Not every scheduling problem needs the same approach. Sometimes a dispatcher needs to adjust a few technicians’ schedules after a cancellation or an urgent request. Sometimes an entire territory needs planning. And when the team has refined a scheduling approach that consistently produces useful results, it just needs to be run on a set recurrence schedule instead of relying on someone to start it each day.

The latest preview capabilities in Scheduling Operations Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service support all three. In this October update, we’re highlighting how to use multi-resource optimization, batch scheduling plans, and recurring optimization together—and where to start.

Schedule manually, and get assistance when plans change

If your dispatchers mainly build schedules manually, interactive optimizations fit into the way they already work. You don’t need to automate the whole operation to benefit from optimization.

Imagine it’s late morning. One technician is running behind, another has a cancellation, and an urgent job has arrived nearby. Rather than rearranging bookings across several schedules by hand, the dispatcher can select up to five resources and ask the agent to suggest a better arrangement. Interactive optimizations are best used for resources working in the same geographical area, or those who take on similar work.

Choose the affected resources, a relevant view of open requirements, and a scheduling goal. Based on those selections, Scheduling Operations Agent generates a suggested schedule for the dispatcher to review before applying changes.

This remains an on-demand tool: the dispatcher decides when help is needed, reviews the suggestion, and stays in control of the schedule.

Plan across a team or territory, and learn what works

When the question becomes “How should we schedule tomorrow’s work across this team?”, batch optimization in Scheduling Operations Agent is a better fit.

A batch scheduling run can consider a larger group of resources and list of requirements, for example, a territory’s technicians and unscheduled backlog. Instead of selecting everything again for each run, you save the configuration in a scheduling plan.

We recommend starting with on-demand batch runs while you configure and refine the scheduling plan. This gives you time to validate the plan before automating optimizations with a recurrence pattern and applying results automatically.

Define the work you want to optimize

Start with a scope: the resources, open requirements, and existing bookings you want the agent to consider.

For a regional service operation, that might mean one territory’s technicians, its outstanding requirements, and the bookings you’re comfortable allowing Scheduling Operations Agent to change. You can build queries from existing views or define your own filters.

Define your scheduling priorities

Next, select or create a scheduling goal.

Different operations prioritize different scheduling objectives. One team might give the most weight to Schedule High Priority Requirements First to complete urgent work. Another might favor Maximize Overall Resource Utilization and Minimize Travel Time. An operation with established customer commitments might place more emphasis on Prefer Existing Bookings.

Custom goals let you weight these objectives and configure constraints such as matching skills, territories, and time windows.

Start with a small number of relevant objectives. Avoid making one objective overwhelmingly dominant unless that trade-off is intentional. Make incremental changes and compare the results so you can understand how each adjustment affects the schedule.

You’ll typically want to keep Maximize Overall Resource Utilization or Minimize Travel Time as your lowest ranked objectives. If you set these objectives higher than the others, they can force the others to not have any effect–for example, if minimizing travel time is weighted higher than scheduling high-priority work, lower priority work with less travel time will be scheduled before higher priority work.

Create and refine your scheduling plan

A scheduling plan combines the scope and goal with the time period that you want to optimize and the way results are applied.

Begin with Review before apply. Run the plan, inspect the suggested schedule and routes, and look at any requirements that remain unscheduled.

Ask practical questions: Is the right work being scheduled? Is travel reasonable? Are important appointments staying in place? Are requirements being excluded because of missing skills, unsuitable time windows, or incorrect data?

Not every unexpected result calls for different weights. Resource calendars, locations, requirement durations, priorities, and booking controls all affect the outcome. Refine those inputs alongside the goal, then gradually expand the scope once the results meet your expectations.

Automate your scheduling plans with recurrence

When you’ve found a configuration that produces useful results consistently, recurrence in Scheduling Operations Agent lets you run that plan automatically.

You can keep Review before apply, with runs starting automatically but a dispatcher approving the result. Or choose Apply automatically when you’re ready for the plan to apply its changes without that manual step.

These are separate decisions: automating when a plan runs doesn’t require automating approval of its results.

Choose the right cadence for recurring optimization

A useful starting point is broader planning overnight, with more targeted adjustments during the day. Not every operation needs both.

These are starting patterns to evaluate, not product defaults. A more frequent run is useful only if enough has changed to justify another optimization.

Keep critical bookings stable during optimization

For intraday optimization, consider starting the optimization window an hour or two ahead, rather than repeatedly rearranging imminent appointments. Use Do not move and booking-level restrictions to protect commitments that must remain fixed. The Prefer Existing Bookings objective can reduce unnecessary movement, but it’s a preference, not a substitute for a hard restriction.

Pay attention to the distinction between run time and optimization time range. A plan might run at 2:00 AM. to optimize work beginning at 8:00 AM. If its results require review, the dispatcher must apply them before that optimization window starts; review results expire at the start of the window or after 72 hours, whichever comes first.

Leave enough time for runs to finish, and stagger plans that affect the same resources or bookings. One plan cannot start another request while its previous request is still solving or applying.

Finally, consider consumption as well as scheduling quality. The minimum recurrence interval is 30 minutes, but that’s a supported limit, not a recommendation to reoptimize every team twice an hour. Start less frequently and increase the cadence when the operational benefit warrants it.

What Scheduling Operations Agent supports today

During public preview, Scheduling Operations Agent for Dynamics 365 Field Service supports interactive optimization for up to five resources, 120 combined bookings and open requirements, and an optimization window of up to 72 hours. Batch optimization supports up to 50 resources, 4,000 combined bookings and open requirements, and a window of up to 14 days.

Capacity affects the interactive resource count, and additional per-resource limits apply. Current exclusions include equipment, pool, and facility resources; requirement groups; and multiday requirements associated with requirement-detail records. A planning window spanning several days does not mean that multiday requirements are supported.

See the current limits and supported scenarios for the Scheduling Operations Agent when choosing your pilot scope. Recurrence is time-based; it doesn’t continuously monitor and react to scheduling events.

Get started with Scheduling Operations Agent

Use interactive optimization to help a dispatcher resolve a focused disruption. Use an on-demand batch plan to work through a larger scheduling problem and refine the outcome. And finally, put the proven configuration on a recurrence. Start with the approach that fits your scheduling needs today, then build from there as you refine what works for your operation.

Explore the Scheduling Operations Agent in Dynamics 365 Field Service and guidance for tuning optimization results.

Scheduling Operations Agent remains in public preview and availability varies with regional rollout.

The post From quick schedule fixes to automated planning with Scheduling Operations Agent appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

A late shipment, a shift in demand, or a jump in costs means procurement, production, and finance all have to respond at once. You need business applications designed to help maintain transaction accuracy, auditability, and control. And with your people turning to intelligent tools to work faster, you need governance that keeps every action grounded in the data, policies, and controls your business runs on.

Managing that complexity is what Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built for, and Microsoft has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Operational ERP 2026 Vendor Assessment.¹ The assessment evaluates vendors on both their current capabilities and how well their strategies align with what customers will need over the next three to five years.

Microsoft was named a Leader by IDC MarketScape

IDC observes that “Dynamics 365 is differentiated by the wider Microsoft platform,” and that Microsoft’s agentic ERP vision “is built on an open, MCP-first architecture that connects AI agents directly to business systems, data, and processes.” The report identifies three strengths:

• Interoperability across the Microsoft platform. A key differentiator for Dynamics 365 is its native connection to Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Microsoft Azure, Dataverse, and Microsoft Copilot. For organizations already standardized on Microsoft, this brings ERP into the tools people already use and provides a single foundation for security, identity, compliance, and analytics, which reduces integration friction.
• Agentic AI built on the Microsoft AI stack. Microsoft’s agentic ERP vision is built on an open, MCP-first architecture that connects AI agents to business systems, data, and processes. The Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server provides standardized, governed access to ERP capabilities and business context. Through Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Cowork, Work IQ, and AI agents, customers can enable agentic scenarios across finance, supply chain, and manufacturing workflows.
• Cloud-current delivery with flexible, composable licensing. Dynamics 365 delivers frequent automatic updates that keep customers current, which references value for staying on the latest release without falling out of date, alongside fast deployments where more than a third of customers go live in under six months. 

