The first days in a new role set the tone for an employee’s entire journey. Done well, onboarding builds confidence, connection, and commitment. Done poorly, it erodes trust and raises the risk of early attrition.

Yet onboarding is also one of the most operationally demanding processes HR teams own. The process often spans disconnected systems and relies on manual data entry. HR, hiring managers, and new hires must coordinate closely during a critical first impression. These challenges slow productivity, create compliance gaps, and deliver inconsistent onboarding experiences.

We built the Onboarding Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources to close the gaps. Now in public preview, the Onboarding Agent delivers a connected experience that helps streamline onboarding activities. The solution helps new hires ramp up faster, build connections, and stay engaged from day one. It works directly within Microsoft Teams, allowing employees to stay in the flow of work. It also writes data back to Dynamics 365 Human Resources, keeping records up to date.

What is the Onboarding Agent in Dynamics 365 Human Resources?

The Onboarding Agent in Dynamics 365 Human Resources guides HR teams and new hires through onboarding. It coordinates onboarding activities as a single, connected journey. The agent automates common setup tasks and recommends the next best action. It supports compliance, maintains accurate records, and helps HR scale personalized onboarding.

What makes the Onboarding Agent different

Rather than adding another onboarding portal for people to log into, the Onboarding Agent rethinks where and how onboarding happens.

• It works where people already are. The experience runs in Microsoft Teams, helping HR managers and new hires avoid switching systems or learning new tools.
• It’s grounded in your system of record. The agent writes onboarding actions back to Dynamics 365 Human Resources. It captures records consistently and accurately. This helps support HR processes and downstream payroll readiness. Compensation flows downstream to Finance, helping ensure new hires are ready for their first pay cycle.
• It’s intelligent, not just automated. This is where AI can do the real work. The agent uses recruitment data, uploaded documents, and natural language to streamline onboarding. It drafts records and extracts key details automatically. The agent also recommends onboarding checklists and leave plans. People can then review and confirm instead of retyping information.
• It’s multi-role by design. Two tailored experiences, one for HR managers and one for new hires, work together to turn the handoffs that typically cause delays into a single, continuous flow.

A smart experience for HR managers

HR teams often manage candidate lists, worker records, positions, checklists, leave plans, and compensation separately. The Onboarding Agent unifies these tasks into one guided onboarding flow. It starts proactively and guides users through each step. HR professionals remain in control throughout the entire process.

Designed to support accelerated onboarding with proactive alerts. The Onboarding agent for HR can surface candidates who are ready for hiring directly in Teams. HR managers can select one or more and start onboarding immediately, helping to minimize the need for manual data entry at the start of onboarding.

Helps draft HR records automatically so HR managers can focus on the exceptions. The agent can generate draft worker records, assign positions, recommend personalized onboarding checklists based on the role, and suggest leave plans tailored to role, location, and policy. HR managers review, edit, and finalize before anything is committed, maintaining flexibility while helping ensure consistency and policy compliance from day one.

Streamline compensation entry. HR managers can enter compensation for one or many employees in a single streamlined flow, with eligibility and validation checks applied in real time to help identify potential issues before records are finalized in Dynamics 365 Human Resources and Finance.

It can give HR a centralized onboarding view. A consolidated onboarding summary surfaces activities in one immersive workspace, giving HR professionals and managers the visibility and control to track progress and act on what’s outstanding.

This enables a consistent onboarding experience while helping minimize manual steps through guided workflows and automation, giving HR teams greater confidence that every hire is set up correctly and compliantly.

A welcoming experience for new hires

For new hires, the Onboarding Agent is a first-day companion that can replace a daunting, ambiguous checklist with a clear, guided path. As soon as they join, Onboarding Agent for new hires can send a personalized welcome message along with links to key resources curated for them and can lay out exactly what to do first, with progress reflected back as each step completes. From there, the agent can keep onboarding moving by turning required information into guided, easy-to-complete steps.

Whether completing onboarding tasks, introducing themselves to the team, or reviewing their progress, new hires can be guided through each step of the journey.

Capture onboarding details while minimizing manual effort. Personal details carried over from recruitment can be presented for quick review and confirmation rather than re-entry. New hires can upload an identification document directly in the experience. The agent extracts the document details and drafts an identification record for review and saving. It can even read address details from that same document, and when a hire prefers to type an address in plain, natural language, the agent structures it automatically. Contact details gathered during recruitment can arrive pre-populated and ready to confirm.

Guide new hires through their first team introduction. The agent helps craft a self-introduction email to the manager and project team, gathering a few details, generating a polished draft, and handing it off to Outlook to personalize and send.

Close the loop with a clear onboarding summary. An onboarding summary brings together personal details, identification, address information, contact details, and the introduction email in one place. It also directs new hires to any remaining tasks in Dynamics 365 Human Resources, helping them complete onboarding and clearly understand their next steps.

The experience helps new hires focus on building relationships and succeeding in their role rather than navigating paperwork and forms.

Why it matters for your business

The Onboarding Agent can help turn onboarding from an operational burden into a more strategic approach:

• For HR leaders (CHRO/CPO): Scale a consistent, high-touch onboarding experience to every hire across every role and location without adding operational strain and gain visibility into onboarding progress to help identify potential gaps early.
• For HR managers: Minimize time spent on repetitive onboarding tasks through automated drafts, recommendations, and validation; help ensure compliance; and track progress across every hire in real time.
• For hiring managers: Simplify the onboarding experience and enable team members to arrive prepared and connected.
• For new hires: Feel welcomed, informed, and connected from the start and get up to speed efficiently with guided onboarding steps and clarity on next actions.

Availability and what’s next

The Onboarding Agent is available in public preview today. The preview includes two experiences that work together:

• Onboarding Agent for HR managers: candidate selection, worker record creation, checklist and leave plan recommendations, compensation, and a consolidated onboarding summary.
• Onboarding Agent for new hires: a personalized welcome kit, personal details, identification, address, contacts, a self-introduction email, and a final summary.

These experiences will continue to evolve and we’ll keep validating new capabilities with early adopters and customers using your feedback to guide what comes next.

Onboarding is where the employee experience begins. With the Onboarding Agent in Dynamics 365 Human Resources, it can begin smart, smooth, and natural.

To learn more about Dynamics 365 Human Resources, visit HR Onboarding Agent Overview. Customers and partners interested in the preview can contact their Microsoft representative.

The post Introducing the Onboarding Agent in Dynamics 365 Human Resources appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re entering a new era of AI-powered business applications, and today we’re excited to publish the 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, outlining a broad set of capabilities slated for release between April 2026 and September 2026. These updates reflect our ongoing commitment to making AI an essential partner in how organizations operate, innovate, and grow.

Dynamics 365 leads this wave with AI-powered, agentic innovations across sales, service, finance, supply chain, human resources (HR), and commerce—helping organizations unify data, automate processes, and elevate customer and employee experiences. Microsoft Power Platform continues to expand modern app development, intelligent automation, and enterprise-grade governance to empower makers and developers to innovate with confidence. Role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot further evolve into intelligent daily command centers, helping to deliver richer, data-grounded insights and extensibility that help teams work smarter across every role.

To help you stay current on the most important and innovative capabilities, we’re moving beyond bi-annual launch events to lighter, more frequent business applications updates, featuring expert insights and demonstrations from Microsoft product leaders and engineers.

• Watch on demand: Dynamics 365 Business Applications Update
• Register for the Power Platform and Copilot Studio update April 15 at 9 AM PDT

Be sure to stay updated on the latest features and create your personalized release plan using the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

2026 release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 deliver AI-powered, agentic experiences across sales, service, finance, supply chain, commerce, HR, projects, sustainability, and enterprise resource planning (ERP)—bringing deeper Copilot integration, intelligent automation, unified customer and operational data, and enhanced cross-app capabilities to help organizations drive efficiency, elevate customer and employee experiences, and operate with greater agility and confidence.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers build their pipeline, enrich opportunities, and accelerate deal closure, while helping sellers easily access accurate, up-to-date information and recommending high-impact actions that sellers can take. Copilot experiences in Dynamics 365 Sales can draw on data spanning customer relationship management (CRM) and Microsoft 365 signals, like email and meeting recaps, to deliver actionable insights across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 experiences.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to enhance agentic capabilities across case management, email, customer intent, quality evaluation, and knowledge management. AI-infused admin and supervisor help to provide more transparency and quicker time-to-value. These investments strengthen end-to-end service orchestration, from helping identify customer intent to driving autonomous workflows that elevate service quality and responsiveness.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Dynamics 365 Contact Center advances the agentic contact center in 2026 release wave 1 with new AI-powered capabilities that improve self-service, support accelerate assisted service, and help organizations run contact center operations more intelligently in 2026 release wave 1. It expands to include emerging channels, supervisor insights, and extensibility, giving organizations a unified, AI-powered system to elevate the customer experience.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service strengthens service execution across technician productivity, resource scheduling, and work order management. Investments focus on mobile usability and reliability, intelligent scheduling through the Scheduling Operations Agent, and end‑to‑end execution across assets, projects, and financial operations in this release wave. Together, these updates help organizations manage service complexity and deliver consistent service outcomes.

