality is created, this could be just the tip of the iceberg for what the platform will eventually be able to do and I for one, am looking forward to seeing where Microsoft will take us with it.

N.B. You can also upload a picture from your PC into the quick create forms on the web client to access this feature if you do not have access on your phone.