The future of ERP is agentic

Today, too much of running a business still means working around software: switching between applications, rebuilding context, and translating decisions into the steps each system expects. A more modern approach makes it possible to organize software around the work instead. As Satya Nadella wrote in The Infinite SaaS Factory:

The lesson is that more agents don’t make systems of record less important. They make trusted places to maintain information, coordinate changes, and manage state even more important. We see a similar pattern in sales, customer service, finance, and ops.

—Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft

Copilot provides the new front end for work, while Dynamics 365 provides the governed foundation that makes ERP business logic and context available to agents.

Bringing ERP into the flow of work

Finance and operations leaders make decisions in meetings, conversations, documents, and spreadsheets, not only inside ERP applications. Microsoft 365 Copilot can bring financial and operational context and actions into those places, helping people work in natural language, reason over enterprise data, and identify risks without switching applications. Work IQ can connect business data from Dynamics 365 with the organizational context of Microsoft 365, so the information that surfaces can help to reflect how the business actually works.

For example, depending on configuration and data connects, a finance leader can explore how changing customer payment patterns affect cash flow while preparing for an executive review. An operations leader can see how a supply constraint affects production priorities and customer commitments without first assembling information from multiple teams.

Bringing agents into business processes

Beyond individual productivity, agents can transform how work moves across the organization. Take that late shipment: a sourcing change may protect production but raise costs, and a revised schedule may preserve capacity but put customer commitments at risk. Decisions take coordination across people, applications, and processes, and that coordination is often what slows the business down.

Dynamics 365 delivers agents for quick deployment including the Procurement Agent, Account Reconciliation Agent, Time Entry Agent, Expense Agent, and the Activity Approvals Agent (all in production-ready preview). These agents can draw on business and productivity data and bring people in when judgment or approval is needed. Using the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server, Dynamics 365 ERP apps Cowork plugin, and tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio, organizations can also build agents and business skills tailored to their own workflows, which can help extend ERP intelligence across teams, applications, and business processes.

Reinventing the system of record for an agentic world

As agents evolve to take on more responsibility, the ERP foundation matters more, not less. Dynamics 365 ERP apps are your systems of record that can help you provide your policies, controls, and governance to agentic workflows. Their data, business logic, and security can help provide Copilot and agents the context to reason over the work and operate in accordance to your business frameworks and processes. Intelligence is applied where intelligence adds value, with ERP logic helping to manage execution. Through MCP, Power Platform, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure, organizations can extend that foundation to fit how their business runs, while staying connected to the systems of record they already depend on.

Let’s get started

The future we’re building with Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings ERP into the flow of work and agents into business processes, on a financial and operational foundation. Agentic ERP isn’t about making tasks faster, it’s about making the business faster. The next era of ERP will be defined by how effectively organizations connect people, agents, and enterprise systems to turn intelligence into action and drive business growth.

• Read the report: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Operational ERP 2026 Vendor Assessment excerpt.
• Explore Dynamics 365: Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
• See the broader vision: The Infinite SaaS Factory by Satya Nadella and Bringing CRM into the flow of work and agents into business process by Jeff Teper.

¹ IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Operational ERP 2026 Vendor Assessment, September 2026, IDC Doc #US54134726.

The post Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for AI-Enabled Operational ERP appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The traditional boundaries of business applications are disappearing. For decades, people went to their customer relationship management (CRM) to find customer context, take action, and move work forward. AI is inverting that model.

This shift creates two complementary opportunities: greater individual productivity and organization-wide process transformation. Customer context, expertise, and actions can now come directly into Copilot and Microsoft Teams, helping sales and service reps get work done where they already work. At the same time, autonomous agents can move defined processes across teams and systems, bringing people in when judgment, approval, or specialized input is needed.

Today, we’re announcing agentic innovations that advance both—helping sales and service teams work more effectively and enabling organizations to reimagine the processes that shape customer experiences.

Bringing CRM into the flow of work
Sales and service reps need customer context and the ability to act in the moment—whether preparing for a customer conversation, advancing a deal, or resolving an issue. With new Copilot skills and Dynamics 365 CRM in Teams, we’re delivering on the promise of agentic, headless CRM: keeping CRM as the trusted foundation for customer data and business processes while bringing expertise, insights, and actions into the places people already work.

Building on the new Copilot experience introduced on September 25, we’re extending Cowork, Autopilot, and Code with 30 new pre-built skills across Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Now sellers can surface at-risk deals, develop account engagement plans, and propose CRM record updates for review. Service reps can understand a customer’s case history, research an answer to a customer question, and draft a response—all within the Copilot experience. And marketers can use customer insights to tailor outreach, draft and review on-brand emails, and launch customer journeys with consent and readiness checks built in.

These skills are generally available in Cowork, with Autopilot in private preview and Code available through the Frontier Program. Custom agents can also use these skills to support enterprise-built workflows. Powered by Dynamics 365 model context protocol (MCP) servers and Microsoft’s trusted data foundation, they bring customer context and actions directly into the AI experiences where work happens.

With the new Dynamics 365 CRM in the flow of Teams experience, organizations can bring customer context spanning both sales and service directly into Teams conversations. Once a Teams channel is connected to a customer account, agents can deliver real-time updates such as pre-meeting briefs, case notifications, and account developments before engaging with a customer.

Whether resolving a service issue, collaborating on a customer account, or sharing updates across teams, employees can work from a shared view of the customer. The result is that CRM becomes a natural part of the workflow rather than a separate destination.

Dynamics 365 CRM in the flow of Teams experience is now available in public preview.

Also, Work IQ in Teams combines business intelligence from Dynamics 365 with workplace intelligence from Microsoft 365 in the collaboration hub where organizations around the world meet, connect, and make decisions. The result is simple: when employees are working in Teams, the customer context, insights, and actions they need from CRM can show up there too.

At BNY, our commercial teams live in Microsoft Teams. Integrating Microsoft Copilot, Dynamics 365, and our internal Eliza AI platform into Teams gives us a unified view of customer relationships across sales and service, directly where collaboration happens. By surfacing account insights, service updates, and important client developments in real-time, our teams can stay aligned, make informed decisions, and take action without switching applications. This connected experience helps our organization work from shared customer context, improve productivity, and stay focused on delivering greater value to clients.

Christian Lewis, Managing Director, Commercial Hub Co-Lead, BNY

Reimagining business processes with agents
Beyond improving individual productivity, autonomous agents can transform how work gets done across an organization by carrying defined business processes forward across teams and systems, bringing people in when judgment, approval, or expertise is needed. Service Agent and Sales Development Agent demonstrate this shift, taking on work autonomously while organizations manage and govern them through Agent 365.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Service Agent has new autonomous capabilities that extend customer service beyond the traditional support team. As customer care becomes a shared responsibility across the organization, Service Agent in Microsoft 365 now equips customer success managers, account teams, subject matter experts, and other employees with the context, knowledge, and actions they need to help customers directly in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

For example, a customer emails an account manager about an unresolved billing issue. Service Agent understands the request, retrieves the relevant organizational knowledge, and drafts a response for review and approval. If the issue requires formal tracking, then it automatically creates a case in your CRM, including Dynamics 365, and shares the case link. Outside business hours, it resolves what it can and escalates to a specialist when needed, while managers retain visibility into actions and outcomes.

We are extending the early experience of Service Agent in Microsoft 365 to a select group of Frontier customers in private preview.

“At Grupo Águia Branca, Service Agent in Microsoft 365 is helping us reduce collaboration friction by creating shared context across teams, handling follow-ups, and routing questions to the right experts. We’re already receiving requests to extend it to other customer-facing teams, reinforcing its broad applicability across the organization.”

Thiago do Couto, Head of Data and Artificial Intelligence, Grupo Águia Branca

Following our announcement in 2025, Sales Development Agent brings autonomous AI to one of the most important challenges in sales: driving revenue by building and qualifying pipeline at scale.

Acting as a teammate, Sales Development Agent can help scale your team by researching prospects, personalizing outreach, managing follow-up conversations, and advancing qualified opportunities before handing them to sellers at the right moment. Sales Development Agent is managed in Teams, sends emails with its own Exchange account, and connects to leading CRM platforms. This flexibility helps teams to quickly scale pipeline generation and qualification and can expand their selling capacity without increasing headcount.

For a seller, that means starting the day with qualified opportunities already prioritized and the research and engagement history needed to take the next best action. Sales Development Agent continues nurturing earlier-stage prospects in the background, then hands them off when buying signals indicate they are ready for a human conversation. The result is less time spent on manual prospecting and follow-up, more selling capacity, and a stronger pipeline for sellers to convert.