Dynamics 365 Sustainability

Dynamics 365 Sustainability introduces more intuitive reporting navigation, advanced calculation versioning, and granular data‑locking to reinforce governance and regulatory confidence in this wave. Expanded finance integration, streamlined workflows, and updated templates and factor libraries will further empower organizations to make informed decisions and support progress toward their sustainability goals.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Dynamics 365 Finance delivers continued global scale enhancements that drive greater financial automation, strengthen global regulatory compliance posture, and enhance financial planning and analytics—helping organizations operate more efficiently and achieve their financial and operational goals with confidence.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management’s 2026 wave 1 enhances supply and demand planning with price-demand correlation and capacity-to-promise (CTP) date protection. Supplier communication and engagement are streamlined, while warehousing gains AI-powered picking, inventory rebalancing, and hands-free scanning—driving supply chain efficiency.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Dynamics 365 Project Operations brings rich capabilities in 2026 release wave 1—from change order support and smarter project planning to smoother quoting, budgeting, and contract workflows. New enhancements streamline item consumption, mobile expense management, subscription billing, and modern-architecture migration—delivering connected project experience.

Dynamics 365 Commerce

Dynamics 365 Commerce strengthens business-to-business (B2B) with multi-outlet ordering, unified sign-in, outlet-specific catalogs, and built-in credit management to help reduce friction and protect cash flow. It modernizes order management and assisted-selling workflows in retail stores, helping to improve associate productivity, and customer experiences across channels. It also enables cross-legal-entity inventory lookup and flexible, attribute-based pricing to help accelerate mass updates and help drive higher sales.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to advance in areas such as recruitment, onboarding, reporting, and integrated workforce management. By merging enhanced user experiences with broader ecosystem integration and expanding regional payroll collaborations, the platform enables organizations to optimize employee engagement, support operational accuracy, and confidently achieve their workforce objectives.

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities will introduce new enhancements that strengthen the foundation for AI experiences across Dynamics 365. These updates include improvements to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, as well as the general availability of immersive home, which is an AI-powered workspace designed to help users stay focused and prioritize what matters most.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data acts as the grounding layer for CRM copilots and AI agents, delivering real‑time, unified customer profiles that help power accurate decisions. With enriched data, teams can act on insights directly in their workflow to deliver timely, personalized experiences that deepen engagement and drive better outcomes. The result is an AI-ready data core that elevates agents and helps deliver more connected, intelligent CRM experiences.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys empowers end-to-end, agentic customer engagements across sales, marketing, and service, allowing businesses to proactively react to customer behavior using Copilot and AI agents. With smarter orchestration tools, teams can deliver impactful campaigns at scale to drive stronger relationships, higher efficiency, and revenue growth. Part of Dynamics 365, every interaction within your organization benefits from shared data and consistent intelligence across Microsoft CRM applications.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central accelerates the move to agentic ERP with enhancements to our AI‑powered agents that automate sales and purchase scenarios in 2026 release wave 1. Alongside new business capabilities, we invest heavily in developer productivity to support extensibility—improving advanced language (AL) testing, debugging, Copilot extensibility, and agent design.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

2026 release wave 1 updates for Microsoft Power Platform deliver modernized app experiences across Power Apps and Power Pages, AI-powered automation and agent innovation in Power Automate and Copilot Studio, enhanced Dataverse intelligence and programmability, and strengthened governance, security, and cost management capabilities to help organizations build, scale, and manage intelligent solutions with confidence.

Power Apps

Power Apps continues to modernize app experiences with a refreshed model-driven user interface (UI), improved mobile and offline capabilities, streamlined search, and expanded AI features. This release brings standardized modern theming to everyone, real-time Dataverse access for offline-first canvas apps, enhanced search in grids and lookups, and broader availability and extensibility of generative pages to help teams build and scale intelligent apps faster.

Power Pages

Power Pages will further empower pro-developers and low-code makers to build intelligent business portals for your employees, customers, citizens, and partners through better integration with market leading AI tools. Additionally, enhanced security agent features will further support low-code makers, pro-developers, and admins with actionable insights and abilities for securing their websites.

Power Automate

Power Automate is Microsoft’s comprehensive automation platform for cloud flows, desktop flows, and process mining. This release introduces AI agent authoring, optimization, and self-healing capabilities for desktop flows, Copilot Studio-powered actions in cloud flows, enhanced maker and collaboration tools across both, general availability of object-centric process mining, and consolidated governance reporting.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studiocontinues its journey to make agent and agentic workflows even easier to build and more powerful. Now you can further customize agents built with Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and power your automation with high value AI actions. Deeper governance, multi-agent orchestration, and evaluations enable further scaling. With connections to Microsoft Foundry and Work IQ, your agents can use the latest AI technology in coordination with your organizational data.

Microsoft Dataverse

Microsoft Dataverse continues to invest in enterprise-ready agentic and low-code data platform capabilities. The spotlight is on Work IQ and Copilot integration, delivering organization-specific decisions with adaptive learning and full auditability. We’re also enhancing agent programmability with Dataverse APIs, MCP servers, and Python SDK, plus new storage management tools for enterprise-grade compliance at scale.

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administrationintroduces admin controls for agent security, real-time risk assessment in Copilot Studio, and AI-powered governance agents that automate tenant monitoring and remediation in this release. Enhanced visibility into usage patterns, granular Copilot credit usage with pay-as-you-go (PAYG) caps, and connector dependencies help you optimize costs, demonstrate return on investment (ROI), and enforce compliance with organizational policies using features within the Power Platform Admin Center. GitHub integration and deploy from Git mature your application lifecycle management (ALM) practices with full audit trails.

Business Applications Update

Power Platform &

Copilot Studio edition

Watch on demand

Updates to role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

2026 release wave 1 updates for Microsoft role-based agents transform Sales Agent and Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot into intelligent daily command centers, helping to deliver richer, data-grounded insights, enhanced chat and mobile experiences, contextual support across Outlook and Teams, and strengthened governance and extensibility to help organizations drive productivity and scale AI responsibly.

Sales Agent

Sales Agent becomes the seller’s daily command center with richer Sales Chat and Sales Home experiences across desktop and mobile in 2026 release wave 1. Sellers will gain streamlined access to deal and account insights through configurable record summaries, contextual support in Outlook and Teams, and improved email and meeting intelligence. New governance and extensibility controls will also help organizations scale AI responsibly.

Finance Agent

Finance Agent helps finance professionals and their stakeholders interact with financial information from their ERP within the flow of work. In 2026 release wave 1, we continue expanding how this financial assistant supports common finance tasks such as reconciliation, variance analysis, and data preparation in Excel, as well as customer communications in Outlook. By bringing financial insights and assistance directly into familiar productivity tools, the Finance Agent helps teams investigate issues faster, respond to stakeholders more efficiently, and spend less time manually preparing or reconciling data so they can focus more on financial analysis and decision support.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2026 release wave 1 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2026 release wave 1 plan, and role-based agents 2026 release wave 1. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Business Applications Update

The Business Applications Update offers an early preview of new capabilities coming in the months ahead. This refreshed structure is designed to reflect the reality of our time: innovation does not happen twice a year; it is constant. Whether you are a strategic leader or a hands-on practitioner, this new cadence is built to get you quickly up to speed.

• Watch on demand: Dynamics 365 Business Applications Update
• Watch on demand: Power Platform and Copilot Studio Business Applications Update

The post 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot Studio offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The way we work is transforming. Generative AI and agentic business applications are catalysts for a profound shift in how we create, collaborate, and make decisions. What once took hours now happens in moments. Ideas move faster, insights surface sooner, and the boundaries between human creativity and machine capability are blurring. This isn’t the future—it’s unfolding now, and it’s changing the very fabric of how businesses operate.

It’s a move from systems of record to systems of action. In this new era, AI agents go beyond support—they help interpret signals, uncover patterns, and initiate actions and continuously optimize processes on your behalf. At Convergence 2025, December 9–12, we’ll explore how organizations can build an AI-first autonomous enterprise powered by data, copilots, and agents working together across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Cloud.