Sales Development Agent is available in public preview and will start consuming Copilot credits on November 16, 2026.

In just three weeks from a limited-scale launch, Sales Development Agent has already unlocked new opportunities, driving meetings with 10+ customers we wouldn’t have otherwise reached. We’re excited to broaden its application across products and customer segments as we continue to scale its potential.

Prabhath Yeluri, Senior Manager, Sales Strategy, Adobe

Accelerate the move from legacy CRM to agentic CRM
Since entering public preview last month, Dynamics 365 Activate (public preview) has generated strong interest from customers and partners. At its core, Dynamics 365 Activate tackles one of the biggest barriers to moving from legacy systems to agentic business applications: the time and complexity of migration. Using AI, it conducts customer-authorized analysis of their current CRM environment and recommends a clearer, lower-risk path to Dynamics 365, helping organizations plan faster and modernize their workflows with confidence.

Dynamics 365 Activate’s discovery capabilities helped accelerate our migration assessment by providing greater visibility into our Salesforce landscape and key migration considerations. The insights enabled our teams to make more informed planning decisions and establish a stronger foundation for the Dynamics 365 transformation journey.

Sathish Arumugam, Manager, Software Development and Engineering, Comcast
Let’s get started
With Dynamics 365, organizations can bring trusted customer context and action into the experiences where people and agents already work, extend proven sales and service expertise through autonomous agents and reusable skills, and accelerate the move to an agentic CRM foundation. Explore the following resources to get started:

Explore Dynamics 365: Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Get started with Dynamics 365 Activate: Join the public preview of Dynamics 365 Activate or explore the documentation.
Learn more: Sales Development Agent, Channel Agent for Microsoft Teams, and how to use it in Dynamics 365 CRM.
Get early access to the latest Frontier AI releases: Enroll in the Frontier program to explore the newest AI innovations.

The post Bringing CRM into the flow of work and agents into business process for sales and service teams appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Customer work spans applications, but the intelligence that powers it should move with the business—not remain locked inside customer relationship management (CRM).

Today, we’re advancing that vision with 30 new pre-built CRM skills for Copilot Cowork, now generally available. Autopilot is in private preview, and Code is available through the Frontier program. Across supported experiences, the skills work with more than 180 generally available tools across Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to bring customer context and actions into AI experiences.

Together, these capabilities help AI carry out CRM workflows so teams can deliver better customer experiences faster. Organizations can also extend the skills into custom agents and AI harnesses that support the workflows their teams already use.

This extends Dynamics 365 beyond CRM applications by bringing sales, service, and marketing expertise into Cowork, Code, and Autopilot. Cowork helps teams address immediate customer needs and prepare complete deliverables; Code supports reusable solutions; and Autopilot delegates recurring work. Dynamics 365 remains the system of action for customer data and business processes, while teams gain ready-to-use expertise where they work.

Bring CRM context and expertise into everyday work

Instead of returning to CRM for every task, sellers, service representatives, and marketers can use Dynamics 365 context within supported AI experiences.

Sellers can use skills to build competitive strategies, investigate deal risks, prepare for reviews with leadership or customers, and turn meeting outcomes into proposed CRM records and next actions. Service representatives can review account-specific case history, turn correspondence into structured case proposals, research relevant answers, and prepare customer responses. Marketers can prepare consent-aware outreach or create brand-compliant content directly in the flow of work.

For IT organizations, the opportunity is to make existing CRM capabilities available where teams work, reducing the need to build each sales, service, and marketing workflows from scratch.

Extend Dynamics 365 intelligence across AI experiences

Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights remain the systems of action for customer data and AI-enriched business processes. Model context protocol (MCP) server tools and skills make that context and those capabilities available in supported AI experiences, while Dynamics 365 remains the system of action. This is a core principle of Agentic CRM from Dynamics 365: bring CRM intelligence into the flow of work while preserving the underlying data, processes, and controls.

Here’s how they work together:

• Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights provide the customer data and business logic that ground agentic workflows.
• MCP tools make that context and business actions available to AI experiences.
• Skills provide reusable, task-specific guidance for using those tools to complete sales, service and marketing tasks.

Together, these layers create a reusable approach for extending Dynamics 365 capabilities into supported AI experiences and custom agents, rather than rebuilding them for each new interface.

Turn CRM tools into job-specific expertise

MCP tools give AI applications a standardized way to access CRM context and approved business actions. They package existing business logic into reusable building blocks that AI experiences can combine to support sales, service, and marketing workflows.

Skills add task-specific guidance to MCP tools: which evidence to consider, how to handle uncertainty, and what a useful output should contain. Retrieving an opportunity record, for example, is a tool action; assessing why a deal has stalled requires a skill that interprets the available context and structures a supported recommendation.

This distinction matters when organizations bring CRM-specific capabilities into their AI experiences or extend the capabilities into custom agents. Organizations can reuse the sales and service foundation rather than designing every procedure from scratch.

Combine skills to support complete customer workflows

Skills can support related steps in a business process, each contributing to a distinct analysis, recommendation, or proposed action. Teams can combine skills into complete workflows.

Help sellers analyze and respond to at-risk deals with Sales skills:

• Pipeline prioritizer flags opportunities that warrant attention.
• Deal rescue helps sellers investigate a stalled or at-risk opportunity.
• Customer engagement strategy recommends a 30-day account plan.

Resolve customer issues more efficiently with service skills:

• Case triage surfaces urgent issues.
• Answer research finds solutions from verified knowledge and similar cases.
• Draft customer reply prepares a response grounded in customer data.
• Customer brief and value metrics brings unified customer context and KPIs into either motion.

Skills provide focused sales, service, and marketing expertise; Cowork, Code, and Autopilot determine how teams put that expertise to work. With Dynamics 365 Customer Experience MCP tools and skills available across these experiences, teams can address an immediate CRM need, build a reusable solution, or delegate recurring work.

• Cowork: move customer work toward a decision. For a competitive deal, a seller can combine competitive strategy to address customer requirements and objections, business case composer to develop the investment case, and deal desk to prepare product and pricing configurations. In service, answer research and draft customer reply can help investigate applicable guidance and prepare a grounded response for review.
• Code: build reusable solutions around customer decisions. Teams can use skills to shape interactive applications around the questions and evidence that matter to the business. For example, the Sales Research Agent skill can guide pipeline and forecast analysis, while case triage and case preparation brief can inform a service workspace showing which cases need attention and why.
• Autopilot: explore recurring workflows in private preview. Sellers, service representatives, and marketers can use Dynamics 365 skills in Autopilot to support tasks such as reviewing deal changes, assessing documented case interactions, and identifying reusable guidance from verified resolutions. Recurring automation and background notifications remain subject to private-preview limitations for Autopilot.

Keep people in control of business actions

People remain in control of business actions. These examples do not imply automatic handoffs between experiences, identical functionality in every experience, or permission to send communications or change CRM records without applicable authorization. Across all experiences, teams should be able to distinguish clearly between what AI recommends, what a user approves, and what it actually changes.

The skill definitions distinguish between analysis, recommendations, proposed changes, and completed actions. For example, reconcile my opportunity can identify differences between customer interactions and the opportunity record and propose field-level updates. Draft customer reply prepares a response for review. Stage advance readiness assesses evidence against the organization’s criteria; a readiness assessment is not itself a stage change.

For IT teams, these distinctions create a practical validation test: users should understand the proposed action; execution should follow applicable authorization and review requirements; and the reported result should reflect what actually happened. A proposed update should not appear as a saved change, and a draft should not appear as a sent message. For solutions built in Code and recurring work delegated to Autopilot, IT teams should also confirm which actions are authorized, when review is required, and how unsuccessful or unconfirmed actions are reported.

Get started with skills using your existing access and controls

Organizations can enable Sales, Customer Service, or Customer Insights skills from the customization area of the desired Copilot experience, connect the appropriate accounts, and select a Dynamics 365 environment when prompted. These ready-to-use skills and CRM tools support common sales and service tasks without requiring teams to build every workflow from scratch.

The plugins respect applicable Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 permissions. Availability and use remain subject to administrator configuration, user or tenant consent, licensing, and organizational policies. Users can turn plugins off in Customize, and each plugin’s shared package makes its capabilities available across supported Copilot experiences.

Explore the broader agentic CRM vision

Read Jeff Teper’s new blog “Bringing CRM into the flow of work and agents into business processes,” for the full view of how Dynamics 365 brings customer context, expertise, and actions into Copilot and Microsoft Teams—and how autonomous agents move sales and service processes forward.