From automation to autonomy: The AI-first organization

Businesses have long pursued automation to streamline operations. The next leap is autonomy—systems that interpret signals across the business, adapt workflows in real time, and anticipate decisions. Autonomous enterprises go beyond efficiency—they are driven, adaptive, and human-centered, with intelligent systems that understand context, collaborate across processes, and deliver measurable outcomes.

We believe the recognition of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Leader placement in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and IDC MarketScape reports reinforces our ability to connect front-end and back-end operations into one intelligent ecosystem. Our leadership is grounded in the breadth of the Microsoft Cloud, the depth of our data estate, and our ability to bring AI, analytics, and business applications together as a unified platform to accelerate end-to-end AI transformation.

Agentic business applications are built on three connected pillars: data, Copilot, and agents—working together to change how work gets done.

1. Data: The foundation of agent autonomy

Most business processes begin with data. Finance close, order-to-cash, customer insights, case resolution, supply chain planning, field service, HR workflows—each depends on complete, connected, trusted information. When this data is fragmented across systems, agents can’t act with autonomy, and AI can only answer questions instead of accelerating outcomes.

Dynamics 365 spans both front-office and back-office operations—customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)—providing a continuous, end-to-end view of customers, employees, finances, supply chain, and operations. This structured, governed, and auditable data is the backbone of business processes—how work flows, how controls are enforced, and how organizations maintain compliance at scale.

As business model innovation becomes even more important, we continue to invest deeply in these core applications. We’re expanding capabilities across ERP and CRM, investing in bringing Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Microsoft Power Platform closer to Dynamics 365 than ever before. From connected frontlines to adaptive supply chains, business applications are becoming composable, intelligent, and outcome-driven—helping customers innovate more quickly while maintaining trust, security, and governance, adapt faster, redesign workflows, and build the operational integrity required for agent-powered processes. At Convergence 2025, you’ll see how Dynamics 365 continues to evolve as the operational engine of AI-first organizations.

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we announced major advances in how agents connect with ERP systems. The Dynamics 365 ERP Model Context Protocol (MCP) server is evolving from static actions to a dynamic, configurable framework that adapts as business needs evolve. A new analytics MCP server extends this capability to structured metrics and insights, supporting agents to reason over governed operational and financial data—not snapshots or exports, but live business signals. Together, these updates unify data, logic, and actions into a common protocol that can simplify integration and accelerate automation.

And with MCP designed for massive scale—including support of millions of ERP actions—organizations gain the performance and extensibility required for agent-powered business processes at enterprise scale.

The entire Microsoft data and application stack—Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM, Dataverse, Fabric, and more—forms the operational engine of agentic transformation. It provides the structure, governance, and adaptability required to support AI-powered business models and next-generation workflows.

2. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Your strategic productivity partner

Copilot continues to help transform productivity across many roles. It helps sales teams move deals forward, finance teams accelerate reconciliation, and service teams resolve issues before they escalate. But Copilot is more than an assistant—it’s the connective layer that links people, data, and systems, understanding intent, orchestrating workflows, and guiding decisions across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365.

3. Agents: Plan, decide, and act

We expect AI agents will be core to how businesses operate—planning, deciding, and acting across systems to accelerate outcomes. These agents will interpret signals, identify patterns, and initiate actions to keep the business in motion.

Microsoft’s strategy spans the full agent ecosystem: first-party embedded agents inside Dynamics 365, agents for specialized industries that can be customized and extended by partners, specific partner-built agents, and custom agents created by organizations through Microsoft Copilot Studio. All share the same security, governance, and identity foundation.

For small to mid-sized businesses, Dynamics 365 Business Central brings agents directly into everyday finance and operations. The Sales Order Agent creates, validates, and updates sales orders which can help improve accuracy and speed by reducing manual entry and exception management. The Payables Agent automates vendor invoices and reconciliations, improving control while freeing finance teams from repetitive tasks. Together, these agents help Business Central customers modernize core processes with governed, AI-powered actions that keep work flowing across purchasing, sales, and accounting.

Across Dynamics 365 finance and operations, embedded agents are transforming core processes—from time and expense entry in Project Operations, to supplier outreach in Supply Chain Management, to reconciliations in Finance and technician scheduling in Field Service. These agents help reduce manual effort and bring greater precision and autonomy to everyday operations.

At Convergence 2025, we’re also thrilled to announce the public preview of the Product Change Management Agent Template—an AI-powered solution that transforms how manufacturers manage the process of change across equipment, products, and processes changes. Built on Copilot Studio, the agent automates workflows and connects critical systems, helping teams cut approval times from weeks to days, reduce errors, and bring innovations to market, faster. Learn how customers like Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) are using this agent template to optimize their manufacturing operations.

Partner-built agents that extend industry workflows

Partners are building agents that extend domain workflows and connect directly to Dynamics 365 through the MCP. These solutions show how agent-to-agent coordination and cross-system reasoning will define the next era of enterprise automation.

Shop Floor by RSM helps manufacturers gain real-time visibility across production by bringing job details, quality checks, and operational signals into one experience. It can surface issues as they occur and support teams in resolving them quickly, helping to reduce disruptions and maintain consistent output. By connecting workers, data, and actions on the floor, the agent can support more resilient, adaptive manufacturing operations.

The PayFlow Agent by HSO helps finance teams manage vendor payment inquiries with greater speed and accuracy. It analyzes incoming emails, retrieves live payment data from Dynamics 365, and responds with up-to-date status information—which can reduce manual effort and help vendors receive clear, timely communication. The agent streamlines payment cycles and can improve transparency across accounts payable.

The Quality Impact Recall Agent by Cegeka helps organizations identify product quality issues and trace their impact across inventory and customer shipments. It coordinates notifications, guides corrective steps, and streamlines recall preparedness, which can help teams act quickly when risks emerge and maintain trust in the products they deliver.

Factorial connects to the Dynamics 365 Business Central MCP Server to deliver a new agent-to-agent experience. You can use a single Copilot interface to pull, exchange, and act on data across the systems. For example, within expense workflows, Factorial’s agent can request, validate, and reconcile financial data directly with Business Central.

Zensai’s agent integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central to transform an organization’s operational signals into aligned goals and check-ins inside Microsoft 365. Built in Copilot Studio and connected through MCP for Dynamics 365, the agent converts finance, compliance, HR, and sales insights into structured, cascaded goals within Perform 365. At Convergence 2025, you’ll see how these first-party, partner, and custom-built agents form a connected ecosystem—and how organizations are already using them to move from automation to autonomy.

Convergence 2025

Convergence has always been where our community comes together to learn, connect, and imagine what’s next—and this year we’re reigniting that tradition at a moment of extraordinary change.

Throughout the event you’ll see how organizations are moving from systems of record to systems of agency, and how you can apply these ideas to accelerate your own AI transformation. I’m excited for you to experience everything we’ve been building.

• Learn more about Convergence
• Explore agentic business applications and agentic ERP solutions
• Sign up to receive 2026 Convergence updates

The post The era of agentic business applications arrives at Convergence 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re entering the age of AI agents, a transformative moment reshaping the landscape of business applications and platforms. AI agents aren’t just making incremental improvements, they’re helping to redefine productivity and can fundamentally change how work gets done.

Published today, the 2025 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot offerings introduces new and improved capabilities that help organizations to harness the full potential of this new era. These plans compile new capabilities slated for release between October 2025 and March 2026.
Integral to the wave 2 plans, AI assistants and agents not only help humans with day-to-day tasks, but also act as proactive partners to drive better business outcomes. Our upcoming release brings that vision to life, helping to make AI not just accessible but an essential component in daily operations. Whether it’s enabling sellers to close deals faster, providing service teams real-time trusted knowledge, or empowering finance professionals with AI-driven reconciliation and analysis, these enhancements can be transformative to the way we all work.