The post Bring Microsoft Dynamics 365 into the flow of work with 30 new CRM skills appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Real-time visibility is critical for customer experience leadership to identify issues early, make informed decisions, and act with confidence. In a June 2026 Dynamics 365 blog, Microsoft shared our agentic vision for the contact center, where purpose-built agents work together to help each contact center persona achieve their goals.

Building on that vision, we recently refreshed the supervisor experience for the modern contact center. The new workspace will bring key supervisor capabilities together in one place, spanning real-time streaming analytics, monitoring, diagnostics, and operations, helping supervisors move from insight to action.

And this is just the beginning. We’re extending the same persona-first approach to deliver purpose-built experiences for contact center representatives and administrators, creating a more connected and intelligent experience across the contact center.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is introducing new real-time streaming experiences in production ready public preview for supervisors, including enhanced wallboards and interactive analytics that give supervisors live visibility into contact center performance and help them quickly identify and respond to issues.¹

Why contact center supervisors need real-time operational visibility

Historical analytics remain essential for understanding trends, evaluating performance, and planning for what comes next. But supervisors also need a live view of what is happening now so they can respond as conditions change. A contact center supervisor’s day often runs on three priorities: monitor what is happening across queues and representatives, detect the moments that need attention, and act before something causes severe end customer impact.

• Monitor the floor through a live wallboard showing demand, backlog, service levels, and workforce availability.
• Detect the metric, queue, or conversation that needs attention through interactive service, queue, and conversation-level analytics.
• Act where the insight appears by updating queues, changing representative presence, assigning or transferring conversations, or closing items when appropriate.

Consider Alexandra², a supervisor overseeing billing and general support during a busy afternoon. Historical analytics help her understand patterns and plan. Real-time analytics in Dynamics 365 Contact Center can help her see what is changing right now, identify where attention is needed, and take action.

Monitor: See the whole floor, live

During Alexandra’s afternoon shift, a demand spike sends active conversations and backlog climbing. The wallboard makes the change immediately visible, helping the team align on what needs attention.

The updated wallboard provides an at-a-glance view of contact center health, including demand, backlog, service levels, wait times, and workforce availability across representatives and self-service agents.

Real-time streaming analytics in Dynamics 365 Contact Center distinguishes live metrics, such as active conversations and backlog, from aggregated metrics, such as service level and abandon rate, so supervisors can quickly understand both the current state and performance over time.

• Live metrics show the current operating state, such as active conversations, queue backlog, online representatives, and longest wait time.

Aggregated metrics summarize performance over a selected period, such as service level, abandon rate, and average speed to answer.

Detect: Find the moments that need attention

Within the new real-time analytics dashboards, the assisted service view helps supervisors investigate what’s behind a change in performance. They can filter by period, channel, and queue; review performance funnels; and open metric details to understand definitions, calculation methodology, thresholds (normal, at risk, critical), a trendline showing whether it’s improving or deteriorating.

The queues view then narrows the focus to where pressure is building. Queue backlog, longest wait time, service level, abandon rate, average speed to answer, representative availability, transfers, overflows, and callbacks can all be reviewed at the queue level.

Thresholds help supervisors move from scanning to prioritizing. Metrics carry predefined thresholds with clear visual indicators, so supervisors do not scan numbers looking for outliers—the outliers announce themselves.

For Alexandra, the assisted service view confirms that abandon rate is deteriorating, while the queues view shows the pressure is concentrated in Premium Support. Instead of guessing, she can see where to intervene.

Act: Resolve where insight appears

In the new analytics dashboard, the contact center representatives’ view turns visibility into action. Supervisors can review representative availability, answered-versus-offered assignments, unanswered assignments, active conversations, presence duration, and capacity (for example, 6/15 capacity units). This makes it easier to quickly identify overloaded representatives or low answer rates and respond in the moment. Additionally, from the representatives view, a supervisor can:

• Update queues. Select one or more representatives and assign, modify, or remove queue memberships, rebalancing capacity toward the queues under pressure. This is where moving representatives across queues happens.
• Update presence. Select one or more representatives and set a new presence state to change how work is routed to them. This matters when a representative’s displayed availability no longer reflects their actual ability to take work. For example, after a missed status change or an operational disruption, supervisors can correct it immediately to prevent misrouting, restore available capacity, and reduce unanswered assignments and wait times.

The conversations view adds the live interaction layer. Supervisors can review ongoing, queued, and completed conversations by queue, then take action on selected conversations from the bulk toolbar. They can assign, transfer, or force close conversations when operational conditions require direct intervention.

For Alexandra, this means she can add cross-trained representatives to the pressured queue and assign open conversations to the right queue or representative before the issue becomes an escalation—all without leaving the page.

How real-time analytics can help supervisors respond faster

Real-time streaming analytics in Dynamics 365 Contact Center reduces the distance between signal and action, so teams can respond while the customer experience is still unfolding.

• Supervisors can respond faster to queue pressure before it becomes a service-level issue.
• Teams can rebalance capacity with less context switching and fewer handoffs.
• Staffing decisions can be based on current demand signals rather than delayed reports.
• The broader team can align around the same live view of operational truth.

The result is a more connected way to manage modern customer experience operations, especially as supervisors oversee service representatives, self-service agents, and real-time operational workflows.

Get started with real-time streaming analytics

To use real-time streaming analytics, configure Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 Contact Center with active customer interaction channels, and ensure users have the Omnichannel Supervisor role to view dashboards and take action.

Learn more

• Overview of real-time streaming analytics (preview) — Microsoft Learn
• Watch: Overview of real-time streaming analytics (preview) — YouTube

¹Responsible use.

This feature is intended to help customer service managers or supervisors enhance their team’s performance and improve customer satisfaction. It isn’t intended to be used, and shouldn’t be used, to make decisions that affect the employment of an employee or group of employees, including compensation, rewards, seniority, or other rights or entitlements.

Customers are solely responsible for using Dynamics 365, this feature, and any associated feature or service in compliance with all applicable laws, including laws that are related to accessing individual employee analytics, and monitoring, recording, and storing communications with users.

As part of this compliance, customers must adequately notify users that their communications with customer service representatives (service representatives or representatives) might be monitored, recorded, or stored.

As required by applicable laws, customers must also obtain consent from users before they use this feature with them. In addition, customers are encouraged to have a mechanism in place to inform their service representatives that their communications with users might be monitored, recorded, or stored.

Note:

• This is a production-ready preview feature.

• Production-ready previews are subject to supplemental terms of use.

²Disclaimer: Alexandra, the supervisor persona, is for illustration only and is fictitious. No real association is intended or inferred.

The post From live streaming to real-time action: Real-time streaming analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

From business requirement to working extension

Retail business models are changing faster than ever. New selling models, experience expectations, regulatory requirements, and competitive pressures don’t arrive on an IT-controlled schedule. Business leaders are under pressure to respond. The IT teams supporting them are responsible for delivering the systems needed to deliver results. For IT teams, that means adapting commerce systems to new business requirements more frequently. The backlog of changes can quickly become a constraint on how fast the business can move.

That’s not an expertise or productivity problem. Developers who build enterprise software extensions are doing genuinely complex work. A single business requirement can require changes across the point of sale, commerce runtime, service contracts, and channel database. Developers must determine where and how to extend each component and understand the dependencies between them. Then, they must apply the appropriate implementation patterns.

Traditional extensibility requires deep technical knowledge of commerce architecture. It also requires an understanding of how components connect across layers. Significant engineering work goes into determining how a business requirement should be implemented.

Starting with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce version 10.0.49, AI can help with more of that work. The new extension skills are now available in public preview using the SDK GitHub repository. The skills bring first-party product knowledge into command-line AI coding assistants, including GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. These include extension patterns, APIs, dependencies, templates, and implementation guidance.

Developers start by describing the intended business behavior in plain language. The Dynamics 365 Commerce extension skills help translate that requirement into implementation artifacts using established extensibility patterns and guidance.

Turn business requirements into working extensions more quickly

Consider a retailer that needs to add age verification for restricted products. The business requirement is clear: when a restricted item is purchased, the store associate must verify the customer’s age, the appropriate business rules must be applied, and the required information must be retained.