Be sure to stay updated on the latest features and create your personalized release plan using the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

The 2025 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovation to transform functions across your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data enhances Microsoft Copilot and agents with real-time, unified customer profiles, enabling teams to act on insights within their workflow. With enriched data, seamless platform integration, and faster processing, businesses can deliver timely, personalized experiences that boost engagement and conversions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys empowers businesses to craft personalized, AI-driven customer experiences across all touchpoints. With Copilot, agents, and enhanced orchestration tools, teams can engage the right audiences at scale, streamline lead generation, and accelerate growth.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers achieve their targets and automate busywork. Microsoft Copilot delivers actionable insights in the flow of work, while AI agents research and engage leads, drive purchase intent, and proactively bring key insights and emergent deal risks—helping sellers close more deals faster. A reimagined interface reorients sellers from data to insights. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features in this release wave for Dynamics 365 Sales.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to enhance agentic and Copilot capabilities for case and knowledge management, as well as AI-driven routing.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center continues to enhance agentic and Copilot capabilities to automate the service journey across digital and voice channels, along with the introduction of new omnichannel and supervisor capabilities in the 2025 release wave 2.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will deliver AI agents, enhanced scheduling tools, mobile usability improvements, and deeper Microsoft 365 integration in the upcoming release wave. With innovations across inspections, vendor coordination, and connectivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Field Service empowers organizations to deliver smarter, faster, and more seamless service at scale.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance brings global-scale finance and agentic operations to our customers, including agents that can lead to faster financial close, and provide additional automation and optimization across large scale operations, as well as enhancements to business performance analytics and planning solutions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can enhance demand planning with event and promotion forecasting, and help improve quality management for sample handling; and the Supplier Communications Agent will automate vendor interactions. New supplier engagement tools and warehouse app upgrades will also be introduced to further streamline operations and boost efficiency.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations will continue to deliver powerful enhancements across the project lifecycle. These include improved mobile and browser experiences for time and expense, better project planning with enterprise custom fields, streamlined billing and invoicing workflows, and expanded support for stocked items, investment projects, and migrations to the modern architecture.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources can enhance the hire-to-retire journey with Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Viva Connections integration to help reduce duplication. New agentic capabilities will be introduced to streamline onboarding with guided experiences and automation. Recruiter assist will also now support job description generation and interview assistance, helping to improve efficiency across hiring and onboarding.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce advances in-store experiences by providing a mobile-first point-of-sale that provides business continuity even during a business outage. Improvements to the Adyen payment connector allows modern payments like Pay by Link across channels, offering more purchasing options for omnichannel customers. Additionally, omnichannel unified pricing enables retailers to establish more intricate pricing structures, helping them remain competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces AI agents to enhance efficiency and automation in the 2025 release wave 2. These agents seamlessly integrate to execute complex tasks, generate reports, automate processes, and optimize order creation using natural language processing. Additionally, this release focuses on quality management, subcontracting, sustainability, and e-document capabilities.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

2025 release wave 2 updates for Microsoft Power Platform bring new and updated ways for organizations to analyze, act on, and automate data to digitally transform their businesses.

Microsoft Copilot Studio continues its journey to make agent creation and operation even easier and more powerful with autonomous agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, the ability to build complete teams of agents that work seamlessly together, and improved governance for enterprise scalability. Copilot Studio will offer even deeper integration with Azure AI Foundry and the Microsoft Graph, helping to ensure your agents can use the latest AI technology in coordination with your data in Microsoft Graph. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Copilot Studio can benefit your business.

Microsoft Power Apps enhances human and agent collaboration with a new agent feed to supervise the work of agents and extensible built-in agents for common tasks like enter, explore, visualize, and summarize data. Bring business problems to Plan Designer and a team of agents will help you build enterprise solutions, including apps, agents, Microsoft Power BI reports, and more. Vibe code with the App Agent to create data-connected experiences—just describe what you need or provide an image, and it can be done.

Microsoft Power Pages enables businesses to build secure, data-driven portals effortlessly. In this wave, we will further expedite site building for low-code makers and pro developers to help build intelligent sites for your employees, customers, and partners. The introduction of enhanced security agent features will further empower low-code makers, pro developers, and admins with actionable insights and abilities for securing their websites.

Microsoft Power Automate is transforming how enterprises automate complex business processes through new human-in-the-loop experiences, such as advanced approvals and AI-native capabilities, such as generative actions and intelligent document processing. To manage complex automations at scale, a comprehensive suite of governance, observability, and security controls will be introduced to the Automation Center and Power Platform admin center.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to serve as a trusted low-code data platform, enabling the creation of scalable agents, Copilot applications, and automations. This update introduces enhancements to core agentic capabilities, including Dataverse for Agents and Dataverse Search to support smarter, AI-ready experiences. New features such as Dataverse Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server and AI-powered business logic tools further expand the ability to build dynamic, intelligent solutions grounded in enterprise data.

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration will become the unified governance hub for managing intelligent agents, agent-driven apps, and automated workflows across the Microsoft ecosystem in this release wave. This will provide a secure, governable, reliable platform for agent development.

Updates to Copilot offerings

Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot help maximize business impact across sales, service, and finance. Learn more about the 2025 release wave 2 updates for Copilot offerings. Agent updates for sales will help sellers work smarter, engage strategically, and close deals faster. Agent updates for service will expand CRM connectivity and enhance email insights and drafting—all within the tools reps use daily. Updates for finance will offer easily customizable agents that can be launched from familiar tools like Excel, boosting efficiency and insight.

Early access period

Starting August 4, 2025, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by October 2025. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2025 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2025 release wave 2 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2025 release wave 2 plan, and Copilot offerings 2025 release wave 2. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2025 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Microsoft Copilot offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On January 25, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between April 2024 and September 2024. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and improvements, showcasing our ongoing commitment to fueling digital transformation for both our customers and partners.

This release reinforces our dedication to developing applications and experiences that contribute value to roles by dismantling barriers between data, insights, and individuals. This wave introduces diverse enhancements across various business applications, emphasizing improved user experiences, productivity, innovative app development and automation, and advanced AI capabilities. Watch a summary of the release highlights.

Explore a heightened level of convenience when examining Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans using the release planner. Enjoy unmatched flexibility as you customize, filter, and sort plans to align with your preferences, effortlessly sharing them. Maintain organization, stay informed, and remain in control while smoothly navigating through various active waves of plans. For more information, visit the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 release wave

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

Learn more

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enhances customer understanding and boosts sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. The 2024 release wave 1 focuses on providing sellers timely customer information, expediting deals with actionable insights, improving productivity, and empowering organizations through open configurability and expanded generative AI leadership. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching the Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales specific skills, data, and actions. Additionally, the team will focus on assisting sellers on the go within the Outlook and Microsoft Teams mobile apps.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot, filtering response verification, diagnostic tools for admins and agents, and usability improvements to multi-session apps. Additionally, we’re making enhancements to the voice channel, and improving unified routing assignment accuracy and prioritization. Watch this video about the exciting new features in Customer Service.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is a field service management application that allows companies to transform their service operations with processes and experiences to manage, schedule, and perform. In the 2024 release wave 1, we’re introducing the next generation of Copilot capabilities, modern experiences, Microsoft 365 integrations, vendor management, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations integration.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues on its journey of autonomous finance, building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process, to increase user productivity and business agility. This release focuses on enhancing business performance planning and analytics, adding AI powered experiences, easing setup of financial dimension defaulting with AI rules guidance, increasing automation in bank reconciliation, netting, expanding country coverage, tax automation, and scalability. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Finance can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhances business processes for increased insight and agility. Copilot skills improve user experiences, while demand planning transforms the forecast process, and warehouse processes are optimized for greater efficiency and accuracy. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on core functionality improvements, including support for discounts and fees, enhanced resource reconciliation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Project Operations can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including supporting high-detail 3D model support through Microsoft Azure Remote Rendering and greatly improved web content support that enable customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data. Additionally, support for Guides content on mobile will be generally available in the coming wave through a seamless integration with the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile application.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources will continue to improve recruiting experiences with functionality to integrate with external job portals and talent pools and offer management. We will continue to expand our human capital management ecosystem to include additional payroll partners and build better together experiences that span the gamut of what Microsoft can offer to improve employee experiences in corporations of any size and scale across the globe. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Human Resources can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to invest in omnichannel retail experiences through advancements in mobile point of sale experiences like Tap to Pay for iOS and offline capabilities for Store Commerce on Android. The business-to-business buying experience is enhanced with new capabilities, and a streamlined order management solution for buyers who work across multiple organizations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is delivering substantial enhancements, with a central emphasis on harnessing the power of Copilot. Available in more than 160 countries, the team is focused on Copilot-driven capabilities to streamline and enhance productivity through enhanced reporting and data analysis capabilities, elevated project and financial management, and simplified workflow automation. We have also upgraded our development and governance tools and introduced improvements in managing data privacy and compliance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. With this release, we’re making it easier and faster to ingest and manage your data. AI enables quick insights and democratized access to analytics. Real-time data ingestion, creation, and updates further enable the optimization of experiences in the moments that matter. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys brings the power of AI to revolutionize how marketers work, enabling businesses to optimize interactions with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, we empower marketers with a deeper customer understanding, we enable them to create new experiences within minutes, reach customers in more ways, and continuously optimize results. Thanks to granular lead qualification, we continue to boost the synergy between sales and marketing to achieve superior business outcomes. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

Learn more

Watch this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave in Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Apps focuses on integrating Copilot to accelerate app development with AI and natural language, enhancing user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. The team is also simplifying the creation of modern apps through contemporary controls, responsive layouts, and collaboration features. Additionally, they’re facilitating enterprise-scale development, enabling makers and admins to expand apps across the organization with improved guardrails and quality assurance tools.

Microsoft Power Pages interactive Copilot now supports every step of site building to create intelligent websites—design, page layouts, content editing, data binding, learning, chatbot, accessibility checking, and securing the site. Connect to data anywhere with the out-of-the-box control library and secure the website with more insights at your fingertips.

Microsoft Power Automate is bringing Copilot capabilities across cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining. This will allow customers to use natural language to discover optimization opportunities, build automations, quickly troubleshoot any issues, and provide a delightful experience in managing the automation estate. For enterprise-scale solutions, maintenance is made easier with improved notifications on product capabilities.

Microsoft Copilot Studio brings native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilot, general availability for generative actions, and geo-expansions to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Norway, Korea, South America, and South Africa. We’re also introducing rich capabilities to integrate with OpenAI GPT models, along with new channels such as WhatsApp, and software lifecycle capabilities such as topic level import/export and role-based access control.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to make investments focusing on enhancing maker experience by improving app building productivity infused with Copilot experiences, seamless connectivity to external data sources, and AI-powered enterprise copilot for Microsoft 365.

AI Builder invests in three key areas: prompt builder for GPT prompts, intelligent document processing with new features and models, and AI governance improvements, including enhanced capacity management and data policies. These initiatives aim to empower users with advanced generative AI, streamline document processing, and strengthen governance across AI models within Power Apps.

Early access period 

Starting February 5, 2024, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2024. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page. 

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 1 plan, and share your feedback in the community forums via Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, we kicked off the 2023 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a six-month rollout of new and enhanced capabilities scheduled for release between October 2023 and March 2024.

This release wave introduces hundreds of new features across Microsoft Power Platform applications, including enhanced capabilities for governance, administration, and professional development. Updates for Dynamics 365 include innovation to help employees be more productive, create exceptional customer experiences and deepen relationships, and drive meaningful growth across the business. This release also features new AI capabilities in Copilot—which more than 130,000 organizations have now experienced—that help to improve insights, save time, and enhance creativity across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.  

Tune in to the launch event, live or on-demand, for a concise overview of the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Nestlé, Kodak Alaris, Northern Trust, Centrica, Spark NZ, Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland, and Suffolk are adopting these capabilities to drive transformative changes in their businesses.

Some of the themes at the event include:

• A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
• Transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) with AI
• Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
• Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform

A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service

As a frontline for customer loyalty, service agents and field teams need access to information and insights to understand customer needs and respond appropriately. New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will help reduce time spent on common tasks, as well as introduce enhancements to the Customer Service workspace. Updates include improved inbox functionality, a redesigned voice experience, enhanced collaboration through Microsoft Teams, and integrated diagnostics for administrators—all aimed at boosting agent productivity and operational efficiency.

During the session led by Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Customer Service, we demonstrated how Copilot assists customer service and field service processes, including customer self-service, across various channels.

We also revealed how customers like Northern Trust Corporation, a leading wealth and asset management institution, can use Copilot to assist the client services team with tasks ranging from account reviews and case investigations to post-resolution wrap-ups. Northern Trust Corporation has not only gained recognition for its innovative financial services, but also for its unwavering commitment to customer service. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a steadfast component of its journey, the latest capabilities in release wave 2 can help the client service teams at Northern Trust be even more efficient, effective, and customer-focused, streamlining its workflow and enhancing its ability to provide timely and accurate support to clients. 

The session also delved deeper into the field service domain, where Centrica, a global energy services company, effectively manages its sizable workforce of 12,000 field operatives on site by harnessing the new capabilities of Dynamics 365 Field Service, streamlining processes from task assignments to issue resolution.

To learn more about release wave 2 capabilities for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, visit the release planner.

Transforming ERP with AI

The new release wave harnesses AI, automation, and analytics to help organizations drive greater operational efficiency across finance, supply chain, and operations—capabilities that enhance visibility, automate processes, extend coverage, and deliver a more integrated experience across departments.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance include the general availability of extended planning and analysis, which brings together operational and financial planning to continuously plan, act, and analyze. In addition, the general availability of business performance analytics streamlines financial reporting by centralizing data from multiple business processes and in an easy-to-use interface.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management include improvements in demand planning, as well as procure-to-pay processes. Copilot will now suggest actions that can help purchasing agents make better decisions in response to new and updated information that affects open purchase orders.

At the launch event, Georg Glantschnig, Vice President, AI ERP, showcased how Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland is improving its demand planning accuracy by using AI. These new features have greatly enhanced its capacity to serve more customers by precisely planning food requirements, thereby reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability through more efficient facility operations. Additionally, the process of fulfilling purchase orders has also seen a remarkable enhancement, thanks to Copilot.

We also demonstrated how New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider, Spark NZ, is transforming its finance and supply chain operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365. It can now automate many of its financial processes—including vendor invoice processing, automatic revaluation of foreign currency transactions, transaction reconciliation, billing, and complex tax calculations. Human resources can also streamline processes, from hiring to self-service vacation time requests and tracking.

See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, and Human Resources.

Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Copilot you can use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.

The new release wave introduces a variety of solutions to help marketers and sales professionals use Copilot to deepen their understanding of their target customer base, streamline engagement processes, and push the boundaries in crafting exceptional customer experiences. 

In the closing keynote session, Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience, demonstrated how Kodak Alaris, a global technology company, effectively used Copilot within Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights. Taking advantage of the new AI capabilities, it tapped into previously hidden data to target its customer base, unlocking capabilities that were once out of reach. Using Copilot, it was able to create unique personalized content to keep customers informed about its services and effortlessly establish new levels of productivity and customer connection, attracting new businesses like never before.

For more details, review the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform

Copilot in Power Platform ushers in a new era of AI-assisted low-code development. Copilot features in release wave 2 make it even easier to quickly create solutions.

At the launch event, Sangya Singh, Vice President, Power Pages, showcased how Copilot plays a vital role in democratizing development, enabling a broader audience—both citizen and professional developers—to create innovative solutions using natural language.

Through the lens of Suffolk, one of America’s largest construction companies, we demonstrated how Microsoft Power Automate helped them streamline critical material request processes, enabling teams to use Copilot in Power Automate to build flows by describing what they need.

We also showcased how Microsoft Power Apps can help Suffolk facilitate efficient coordination of construction status updates, and how the generative answers capability in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents can search industry resources for answers, reducing manual research. We also demonstrated how Microsoft Power Pages improves collaboration with multiple partners on construction projects, and how Microsoft Power BI can help Suffolk visualize safety data at construction sites across the globe, highlighting the trends, causes, and outcomes of incidents and near misses so that preventative actions can be easily identified and implemented.

In addition to enhancing daily business operations, Copilot within Microsoft Power Platform has significantly improved the governance and administrative experience, expediting the development of these applications.

Visit the Microsoft Power Platform release planner for more details.

Tune in to the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event 

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in live or on-demand for a concise overview of the release wave.

Watch now

Watch the launch event on-demand for in-depth insights and demonstrations of the new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You can also delve into several deep-dive presentations on topics including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, responsible AI practices, and a fireside chat that explores the latest features in this release wave.

Don’t forget to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to stay informed about what’s new and on the horizon.

We also invite you to learn more about the latest AI innovation at Microsoft Ignite 2023, taking place in Seattle from November 14 through November 17, 2023, with online sessions available live and on-demand on November 15 and November 16. Register today.

The post Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event introduces wave of new AI-powered capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

AI is ready to support work—the question is: What will your business do with it?

Join us at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on October 25 and explore how to create an AI-powered business that helps people and teams be more productive, solve problems quickly, and focus more energy on building revenue.

This will mark our tenth Business Applications Launch Event—a milestone in our commitment to business app innovation, our customers, and our partners. But we’re just getting started. To see what’s next—and what it means for your organization—you’ll hear directly from Microsoft leaders about their vision for AI, customer service, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and low-code solutions.