The implementation within your commerce platform is more complex. The point of sale prompts the store associate and captures the outcome. Commerce runtime enforces business rules and manages transaction flow.
The extension design moves required data across integrations and stores it where needed.

Before a developer writes the business logic, there’s already significant architecture work to do. The developer must identify the appropriate extension points, determine which APIs apply, understand the dependencies between components, and design a flow that works across each of those layers.

With the Dynamics 365 Commerce extension skills, the developer can begin by describing the intended business behavior in plain language. The skills will help identify the relevant extension points across the point of sale, commerce runtime, hardware station, and channel database and propose an implementation approach. From there, they can help scaffold the connected components, generate code using established extensibility patterns, and validate the build.

The developer remains responsible for reviewing the proposed architecture and generated code and making the final engineering decisions. AI can take on more of the technical groundwork, allowing the architecture and mapping work that previously happened before development to become the starting point for it.

Give AI the business process expertise enterprise system development requires

General-purpose AI coding assistants can generate code, but extending enterprise systems requires more than code excellence. Developers need to know where functionality should be extended, which APIs to use, how components depend on and interact with one another, and how an extension will fit within an architecture designed to support future upgrades.

The Dynamics 365 Commerce extension skills bring that expertise into the AI-assisted development experience. The skills can reason over the existing codebase and repository structure, map requirements to the appropriate extension points, and generate code using established extensibility patterns and guidance.

The value is not simply faster code generation. By reducing the technical groundwork required before development can begin, the skills can help developers focus more on architecture decisions, business logic, and the experiences that differentiate the retailer. That can shorten the path from a business requirement to a working extension.

For IT leaders, the payoff is the ability to turn more business requirements into capabilities without having to scale resources at the same rate as demand. Whether extensions are built by an internal engineering team, a Dynamics 365 partner, or a software development company, reducing the engineering effort required to move from a business requirement to a working extension can help teams address more of the backlog and respond faster to business priorities. When IT can turn business decisions into working capabilities faster, technology becomes an accelerator of business velocity rather than a constraint on it.

Move faster while supporting enterprise system governance, risk, and compliance

As IT teams increase the pace of change, they also need to manage the risk that comes with extending systems that execute business-critical transactions. Commerce transactions can affect inventory, tax, payments, revenue, and ultimately the financial records of the business. Changes to how your business processes run must meet the security, regulatory, financial control, and audit requirements that govern enterprise systems.

The Dynamics 365 Commerce extension skills are designed with those requirements in mind. The skills have completed applicable Microsoft legal and Responsible AI reviews and undergone harm testing. Guardrails are designed to constrain generation to verified Dynamics 365 Commerce APIs and extension approaches, while developers review, test, and validate generated code before it moves into production. Explore Dynamics 365 Commerce training resources to learn more about the platform and extension model.

These safeguards become even more important as AI is used across more stages of the development lifecycle. Today, the Dynamics 365 Commerce extension skills can assist with the work required to plan, build, and validate an extension. But the opportunity for AI-assisted development is much bigger than what’s possible today.

The future of the Dynamics 365 Commerce extensibility is agentic

The Dynamics 365 Commerce extension skills introduce a new way for developers to plan, build, and validate extensions. The opportunity ahead is to bring that same extensibility expertise to more of the development lifecycle.

Imagine AI assisting with designing truly unique and differentiated commerce experiences across design, development, testing, review, and release readiness, with Dynamics 365 Commerce extensibility expertise at every stage. Many IT teams are managing enormous backlogs while new business priorities continue to compete for finite development capacity. A more agentic development lifecycle could change that equation—empowering IT to drive business model velocity with proactive technology roadmaps that anticipate what’s next in commerce.

With Dynamics 365 Commerce version 10.0.49, developers can start exploring that future. We invite you to try the public preview, share your feedback, and help us shape a future where IT has the capacity to lead business change—not just keep up with it.

Learn more about the Dynamics 365 Commerce extension developer skill.

The post Adapt Dynamics 365 Commerce faster with AI-assisted extensibility appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Work IQ now grounds Microsoft Copilot and agents in your core business data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Work IQ reasons across the productivity and business data that matters to your business. It’s available in preview starting September 30, 2026, with rollout continuing throughout October 2026.

By connecting and modeling your business once, you create a shared foundation for Copilot and agents: what your data means, how records relate, and which business rules guide the next step. You can then reuse that understanding and governed actions across Copilot and agent experiences without rebuilding context for every agent.

Business applications data and workflows in Work IQ shift the starting point from navigating apps to expressing what you need to accomplish. Your business applications remain the systems of record, but their data and processes are modelled into valuable, reusable business understanding and context made available through Copilot and agents.

Consider a sales lead preparing for a customer renewal. The opportunity looks healthy in the sales system, but Work IQ can bring additional business context to the picture. An unresolved service issue and recent customer email communications reveal that resolving the issue is critical to the renewal. Instead of simply retrieving records, Copilot can use that shared business understanding to help the sales lead determine what needs attention and what to do next.

The same pattern extends far beyond sales. Work IQ can bring business understanding and action to scenarios that span sales, service, finance, operations, and supply chain.

Users can ask about the business in Copilot and agents

The sales lead starts in Copilot Home, where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the company’s contract management apps, and Microsoft 365 context are all available. Instead of choosing an app or assembling reports, they begin with a simple business question: “Which upcoming renewals need my attention, and what should I do next?”

Copilot Home connects the opportunity across three separate systems of record and returns a clear, actionable response.

• Copilot identifies a renewal that appears healthy in Dynamics 365 Sales but needs attention when viewed across the business.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service shows an unresolved equipment issue, and the custom equipment app links that issue to a site covered by the renewing contract.
• Recent customer emails and a Microsoft Teams meeting indicate that resolving the issue is a condition of renewal. The conversation continues but there’s no clear action plan.

The response brings data together and links to the underlying sources. Although the opportunity remains open, the customer’s commitment depends on a service improvement plan. The business understanding connects the account, equipment, and contract definitions rather than simply matching words across records.

How does this work?

The semantic model brings business context together by combining a focused data scope and semantic indexing with knowledge from your existing business applications. and organization-specific terminology. That means:

• Faster responses: Give agents a focused starting point with scenario-based table and column scope, combined with semantic indexing, helping them find relevant information faster.
• More accurate answers: Help agents understand what users mean—not just what the schema says—by drawing on business logic in views, forms, and relationships, plus a business glossary.
• Faster time to value: Build on the knowledge already captured in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Apps. The model automatically derives context from existing configuration, reducing the need to write instructions from scratch for each agent.
• Consistent answers across experiences: Every agent using the same semantic model shares a common understanding of your business, so users get the more consistent answers across channel and experience.

You stay in control: You can refine what agents learn by enabling or disabling signals, excluding outdated views or relationships, and adding business vocabulary the system cannot infer. The result is a reusable foundation grounded in your business definitions and data.

Apply the business’s playbook as a business skill

Finding the right information is only the first step. To carry out a business task, an agent also needs to understand how your organization works: which criteria matter, what evidence to consider, and when approval is required. Today, that knowledge is spread across experts, documents, and applications—or copied into individual agents as instructions that become harder to maintain over time (shown below is the “recommend supplier skill”).

Let’s go back to our sales lead preparing for the customer renewal. His organization has created a reusable business skill that comes with the company’s step-by-step instructions for successful account renewal:

1. Check unresolved critical cases.
2. Confirm a service improvement plan owner.
3. Document customer commitment.
4. Obtain approval before offering a concession.

The sales lead simply asks “Use our renewal readiness process to recommend the next steps” and the skill is invoked. The sales lead didn’t have to call a separate agent because business skills are an inherent part of the Work IQ across your Copilot experiences, so it’s already there and available for you to use. Copilot applies that guidance to the account and recommends a full-length, joint sales and service improvement plan.

Business skills turn that know-how into a reusable asset. A business skill combines instructions for a business task with the context and supporting resources an agent needs to follow them. Instead of recreating the process for each agent, teams can define it once and reuse it across all agents connected to Work IQ model context protocol (MCP) including agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This results in business expertise that teams can maintain and reuse across agents, rather than another set of prompts to keep in sync.

Turn the recommendation into a governed action

Through governed actions built into Work IQ, the Copilot and agents present the proposed changes, follow any required approval, and update the source records within the user’s permissions. For example, the sales lead asks “add the service improvement plan to the renewal opportunity and create a follow-up task for the account owner.” Our sales lead can use a set of business apps domain of tools (integrated as part of Work IQ APIs) to accomplish a wide range of task across any Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application.