Register for a glimpse at the future of business AI, with thought leaders and Dynamics 365 experts guiding you. Be first to see the latest AI advancements in action, including:

• The latest AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales that provides relevant recommendations, summarizes data, retrieves information, and performs actions within the flow of work.
• Advanced Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service that streamline agents’ workspaces, let them see transcripts of live chats and voice calls in their inboxes, and allow them to respond to customers quickly with the right information.
• New Microsoft Sales Copilot features that help compose emails, update customer relationship management (CRM) records, recap meetings, and offer real-time tips to help sales teams close more deals.
• Enhanced automation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance to help handle accounts payable and bank statements, complex tax scenarios, and e-invoicing requirements in more markets.
• New Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to help marketers quickly create memorable customer experiences using whole new levels of personalization for emails, images, and layouts.

Plus, learn about updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources—all ready to help your employees be more productive, build customer loyalty, and drive meaningful growth. You’ll also hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about what’s driving innovation today. Then catch some of the newest AI capabilities in action, with demos led by the people behind the 2023 release wave 2, offering expert guidance on how these updates will help you:

• Improve insights, save time, and fuel creativity with the latest AI-powered solutions.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating work and avoid repetitive tasks with automation.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization using modern, AI-enhanced collaboration tools.

Insights on putting AI to work for you

The Business Applications Launch Event is more than our chance to showcase hundreds of new features and updates. It’s also a great opportunity for you to learn expert tips on how to apply these new technologies to some of your business’ biggest challenges. And if you have questions about new features, the role of AI at work, the evolution of copilots, or what’s ahead for business apps, get them answered by experts—we’ll be hosting a live Q&A chat at the end of the event, so be sure to stick around.

It’s been inspiring to see all the new features that the Dynamics 365 team has been working on, and we’re looking forward to celebrating 10 events’ worth of advancing business applications ahead.

Business Applications Launch Event

Explore how to create an AI-powered business.

Register now

We hope you’ll join us.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

 9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

The post Discover new AI for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at our tenth Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We surveyed more than 500 CFOs and senior business leaders for our 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report and found that many organizations continue to struggle with lack of IT resources, overwhelmed employees, and disconnected systems. In fact, while 79 percent outlined that they were shifting to owning business model innovation and empowering transformation across the organization, 88 percent said they don’t have the IT resources or tools needed to drive operational efficiency and minimize busy work for their teams. Finance, human resources (HR), and project operations leaders need to reimagine processes to help their teams achieve more, faster. 

With the 2023 release wave 1, we are delivering enhancements across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Dynamics 365 Human Resources that focus on helping our customers adapt faster, work smarter, perform better, and operate more sustainably.

Adapt faster with simplified financial consolidations and close

Financial reporting and close—whether year-end, quarterly, or monthly—can be challenging for finance teams as they must quickly aggregate data from across the organization and handle the close and consolidation process on time without compromising accuracy. With these latest updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are further streamlining the close process while improving speed and accuracy, enabling organizations to adapt faster to changes.

Improved speed and accuracy

With these latest updates, we’re providing new features that take the hassle out of recording certain types of transactions, improving speed and accuracy. 

Changes in exchange rates cause the book value of open transactions in foreign currencies to vary over time. Recording these fluctuations accurately at a granular level is incredibly important, yet it’s difficult in practice. Our updated currency revaluation posting profile enables finance teams to post currency revaluation adjustments per currency and module. Accounts payable and accounts receivable subledgers are updated automatically to reflect the unrealized gain or loss, helping to ensure these adjustments are accurately recorded.

Similarly, determining how certain transactions, such as the disposal of a fixed asset as a scrap, should be recorded can be complicated. Elimination of these transactions affects balance sheet accounts, such as acquisition adjustment, depreciation adjustment, revaluation, and write-up and write-down accounts, so recording these adjustments accurately is incredibly important. These latest updates provide options that allow you to determine the posting details of fixed asset disposal scrap/sale based on your business needs.

More granular tracking and reporting

While businesses need to quickly consolidate financial data to close their books, it is also essential that they have sufficient granularity in their reporting to provide finance leaders with the visibility they need to drive strategic decisions. 

After transactions are posted, it’s common for organizations to require visibility into subledger data so that certain transactions can be analyzed. With this update, we are including new ways to define financial tags. Financial tags let organizations track user-defined fields on accounting entries posted to the general ledger. Financial tags can also be used to track the subledger data and are now available for matching within ledger settlement, reducing the number of transactions to be manually matched.

In addition to supporting new financial tags, we’re also improving how vendor and customer payments are recorded to the bank subledger. This feature allows an organization to post vendor and customer payments in separate vouchers but update the bank account in summary to match the bank statement, making reconciliation easier and ensuring smoother bank reconciliation.

Accelerate global expansion and operations

As companies look to better manage the complexities of international operations, globalization studio enhances the globalization capabilities for numerous countries’ new laws around reporting. With this latest update, we are bringing new capabilities to help make it easier for companies working in certain parts of the European Union (EU), Latin America (LATAM), and Asia Pacific area (APAC). 

These updates include the extension of multiple tax ID reporting to more EU countries, which helps ensure accurate tax numbers for transactions, streamline compliance, and raise operational efficiency for global companies. We’re also expanding out-of-the-box regulatory compliance coverage to additional LATAM countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Colombia, and Uruguay. By providing localized solutions, Dynamics 365 Finance users can confidently navigate the regulatory landscape, reduce compliance risks, and fortify their operational efficiency across multiple LATAM countries.

Work smarter with automation that minimizes repetitive tasks and data entry

For many companies, financial processes still involve many manual and repetitive tasks, which require a large number of resources and take finance leaders away from more strategic work. According to our 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report, 88 percent of financial leaders feel they are primarily responsible for transactional functions, such as creating financial reports, as opposed to the more strategic functions of running a business, like advising on innovations. Similarly, 88 percent of finance leaders reported not having the automation tools they need to automate repetitive tasks (for example, digital invoicing software and online payroll) and free up their time for more innovative work. With this latest release, we’ve added new capabilities to help finance teams work smarter by using automation to minimize manual and repetitive tasks. 

Streamline invoicing to reduce the time from procure to pay

Processing vendor invoices is a manual and repetitive task in every organization. Not only is this process resource intensive—requiring a high volume of document processing—it is also ripe for human error.

By digitizing and automating invoicing, businesses can save time and reduce errors. Dynamics 365 Finance includes accounts payable automation with invoice capture to provide continuous AI-driven automation with reading and recognition of vendor invoices. With this release, we added additional capabilities for non-purchase order (PO) invoices and the vendor invoice journal. We’ve also enhanced the invoice process with the ability to process free text invoices faster and invoice automation that enables the processing of vendor invoices during import, all of which save time and effort while helping to improve accuracy. This eliminates the need for additional background processing and frees accounts payable staff to focus their efforts on exceptions.

Improve processes

Working smarter as a company requires integrating systems of record to provide greater visibility and continuity across the organization. With this update, we have added some key integrations that will make it easier for companies to operate strategically.

In this update, we’ve enabled resource management integration. By significantly streamlining the project resourcing process for organizations by consolidating employee data, resource managers can swiftly identify and allocate suitable resources based on skills, certificates, and availability. We’ve also enabled learning management integration, which offers users a centralized view of training data and other employee information, streamlining workforce development, boosting productivity, and fostering a more informed decision-making process.

Simplify manual processes

Organizations are often burdened by manual tasks, which draw valuable resources and are prone to error. For those tasks that require manual inputs, making those experiences as simple and intuitive as possible is critical. 

One such experience is time entry. We’ve taken steps to modernize the user experience for time entry in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, making it more efficient and user-friendly. The modernized interface optimizes usability, accessibility, and extensibility, allowing consultants to enter time more effectively and accurately.

Perform better with enhanced business performance analytics

As finance leaders continue to take on more strategic responsibilities with organizations, the need for high-quality data and insights is increasingly important. Yet getting this visibility across the organization remains a challenge for many businesses. The new Dynamics 365 features significantly improve business performance analytics. 

Turn data into insights

To be successful, business leaders don’t just need data; they need actionable insights that help drive corporate strategy. New record to report and procure to pay data models will provide financial and non-financial data and metadata into Microsoft Dataverse and transform it into analytical tables. Structuring this complex data provides a single data source for reporting, allowing users to build well-defined and readily available relationships between ledger, subledger, and source documents from multiple systems.

The new reporting hub and base reports on data governance, as well as row-level and role-level security. These features help finance teams quickly locate, edit, and share relevant reports by business process easily and quickly—helping to put insights into action.

Advanced data gets enhanced security

Security is paramount for financial data. We’re furthering our investment in security by providing additional security controls in Dynamics 365 Finance. Business performance analytics provides row-level and role-level security capabilities to multiple users in your organization’s finance and accounting teams, as well as to the staff in other departments. This helps ensure that reports are only seen by those with appropriate permission.

When paired with the extensibility of the data model, users can be set up to view reports by dimension and legal entity. This lets teams create refreshable, prewritten reports that can be distributed beyond the finance organization, making it easier and safer to circulate data.

Making it easier to navigate taxes

Streamline tax calculation and reporting processes for import/export businesses through direct currency conversions and localized support for Indian taxation. Additionally, you can simplify interoperation with tax solution ISVs, enabling efficient management of complex tax rates across multiple jurisdictions. The withhold tax calculation during invoicing also helps customers meet their compliance obligations, reducing manual effort for businesses operating in countries with specific tax requirements.

By integrating these features into a single comprehensive solution, businesses can achieve greater accuracy in tax declarations, seamless integration between project management and accounting modules, and improved tax management across various jurisdictions. These capabilities ultimately help organizations drive efficiency, fulfill legal compliance, and make better decisions, allowing businesses to thrive in an increasingly globalized market.

Operate more sustainably

We are introducing new features aimed at helping businesses improve traceability tied to sustainability by utilizing the power of automation, digitization, and compliance with evolving global regulations. These features include archiving data and electronic invoicing services for various countries. Implementing these solutions can help organizations reduce power usage, improve efficiency, and comply with local and international regulations.

Reduce data storage energy expenditures

The archive data feature allows companies to save storage space and improve performance by reducing the data set they work against. This enables organizations to archive data consistently and securely while still allowing for reporting and analysis of historical data through standard reporting.

Eliminate paper waste

Electronic invoicing services support the move towards a paperless environment by helping companies automate the entire invoicing process. By eliminating the need for physical paperwork, electronic invoicing reduces paper waste. This newest release offers electronic invoicing services for France, Poland, and Japan.

Additionally, the global e-invoicing feature addresses the growing market driven by tax digitization and invoice automation. By interoperating with government services and intermediate-certified operators, the global e-invoicing feature helps businesses efficiently exchange electronic invoice documents with tax authorities and other businesses.

Try out the capabilities

Many users started testing the new features in an early access period starting January 30, 2023. This allowed users and partners to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. For those already in an early access non-production environment, these new features will be automatically enabled with the April 2023 upgrades.

Watch this YouTube video to learn more about these updates or get started with a free trial.

Dynamics 365 release planner

See the new features for Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations

Explore release planner

The post 2023 wave 1 releases AI, automation, and analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Ignite returns live next week—a digital and in-person event in Seattle, Washington on Wednesday, October 12, and Thursday, October 13. Register today for two content-packed days where you’ll explore the future of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and join other technologists in immersive learning experiences, product demos, breakout sessions, and expert meet-ups.

This year, the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform teams will showcase new and upcoming capabilities as well as demonstrate how your organization can make the most of AI and automation to streamline business processes, enhance collaboration, and improve customer and employee experiences.

Register now for the in-person or digital event. The free digital event will be the foundation of Microsoft Ignite this year, offering hours of sessions and interactive learning, Q&As with experts, live discussions, roundtables, and much more, all streaming live and on-demand, at no cost.  

Dynamics 365 at Microsoft Ignite: Essential sessions and activities

To help you plan your experience from the variety of sessions and activities, we’ve compiled some essential presentations, sessions, and viewing tips. Click the linked titles to learn more and add each event to your session scheduler.

Ignite opening keynote

Wednesday, October 12 | 9:00 AM–9:50 AM Pacific Time

Join the opening keynote, hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, for an overview of innovations that will shape the future of business.

Core Theme Session

Wednesday, October 12 | 11:00 AM–11:30 AM Pacific Time
Deliver efficiency with automation and AI across your business

Learn how organizations across industries are applying AI, automation, and mixed reality to streamline business processes, enhance collaboration, and improve customer and employee experiences. You’ll get a first-hand look at how products like Microsoft Viva Sales, Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, and Microsoft Power Platform rapidly enable AI and automation with modern capabilities.

Into Focus

Wednesday, October 12 | 3:00 PM–3:40 PM Pacific Time
Business Applications Into Focus: Biz Apps 2022 Release Wave 2 Launch

Don’t miss this first look at the new Dynamics 365 and Power Platform innovations coming to market. We’ll debut new technologies not previously announced, as well as give you a first look at innovations in release wave 2—features that are planned for release between October 2022 and March 2023. We’ll also spotlight organizations that will use these new technologies to drive better operational outcomes and customer success.

Dynamics 365 breakout sessions

After the keynote, learn what’s new and on the horizon for Dynamics 365 in these featured sessions:

Wednesday, October 12 | 11:05 AM–11:30 AM Pacific Time
Re-energize your workforce in the office, at home, and everywhere in between

In today’s shifting macroeconomic climate, technology can help organizations in every industry overcome challenges and emerge stronger. From enabling hybrid work to bringing business processes into the flow of work, learn how Microsoft 365 helps organizations deliver on their digital imperative, so they can “do more with less.”

Wednesday, October 12 | 2:00 PM–2:30 PM Pacific Time
Jumpstart your physical operations transformation with technologies built for the industrial metaverse

Explore what the industrial metaverse means today and where the technology is headed. From autonomous automation to connected field service and mixed reality to digitization of connected environments, we’ll showcase a maturity model that you can use to guide your implementation over time while solving business challenges each step of the way. We’ll also share how innovative customers are using this technology now to secure a competitive edge and build for the future.

Wednesday, October 12 | 12:00 PM–12:40 PM Pacific Time
Microsoft Viva: Latest innovations and roadmap for the new digital employee experience

Hybrid work presents new challenges for engaging, motivating, and growing a workforce. IT leaders and human resources (HR) leaders have an opportunity to partner on a more advanced digital experience to support various ways of working. We’ll explore how Viva puts people at the center, connecting them to company information, communications, workplace insights, knowledge, and learning. Product leadership will share the latest innovations from Viva to prepare your organization for the new digital employee experience, today. 

Wednesday, October 12 | 12:00 PM–12:35 PM Pacific Time
Unlock new customer experiences with NLP at scale

Organizations around the world use Microsoft’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to simplify tasks and support human connection, from helping employees better understand customer needs to helping customers find information more quickly. Learn why technology leaders are doubling down on NLP, and get a deeper understanding of NLP capabilities available across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services that can help transform customer and employee engagement at scale.

Wednesday, October 12 | 2:00 PM–2:30 PM Pacific Time
Create rich connections and customer experiences with Microsoft Teams Phone and contact center capabilities

Staying connected with colleagues, partners, and customers is more important than ever. Join us to learn how Teams Phone and contact center capabilities for Teams can create richer communications while helping organizations turn customer service into a team sport. We’ll share the latest updates on our mobility innovation and discuss how organizations are using Teams Phone enterprise-grade calling.

Attend live or watch on-demand

In addition to the live streams above, each segment will be rebroadcasted throughout the event. The key segments are open to everyone, but we encourage you to register in advance to unlock the full Microsoft Ignite experience—from digital breakout sessions with live Q&As to conversations with Microsoft experts and your global community.

More to explore

Microsoft Ignite will include live segments and Q&As, available across time zones. Check out all of the events and activities hosted by our team of experts:

• Ask the Experts: An opportunity to ask questions at sessions with experts in cloud, desktop, mobile, and web development for specific guidance on your project or interests. 
• Table Topics: A live discussion with the community on camera and in chat. Get inspired by community experts, learn best practices, and share helpful resources with other attendees. 
• Local Connections: An opportunity to engage with attendees local to you, no matter where you are in the world. Dedicated time to help find developers, Microsoft experts, and partners with similar interests in your area. 
• Learn Live: Guided online content with subject matter experts to direct you through Microsoft Learn modules that you can complete on your own at any time. 
• Product Roundtables: Two-way discussions direct with Microsoft engineering. 
• Cloud Skills Challenge: A collection of interactive, online learning modules to complete for a chance to earn a free certification exam. 
• One-to-One Consultations: A unique opportunity to connect with an expert during the event to get the technical answers you need. These 45-minute sessions provide the event’s only one-to-one setting.

Get the most of your Microsoft Ignite experience

Be sure to follow Microsoft Ignite on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date and connected with the community, and register for Microsoft Ignite today.

The post Your guide to Dynamics 365 at Microsoft Ignite 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Think about the time spent between the moment you open an email or chat, find, and reply with the requested information, and then get back into the flow of your work. Add up those minutes-long interruptions, and you begin to realize why we often can’t finish everything on our to-do lists.

We want to dramatically reduce those disruptions by bringing together business processes, information, communication, and collaboration, enabling an integrated workspace for teamwork. Not only does this save time and improve collaboration throughout the day but frees up time so you can stay focused on customers.