Here are just a few other governed actions:

• Reassign ownership: “Create a follow-up task for the account owner and assign the equipment issue to the regional service manager.”
• Escalate the service issue: “Escalate the unresolved equipment case, set its priority to Critical, and link it to the renewing contract and affected equipment.”
• Update the contract record: “Record resolution of the equipment issue as a renewal condition and add the agreed service commitments to the contract.”

Earlier, the sales lead was able to invoke a skill directly in their Copilot experience. The same is true for governed actions which are new business apps tools that we’re adding to the Work IQ APIs. For the sales lead, he can stay in the flow of work while making updates to the sources systems of record.

Make the approach reusable anywhere

The sales lead can continue to extend the same scenario.

• In Agent Builder, they create a focused renewal assistant grounded in selected business apps.
• In Copilot Studio, they add a guided service improvement process with actions and approvals. With custom code, developers bring the experience into their existing account workspace.
• In any custom agent or third-party agent building platform, you can create teams of agents that oversee end-to-end processes and recommend process improvement.

Each extension builds on shared business understanding and, where supported, reusable business skills—rather than creating another disconnected interpretation of the customer. This is all backed by Microsoft Dataverse, the trusted data storage layer for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio. Dataverse acts as the secure business store for semantic models and skills in Work IQ and enables the new Dataverse Ask API.

The Work IQ MCP Server, Work IQ command line interface (CLI), and Work IQ plugin for coding agents now also bring approved business context directly into the coding environment. You begin with the intended business outcome. The coding agent determines which skills, tools, and sequence to use, while the developer remains responsible for architecture, validation, testing, and user experience. You can build governed agent experiences faster because connected experiences use the same approved business context and reusable process definitions.

See it in action

Business apps in Work IQ can rationalize across an expanding range of data: Dynamics 365 CRM apps (Sales and Service), Dynamics 365 ERP apps (Finance and Operations*), Power Apps, and third-party line of business (LoB) apps.

Business applications in Work IQ connects business understanding across sales, service, finance and operations, and supply chain—unlocking scenarios that no single app can deliver alone. This shared customer view brings account activity, orders, and financial context together newly enabling cross-platform insights. For business users, the result is less time spent piecing together information across disparate systems and more coordinated action across the business.

See how PowerApps911 prioritizes account engagement by connecting customer signals using Work IQ

IT governance: Secure, governable, observable

Work IQ enables your organizations to create intelligent, observable agents under the purview of Microsoft Agent 365. Observable means understanding how AI uses that data and evaluating the value it creates. As an IT admin, you choose the business context those agents use and control which users, agents, and applications can access business data. Governable means that the IT admin is in full control deciding what business data becomes available to AI experiences.

But a single coordinated control plane does not mean one new portal—it means connected decisions across familiar experiences.

• The AI admin manages who can use AI and the organization’s AI policies in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• The Power Platform admin governs which business environments participate and who has access.
• Makers and developers shape how specific business data is exposed, within those admin boundaries.

Get started with business applications in Work IQ

For years the promise has been AI that understands your work. It now understands your business too—the records, the processes, and the way your organization actually gets things done. Try the public preview and see what you can build.

• Explore learn docs for business applications in Work IQ
• Learn more about Usage Based Billing for Work IQ
• Watch the business apps in Work IQ Podcast
• Watch James Oleinik walk through a business apps in Work IQ sales scenario

Read more Copilot announcements on the Official Microsoft Blog.

*Rolling out in late October 2026.

The post Work IQ: Business and workplace intelligence in the flow of work appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

AI is transforming not only what ERP can do, but how work gets done. In Dynamics 365, we’re advancing the financial and operational capabilities organizations depend on today while building the next generation of agentic ERP, where people and AI collaborate to accelerate decisions, orchestrate work, and drive outcomes across the business.

Our vision for agentic ERP helps organizations work across traditional application boundaries so organizational leaders can redesign how work gets done. This week, with our Dynamics 365 partners at the inaugural Directions for Enterprise in Copenhagen, the city where our ERP portfolio’s roots began over 30 years ago, we’re sharing our latest innovations across the Dynamics 365 ERP portfolio.

We are also moving beyond release waves with the AI at Work roadmap, giving customers and partners a more current view of innovation with an always-on roadmap. Complementing the AI at Work roadmap, this update shares a snapshot of highlights that are new and coming soon through March of 2027, helping organizations make faster decisions, prepare for change, and capture value from new Dynamics 365 ERP capabilities sooner.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Finance teams need to close the books accurately, plan with current information, and keep pace with regulatory changes. Our investments in Dynamics 365 Finance strengthen those core processes while expanding what AI can do across them.

The financial journals experience is being re-engineered to support higher transaction volumes and to manage cross-legal-entity complexity. Teams will be able to view intercompany transactions, create accruals, and preview allocations before posting. The Account Reconciliation Agent is also evolving to resolve exceptions in bulk, enabled by legal entity and module, addition of limits and notifications, and expanded agent suggestion summaries. Accounts payable (AP) automation is also improving, with AI recognition to capture invoices and AI suggestions to complete the finance entries, resulting in more touchless automation.

Finance Agent is bringing skills for reconciliation, data preparation, variance analysis, collections, and business intelligence across Microsoft 365 surfaces, such as Copilot, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, with native Dynamics 365 Finance connectivity and connectors to other systems to support more end-to-end business processes.

We’re also investing in planning, globalization, and compliance. The Business Performance Planning demo data and starter kit is generally available, bringing revenue, workforce, operating expense (OPEX), capital expenditure (CAPEX), and allocation scenarios together to make getting started easily. France e-invoicing and e-reporting support is also generally available, with support for the next phase of Brazil’s tax reform on the roadmap.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Supply chain teams need to anticipate and understand how change will impact operations and respond quickly. New capabilities in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management expand visibility and decision support across procurement, planning, supplier engagement, and warehouse operations.

Procurement agent impact analysis, now in public preview, traces supplier-proposed purchase order changes to affected sales, production, transfer orders, and projected inventory. In demand planning, generative insights for seasonality, trends, and signal correlations have been generally available since August, along with external signals such as inflation, pricing, and weather. AI-generated explanations of forecast drivers will follow.

Supplier Engagement is now in public preview, bringing onboarding, requests for quotation, purchase orders, and invoicing into a workspace and supplier portal across legal entities. We continue to invest in strengthening warehouse management system (WMS) capabilities to support complex warehouse operations and large-scale warehouse automations. For warehouse operations, dynamic item placement is coming next, adding more control over where inventory is stored and how storage policies apply.

Rental business models are becoming increasingly more important for asset-driven organizations, requiring availability, reservations, contracts, billing, and maintenance to work as a more connected process. Rental management capabilities are coming to public preview, designed to connect the rental lifecycle from quote and contract through inspection, return, and billing.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Project-based businesses need to manage changing scope and commercial terms while keeping project financials, billing, and resources aligned. New capabilities in Dynamics 365 Project Operations expand how organizations manage these areas as projects evolve.

Change order management, coming to public preview, provides a structured, auditable process for incorporating contract changes into billing schedules. Also up next, subscription billing will add recurring billing schedules, invoice generation, and flexible and tiered pricing.

For project financials, organizations can recognize project revenue against the original cost estimate rather than a changing estimate at completion when that accounting approach is appropriate. A new time-phased staffing view brings task assignments, project bookings, and available capacity into one timeline to support project staffing and utilization decisions.

Dynamics 365 Commerce

B2B buyers purchase for multiple locations, work across legal entities and fulfillment channels, and buy on organizational credit. Our investments in this release will reflect that. B2B self-service buyers will get one sign-in to shop, order, and track purchases across multiple outlets, with on-account and credit validation.

We are bringing B2B into the store enabling Trade POS. For wholesalers and distributors, the counter is where the business gets done, and the orders written there are deep, bulky, and rarely sourced from one place. We’re shipping order capture optimized for bulk ordering; contacts on orders and quotations in point of sale (POS), which matters when the buyer at the counter isn’t the account; order release from POS straight to the warehouse; and streamlined pickup workflows. In addition, we continue to enhance our retail store footprint with Tap To Pay on Android, label printing, and faster checkout.

Commerce is also extending into agentic experiences with Dynamics 365 Commerce Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in public preview. As our MCP server evolves, we plan to expand the set of tools and extensibility support to help customers and partners develop their own scenarios alongside ours. Through March 2027, the roadmap will include continued enhancements to core experiences with AI.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Scheduling field service means continuously balancing technicians, skills, locations, priorities, and time windows. The Scheduling Operations Agent, in public preview, helps dispatchers optimize multiple resources against defined objectives and review proposed changes before applying them. Recurring scheduled optimizations will be coming, allowing optimizations to run on a defined schedule.

Organizations often manage field execution, project planning, and financials across different systems, which can require manual reconciliation and make visibility more difficult. Connected workflows across Field Service, Project Operations, and Finance are helping complex service organizations plan, execute, cost, and bill work. Now generally available, you can create work orders directly from or link directly to project tasks, connecting field execution with project scope and task-based billing. Also, mobile-first notes experience, generally available, allows technicians to capture text, images, and video directly in the work order.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Dynamics 365 Human Resources is evolving across hire to retire, strengthening foundational HR while introducing new agentic capabilities for workforce operations. HR teams need to attract and hire talent, onboard people effectively, develop and retain critical skills, and deliver responsive employee services while managing increasing process and compliance complexity. Our investments strengthen the HR capabilities organizations rely on today while expanding how AI and agents can support work across the employee lifecycle.

Starting with how organizations attract and bring people into the workforce, we will have new capabilities for talent pools and referrals that help teams identify candidates, while digital offers and preboarding will support the transition from candidate to employee. Once people are in the organization, investments in learning, succession, and performance will help teams develop and retain talent. New capabilities for benefits, leave, HR-aware time entry, and HR reporting will support the ongoing work of managing and supporting the workforce.

As these core processes evolve, agentic capabilities create new ways for HR teams to get work done. Candidate assessment and onboarding bring agentic experiences into the hiring journey, while new HR business skills make more hire to retire workflows available to Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Cowork, and agents. An HR professional could, for example, initiate a workforce process directly from Copilot Cowork using natural language, with business skills carrying out the underlying actions in Dynamics 365 Human Resources. Together, our roadmap connects HR processes, workforce knowledge, and agents to help streamline HR workflows and better coordinate workforce activities, giving HR teams and managers more time to focus on the employee experience.

Dynamics 365 Sustainability

Accurate sustainability reporting requires strong governance, traceability, and auditability across the reporting lifecycle. The next release strengthens this foundation with capabilities that help organizations govern reported data, support audit and assurance processes, and improve confidence in sustainability disclosures. Snapshot-based data trails capture the source activity data, emission factors, global warming potential versions, filters, and calculation logic used to derive reported results, with an Excel-based output that supports audit review and validation. Reporting period controls allow organizations to lock data at the reporting year and entity level, helping maintain consistency while preparing disclosures and after reports are finalized. Governed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data collection further brings structured requests, due dates, reminders, supporting evidence, reviews, and approvals into the reporting process, improving accountability, data quality, and audit readiness.

Building the foundation for agentic ERP

With agentic ERP, business processes are less constrained by the boundaries between applications and tools. Copilot, Copilot Cowork, and agents can work across Dynamics 365, email, documents, and collaboration tools to reason over business context, coordinate work, and help complete business processes from start to finish. Dynamics 365 provides the business process foundation, grounding these experiences in enterprise data, business logic, skills, and security controls.

The Dynamics 365 ERP plugin for Copilot Cowork and the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server, both generally available, allow agents to reason over and work with ERP data, actions, and attachments. Citations and deep links from Copilot responses connect users back to the underlying ERP records.

This agentic foundation will further expand to include business skills giving organizations a more centralized and governed way to define how work gets done. Organizations can define processes and procedures as reusable context and instructions for ERP agents, with access managed through Dynamics 365 security roles. Microsoft will also provide business skills for agentic business processes such as procure-to-pay, helping organizations adopt agent-driven experiences using reusable business context and actions.

Security and trust are fundamental to agent deployment. New capabilities in role-based access controls will allow organizations to define additional restrictions when a user is operating through Copilot Cowork or agents, enabling tighter control on what agents are allowed to do. Together, these capabilities connect the experience layer of Copilot and agents with the business process foundation in Dynamics 365—connecting how people work with how the business operates.

Adopt agentic ERP at the pace of your business

Every organization will take a different path to agentic ERP based on its priorities, existing processes, and business needs. Continuous roadmap publishing gives customers visibility into the Dynamics 365 capabilities available today and what is coming next, so they can adopt new capabilities when they are right for their business. As ERP becomes increasingly agentic, that visibility can help organizations plan with more confidence, take advantage of innovation as it becomes available, and evolve at a pace that aligns with their business priorities.

Explore the AI at Work roadmap to see the latest capabilities across Dynamics 365 ERP and share your feedback in the community forums via Dynamics 365.

The post Build the future of agentic ERP with new Microsoft Dynamics 365 capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Commerce personalization experiences continue to expand beyond traditional storefronts as customers interact with businesses across stores, websites, mobile apps, marketplaces, social channels, and conversational experiences. AI and agents are creating even more possibilities for how customers, employees, and business buyers interact with commerce. For developers and architects, this raises an important question: how do you introduce new custom experiences without rebuilding the commerce capabilities behind each one?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce provides a composable, API-first architecture that separates the experience layer from the commerce engine. New licensing offers customers more flexibility to use Dynamics 365 Commerce to build custom applications, connect third-party experiences, and support new commerce scenarios. Organizations can create experiences for their specific business requirements while using Dynamics 365 Commerce capabilities for pricing, promotions, inventory, loyalty, orders, fulfillment, and other commerce processes.

How AI and new channels are reshaping commerce experiences

Omnichannel commerce has traditionally focused on connecting experiences across stores, e-commerce sites, mobile applications, and call centers. Those channels remain important, but marketplaces, social channels, conversational experiences, purpose-built applications, and now agents are expanding the ways customers and employees can interact with commerce. For architects, the important consideration is not which interface comes next, but how commerce capabilities can be made available quickly in new custom channels without implementing the underlying business logic separately for each one.

Dynamics 365 Commerce supports traditional and emerging channels, including stores, e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B), call centers, marketplaces, and other digital experiences. Its composable architecture provides a common commerce engine that organizations can use across these experiences and extend as their channel strategies evolve.

Why composable commerce starts with a decoupled architecture

Commerce scale unit is the distributed runtime that provides commerce capabilities across Dynamics 365 Commerce channels. It exposes commerce business logic through APIs and processes interactions with channel databases, Dynamics 365 Commerce headquarters, and other services. By separating the experience layer from the commerce engine, developers can create experiences for specific customer, employee, partner, or business scenarios while using common commerce capabilities underneath them.

For example, an organization can build a custom mobile application that uses Dynamics 365 Commerce for product information, pricing, promotions, inventory availability, loyalty, and orders. A manufacturer can create a specialized B2B experience for distributors, while a retailer can connect a third-party e-commerce platform to Dynamics 365 Commerce and integrate commerce transactions with downstream business processes.

Build custom experiences with commerce scale unit APIs

Commerce scale unit exposes commerce capabilities through RESTful APIs, giving developers a consistent way to incorporate Dynamics 365 Commerce into custom and third-party experiences. Applications can use APIs for supported commerce scenarios involving products and customers, pricing and discounts, inventory, loyalty, carts and checkout, orders, returns, fulfillment, and other commerce operations.

This gives development teams more flexibility in how they build the experience itself. A custom storefront, mobile application, marketplace integration, or other front end can be designed around its own requirements while using Dynamics 365 Commerce for the commerce capabilities it needs. For organizations using Dynamics 365 more broadly, those interactions can also connect with the finance and supply chain processes that support commerce operations.

PETER HAHN provides another example of this approach. The fashion retailer combines a custom web shop with Dynamics 365 Commerce modules and specialized third-party solutions, with Dynamics 365 connecting commerce operations to finance and supply chain processes. Learn how PETER HAHN uses a composable commerce architecture.

Retail transaction orchestration and import options for Dynamics 365 Commerce

The architecture for a custom commerce experience also depends on where retail transactions originate and how Dynamics 365 Commerce participates in processing them. In some scenarios, a custom or third-party experience uses commerce scale unit APIs as part of the transaction. In others, the retail transactions are captured by an external system and then brought into Dynamics 365 Commerce. New licensing offers provide additional flexibility for both approaches.