At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing a breadth of more connected and engaging experiences between Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams, bringing together the features you depend on into a unified digital workplace for collaboration across your entire organization. These new capabilities help everyone work together from anywhere in a more seamless and natural way, as well as better engage with customers for more personalized experiences.

We’re making it simple to meet, chat, call, and collaborate right from within your Dynamics 365 workspace. For example, as you browse a customer record, you can see related conversations and people, and then start or continue a chat without switching to Teams. Similarly, while working in Teams, you can seamlessly access and share business processes, records, and information from Dynamics 365—so everything you need to stay focused and productive is in context to the task at hand.

Whether you work in sales or marketing, service, finance, commerce, or human resources—any role that depends on teamwork—the unified collaboration features in Dynamics 365 applications and Teams will help you get daily activities done in a way that simply keeps everyone connected virtually in a natural way.

Let’s take a closer look at how our approach to unified collaboration makes an impact across the organization.

Sales: boost collaborative digital selling and engagement and transform customer interactions into revenue

Strong team collaboration and communication is essential in a sales organization, helping every seller identify, track, and share leads and opportunities. With Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, we are helping put collaboration in context and providing actionable next steps using AI-driven insights. This allows sellers to be more productive, work together better, and build stronger customer relationships.

Today we are announcing several new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales to boost collaboration across sales teams.

We are introducing an embedded Teams chat experience for Dynamics 365—a side panel that shows recent and ongoing chats, channels, and people in Teams related to the customer record in view.

As a seller browses customer records, the side panel displays (1) Teams chats and channels that mention the customer or account, as well as (2) suggested chats and contacts based on colleagues who are working on the account. Without switching to the Teams app, sellers can start or continue the conversation thanks to a (3) Teams chat experience which also (4) displays the customer record and quick actions to help avoid switching apps to find relevant information.

Recent years have witnessed a radical shift in buyer behavior that has led most businesses to alter traditional sales methods and adopt digital sales to stay relevant, maintain a competitive advantage, and cater to the buyer’s needs without losing the all-important personal touch. Voice and video now are important channels to ensure sellers keep connection and drive valuable conversations without missing any follow-ups.

Today, we are introducing both an embedded Teams dialer experience for Dynamics 365 as well as an extensible video or audio Teams meeting experience that seamlessly ties back to Dynamics 365 Sales.

As a seller is presented with the next best customer to reach out to, they can click-to-call—a side panel showing the teams dialer opens, including real-time business-critical insights such as transcript with important mentions highlighted (1), a place for note taking (2), and automatic detection of action items (3) sellers can ensure actions are captured ready for follow up.

We also cater for Teams meetings that are scheduled and tracked by the seller. When they join the call from Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 the familiar Teams client opens where—aside from the custom video, avatar, or shared content—the seller will be presented with the same real-time insights as they did during the audio call, including the transcript with important mentions highlighted (4), a place for note-taking (5), and automatic detection of action items (6) sellers can ensure actions are captured ready for follow up.

All insights are tied back to the relevant record in Dynamics 365 Sales CRM with zero effort on the seller’s side. Within seconds of completing the conversation, the summary page will be available; including conversational KPIs representing the seller’s behavior during the call (7), commitment and follow-ups made during the call (8), important mentions (9), and the full playback option alongside sentiment analysis and segmentation of the call to topics (10).

These new team collaboration experiences are supported by multichannel engagement capabilities in Teams that help improve the way sellers connect with other sellers, prospects, and customers. The Dynamics 365 app for Microsoft Teams enables sellers to engage with audio and video online meetings, and support for third-party outbound and inbound calling ensures advanced call control functionality is right where is should be: alongside the information that is fueling sellers’ conversations with the caller. Conversation intelligence automatically transcribes calls and analyzes content, sentiment, and behavioral style—insights that can improve the way sellers engage with prospects and customers.

Learn how VITAS Healthcare, C.H. Robinson, Microsoft Inside Sales, and Grant Thornton transformed sales with Dynamics 365 Sales and Teams.

Marketing: turn event attendees into loyal customers

Virtual meetings and webinars are now a preferred way to connect and engage with audiences. With Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, planning online events and nurturing your attendees is fast and easy.

Customers can set up, promote, and report on events hosted on Teams from within Dynamics 365 Marketing. In a few simple steps, they can export attendee data and view customer segments created in Dynamics 365 Marketing based on audience attendance. Customer journeys, including starter emails, are also automatically created to nurture attendees. Users can then further customize the content and experiences for attendees based on how they engage and orchestrate personalized customer journeys.

Today we’re announcing that commercial Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers will soon get six months of Dynamics 365 Marketing at no additional cost. We’ll have more details on this offer to share soon, along with eligibility details, and we are excited to see you reap the benefits of these solutions together.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing or visit our help documentation to get started. Also, discover how Project Management Institute Minnesota and Discoveries, Inc are using these event management capabilities in the real world to improve engagement with event attendees.

Customer service: resolve customer issues faster using the power of collaboration

As cases that reach your live agents become increasingly more complex, it’s more important than ever that your customer service tools are designed to make life as easy as possible for your agents to resolve customer issues. This includes how cases get assigned and how your agents collaborate with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within your organization. Key features such as unified routing and assignment capabilities leverage rule-based and machine learning classification to ensure incoming work items are routed to the best-suited agent or queue. But, there are still times when customer service agents need support from other colleagues to quickly address customer issues without having to escalate or transfer the case. With the new embedded Teams chat capability, directly accessible from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service agent desktop, agents can collaborate with SMEs to resolve cases faster and more effectively, ultimately improve the customer experience.

The Teams chat feature enables agents to easily start conversations with SMEs and other peers, avoiding the disruption of switching apps, while maintaining a seamless flow of work. The enhanced collaboration feature reads the context of the customer record and suggests relevant collaboration contacts for the agent. Related Teams chats initiated from Customer Service are visually differentiated to enable faster discoverability. In addition, agents can link relevant Teams chats to the customer record so that the conversation, information, and context is immediately available. 

Field service: enhance collaboration across field service

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Teams work together to enable field technicians to stay connected to work orders, information, and experts in real-time, even from some of the most remote job sites.

Technicians and field service agents can use the integrated Teams experience within Dynamics 365 Field Service to collaborate in real-time with experts on work orders, as well as use Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents for Customer Service to enhance their productivity as they complete service tasks. Technicians can access the content they need related to the task at hand—from customer records to schematics—from a mobile device or for a hands-free experience, a Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset.

The solution is enabling surgeons at hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System in New York to advise counterparts 7,000 miles away at Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Eastern Uganda. “Microsoft Teams, Dynamic 365 Remote Assist, and HoloLens 2 allow us to bring our knowledge into a community, share that knowledge, and make it part of that surgical community on a long-term basis,” explains Dr. Michael L. Marin, Chairman of the Department of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at Mount Sinai. “It helps us create a sustainable program of surgical care.”

Retail: maximize retail collaboration and staff efficiency

On the retail frontlines, it’s critical to have the most current and accurate product and inventory information customers need in the moment. With Teams and Dynamics 365, retailers can provide the frontline with streamlined mobile tools to connect with peers and get near-instant access to information they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

With Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, we are also removing the barriers between the head office and individual stores by providing new task management functionality right within Teams. Task management functionality in Dynamics 365 Commerce allows managers and workers to create task lists, manage assignment criteria, and track task statuses integrated between Dynamics 365 Commerce back office, store commerce, and Teams applications.

Users can easily track task completion across all relevant stores, re-assign tasks, and give feedback and proof of execution where applicable.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce and check out our task management capabilities.

Human Resources: simplify employee leave and absence management

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides a comprehensive personnel management solution, including performance, leave and absence, and payroll integration. A new update, now generally available, enables employees to view time-off balances and submit leave requests from within Teams where they are already collaborating and getting their work done.

Employees simply type in keywords and a chatbot responds immediately to let them know leave balances or request time off. Managers can just as easily review and approve time-off requests with just a few clicks. By enabling employee and manager self-service, HR teams can stay focused on more strategic tasks while empowering employees to better manage their leave and absence benefits.

Learn more about the employee leave and absence experience in Teams.

Boost collaboration for better customer experiences across the organization

These integrated collaboration capabilities are just the start. We continue our investment in innovation to transform work, so everyone can be more efficient, more collaborative, more insightful – and ultimately, deliver the best customer experiences possible.

Learn more on the Microsoft Teams blog and explore all of the ways Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams help move projects forward and keep people connected with chat, suggested actions, and records in collaborative workspaces. Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams: extend collaboration across teams appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.