• With Dynamics 365 Commerce headless orchestration, a custom or third-party client can use commerce scale unit APIs to access supported Dynamics 365 Commerce capabilities and orchestrate retail transactions. This approach can support custom storefronts and applications, third-party commerce experiences, and other purpose-built channels that use Dynamics 365 Commerce services as part of the transaction.

• With Dynamics 365 Commerce headless import, transactions captured outside Dynamics 365 Commerce can be imported into Commerce for subsequent processing. This provides an integration option for architectures in which an external application captures the transaction and Dynamics 365 Commerce supports downstream commerce processes.

Together, these options give organizations more flexibility to select an approach based on their commerce architecture, transaction requirements, and the role Dynamics 365 Commerce plays within the solution.

Build a commerce architecture for what’s next

Commerce experiences will continue to evolve as organizations introduce new applications, channels, and ways for customers and employees to interact with their business. AI and agents add new possibilities to that landscape, increasing the value of an architecture that makes commerce capabilities available independently of the experience consuming them.

Dynamics 365 Commerce provides an API-first commerce engine for Microsoft-delivered, as well as custom and third-party experiences, The Commerce Scale Unit provides access to commerce capabilities and Dynamics 365 connects those interactions with the operational and financial processes behind them. With new licensing options for retail transaction orchestration and retail transaction import scenarios, organizations have greater flexibility to build the commerce experiences they need today and extend their architecture for what comes next.

Learn more about Commerce Scale Unit architecture through Dynamics 365 Commerce documentation. Start using Headless Commerce Integration.

The post Build custom commerce experiences with Dynamics 365 Commerce appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Don’t let legacy applications hold back your adoption of innovation

Organizations around the world are exploring how AI and agents could redesign and transform their critical business processes. But for many, that ambition is constrained by the time, cost or complexity of moving from the business applications they rely on today to the agentic applications they need for the future.

Often, we hear from leaders that they feel locked into systems customized over years, surrounded by point solutions and connected through complex integrations. What began as an initiative to simplify and modernize the technology stack has, over time, accumulated layers of customization, integration, and business decisions, creating the very complexity it was intended to overcome.

Today, we are introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Activate, a comprehensive, AI-powered tool that can help partners and customers move to Dynamics 365 faster, with less manual effort and lower migration risk. It is informed by hundreds of successful, recent, Dynamics 365 migrations, to analyze requirements, generate configurations, and migrate data from applications like Salesforce. Our goal is to help partners and customers migrate to Dynamics 365, a leader in the customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) categories, with greater speed and confidence.

We are starting with a public preview for organizations moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365, with additional Dynamics 365 implementation scenarios to planned for ERP and other business application providers.

Move beyond CRM lock-in. Activate what’s next

Now in public preview, the Salesforce migration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Activate combine CRM environment analysis, actionable migration recommendations, and automated migration execution with built-in guardrails in a Microsoft-hosted experience. It will analyze an existing Salesforce CRM environment and build a detailed understanding of its data, business processes, customizations, and dependencies. This context helps implementation teams determine what needs to move, identify potential issues earlier, and prepare for the transition to Dynamics 365.

But the goal is not simply to recreate an organization’s existing CRM in a new system. With Dynamics 365 Activate, partners and customers can quickly decide what to preserve, simplify, or redesign with Dynamics 365 and AI—spending less time reconstructing the past and more time building what’s next. ERP capabilities will be coming later this year.

Turn years of complexity into a blueprint for the future

Understanding an existing business application environment is difficult because it reflects years of decisions and customization. Data models reflect how the business has evolved, customizations capture unique requirements and exceptions, and integrations connect processes across the organization. While some of the complexity remains essential, others can be simplified and left behind.

Dynamics 365 Activate profiles data and entities, identify relationships and dependencies, and surface customizations that require attention. This gives implementation teams a clearer blueprint for what should move, what should change, and what should be redesigned before migration begins. In early customer engagements, Dynamics 365 Activate has processed over six billion data records, enabling teams to quickly profile large-scale environments and focus migration efforts where they will have the greatest impact.

The impact becomes more tangible when applied to a customer’s environment. For example, Comcast was looking for ways to accelerate its migration assessment and gain a clearer view of its Salesforce landscape. The CRM discovery capabilities in Dynamics 365 Activate provided greater visibility into the company’s existing environment and the key considerations that could inform its migration planning.

Dynamics 365 Activate’s discovery capabilities helped accelerate our migration assessment by providing greater visibility into our Salesforce landscape and key migration considerations. The insights enabled our teams to make more informed planning decisions and establish a stronger foundation for the Dynamics 365 transformation journey.

Sathish Arumugam, Manager – Software Dev and Engineering, Comcast​

Dynamics 365 Activate can also provide greater visibility and validation throughout implementation, helping organizations identify migration risks earlier and approach deployment with greater confidence.

Dynamics 365 Activate brings together the right combination of technology, expertise and partnership to help accelerate our transformation journey. The approach provides greater visibility and validation throughout delivery, helping reduce risk while improving confidence in business outcomes. For Ziwi Pets, the opportunity to achieve faster time-to-value and deliver a solution that closely reflects our operational needs was a compelling factor in moving forward.

Benjamin Boase, CEO - Ziwi Pets​

The value of this understanding grows as it carries forward. Context established during discovery can inform business-process decisions, solution design, configuration, migration, testing, and deployment rather than being repeatedly rediscovered, documented, and translated as work moves across teams.

For implementation partners, this means spending less time on resource-intensive workstreams like discovery and analysis, and more time to applying their methodology, industry expertise, solution architecture, and change management they bring to an implementation.

Human-led, AI-accelerated is core to how we operate at congruentX. As an AI-native company, we combine Microsoft’s AI migration tooling with cX IP and delivery accelerators to compress discovery and migration complexity, accelerate the path from legacy CRM to measurable, sustainable business outcomes, and keep our team focused on the high-value work that drives those outcomes. At cX, we do not just target outcomes, we guarantee them.

Marty Priest, Managing Partner & CEO, congruentX

Dynamics 365 Activate represents a significant step forward in how Dynamics 365 solutions can be delivered. By combining Microsoft’s innovation with a collaborative delivery approach, we’re able to accelerate the journey from concept to value while reducing implementation risk and improving solution quality. What excites us most is the true partnership between Microsoft, Fusion5 and our customers, working together in rapid cycles to validate outcomes earlier, make better decisions faster, and ultimately deliver business transformation, with greater confidence.

Kristy Brown, Chief Executive -New Zealand, Fusion5​

One implementation experience for your business changes

While we are beginning with CRM migrations, moving from one business application to another is only one reason organizations implement Dynamics 365. Some are starting fresh to support a new business model, process, or part of their organization. Others are moving from an existing CRM or ERP platform. And existing Dynamics 365 customers need to continually evolve as they enter new markets, add applications, or transform business processes.

Our vision for Dynamics 365 Activate is to bring one agentic implementation experience to all three journeys, helping organizations start, move, and grow with greater speed and confidence.

• Start new. When an organization implements Dynamics 365 to support a new business model, process, or part of the business, Dynamics 365 Activate can help teams move from requirements to a solution designed for how they want to operate.

• Move from a known source. Dynamics 365 Activate can begin with what already exists, using AI to understand the data, processes, customizations, and dependencies within the current environment. Salesforce is our first migration scenario, with additional CRM and ERP migration scenarios to follow. The goal is not simply to move what exists, but to give customer and partner teams the context they need to decide what should move, what should change, and what should be left behind.

• Grow what exists. For customers already using Dynamics 365, the next implementation might involve a new application, business process, geography, legal entity, or business unit. Dynamics 365 Activate can build on the environment and business context already in place, helping teams extend what they have instead of beginning each new project with another lengthy discovery effort.

The broader opportunity for Dynamics 365 Activate is to make implementation intelligent, continuous, and reduce time to value while reinforcing Microsoft’s ability to unify customer data, productivity, and business processes. We will continue investing across CRM and ERP workloads, with planned capabilities including agentic mapping and test sampling, natural-language migration guidance, and executive assessment summaries.

Whether an organization is starting, moving, or growing, changing the applications beneath the business should not require years of work before the next idea can become real.

Ready to get started? Join the public preview of Salesforce migration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Activate, or explore the documentation to learn more.

If you have any questions about how Dynamics 365 Activate will support your organization, we encourage you to reach out to our Microsoft representative or implementation partner.

The post Accelerate your move to agentic business applications with Dynamics 365 Activate appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.