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 Studio continues 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 administration introduces 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 consumption 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

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April 15, 9AM PDT

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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
• Register for the Power Platform and Copilot Studio update April 15 at 9 AM PDT

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.

We’ve published the 2025 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Copilot offerings. These plans are a compilation of the new capabilities planned to be released between April 2025 and September 2025. With advancements in agents, automation, intelligence, and seamless integrations, this release is designed to address the evolving needs of modern enterprises while driving efficiency and innovation across industries.

Key areas of focus include expanding AI capabilities and agents to automate routine tasks, provide actionable insights, and improve decision-making at every level. This wave introduces enhancements to user experiences, enabling more intuitive workflows, smarter resource management, and greater collaboration. Businesses can benefit from intelligent tools that optimize operations, improve customer engagement, and support strategic growth initiatives.

In addition to productivity and efficiency, this release prioritizes security, governance, and extensibility, helping to ensure businesses can scale confidently while maintaining compliance and control. With these advancements, organizations can take advantage of the full power of AI and agents to transform their operations and deliver exceptional value to their customers. Watch a summary of the release highlights for 2025 release wave 1.

Dynamics 365 release wave 1

Check out the 2025 release wave 1 Dynamics 365 features.

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Highlights from Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers meet their targets while boosting seller productivity. Copilot and agents enhance performance and simplify tasks, to help grow your pipeline, sharpen strategies, and accelerate deals. A reimagined user experience ensures sellers never miss the best move. Automated research, ongoing follow-ups, and prioritized tasks provide continuous guidance, allowing you to focus on the right actions to drive success and grow your business. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features included in this release wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will enable agentic capabilities for case and knowledge management, as well as AI-driven routing, while extending Copilot capabilities for customer service representative and supervisor experiences, with a focus on productivity improvements. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Customer Service can benefit your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center will transform service experiences with new features to deliver effortless self-service, accelerate assisted service, and drive efficiency. The 2025 release wave 1 introduces Copilot and agent capabilities to automate intent determination for evergreen self-service and autonomous knowledge management.  Additional key features include multi-modal support in customer intent agent, enhanced unified routing features, and new workforce and quality management capabilities.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces Copilot-first experiences that enhance service operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences in 2025 release wave 1. Key features include automated inspection generation from templates, actionable insights for schedulers, quick access to vital information for frontline workers and managers, plus seamless integrations with Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance capabilities are designed with a copilot-first experience, delivering enhanced automation and agentic capabilities. This release focuses on simplifying complex tax management and regulatory compliance, automating account reconciliations with agents, improving bank reconciliation processes, and adding intelligence to planning, along with extensibility and data refresh updates for business performance analytics. Discover how the latest enhancements to Finance can benefit your business in this video.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management advances autonomy by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics to improve productivity and organizational adaptability. This update enhances operational efficiency by automating supplier communications, improving demand planning accuracy with cell-level explainability and generative insights, and taking advantage of AI in manufacturing to align production data with actual processes.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, contract management, invoicing, time and expense entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on AI-assisted core functionality improvements in what-if analysis, proposal generation, time and expense and approvals. This release will introduce a mobile app for time management and deliver scale improvements to support larger projects and handle higher invoice volumes.

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities will continue enabling AI and autonomous enterprise resource planning (ERP) with capabilities that support ERP application suite in Dynamics 365, including Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, Human Resources, and Project Operations. We’re infusing agent experiences across applications, including chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for agent scenarios along with enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources enhances intelligence, automation, and analytics across the hire-to-separate process to boost productivity and enable business agility. We’re advancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and integrations with external job boards, including LinkedIn. Additionally, we’re improving benefits and people management experiences for employees and HR business partners through AI-first solutions and automation. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce advances in-store experience by providing a mobile-first point-of-sale that reduces store hardware footprint and boosts sales conversion. The improvements to the payment connector allow modern payments methods, further reducing hardware requirements and offering more purchasing options for customers. Additionally, omni-channel unified pricing enables retailers to establish more intricate pricing structures, helping them remain competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces intelligent AI agents to enhance efficiency and automation for small or medium sized businesses (SMBs). These agents seamlessly integrate to execute complex tasks, generate reports, automate processes, and optimize order creation using natural language processing. This release focuses on manufacturing, sustainability, and electronic document capabilities, along with enhanced Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service integrations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data powers Copilot and agents with the latest customer insights, enabling your teams to take advantage of this data directly within their daily workflow. Enriched with the latest marketing behavioral interactions and streamlined data ingestion, your business can access up-to-date customer profiles without delays to build each experience upon the last.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys brings the power of AI to engage your customers on new channels so you can create new scenarios and business opportunities. Thanks to advanced journey capabilities, you can optimize interactions with your customers, helping to ensure that each touchpoint is meaningful and impactful. The new forms and event management features not only streamline the lead generation process but also help ensure that high-quality leads are captured and nurtured effectively.

Microsoft Power Platform

Check out the 2025 release wave 1 Microsoft Power Platform features.

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Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft Power Apps changes how software solutions are built with the plan designer where makers can provide a business problem, and a set of agents helps them build a Microsoft Power Platform software. Apps created using Power Apps are intelligent, powered by a set of extensible agents that support most common tasks like exploring, entering, and summarizing data. Makers can automate common tasks by creating agents from existing apps and deploying them to take care of work autonomously. With integrated ability for users to understand and monitor agent actions, and easy ability to resolve issues when agents hit roadblocks, Power Apps is accelerating the shift to intelligent AI-driven solutions at scale. Watch this video to discover the exciting features launching in this release wave.

Microsoft Power Pages enables businesses to build secure, data-driven portals effortlessly. Recent updates include AI-driven features like Web Agents for multi-platform engagement (email, Teams, WhatsApp), AI-assisted form filling for improved productivity, dynamic list visualizations for better insights, and enhanced governance policies to strengthen security and streamline site deployments.

Microsoft Power Automate is transforming how enterprises automate complex business processes through new human-in-the-loop experiences, including advanced approvals and AI native capabilities, such as generative actions and intelligent document processing. A comprehensive suite of governance, observability, and security controls coming to the automation center and Microsoft Power Platform admin center help to manage complex automations at scale. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Power Automate in this wave.

Microsoft Copilot Studio brings new autonomous agent capabilities; extension of Microsoft 365 Copilot with Custom Agents; new capabilities for the Copilot Studio embedded builder in Microsoft Copilot including support for actions, new enterprise knowledge sources, and the ability to upgrade a declarative agent to Copilot Studio custom agent to access additional capabilities and new conversational channels for custom agents including WhatsApp and SharePoint. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Microsoft Copilot Studio can benefit your business.

AI Builder in Copilot Studio brings the power of advanced automation to routine processes like email handling, document processing, and image management, helping businesses run smarter and more efficiently. AI Builder has multi-modal content processing capability, which allows businesses to handle various data types—including text, document, and images—within a single natural language instruction. Enhanced Prompt builder tools empower makers to customize AI actions with diverse inputs, expanded data sources from Microsoft Dataverse, and support for generating multiple content types, including documents.

Dataverse is continuing to extend maker experiences by enriching app and agent building capabilities across the platform. Dataverse can seamlessly connect all your data together with an ever-expanding set of external data sources. And with your data together, Dataverse can convert your enterprise data into knowledge, which you can use to customize and extend agents that are built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and the agent builder experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot. These investments are aimed at grounding AI-driven experiences with enterprise knowledge across Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Platform Administration and Governance continues to provide enhanced tools and insights for admins to get the most from Microsoft Power Platform. In this wave. We’re focusing on security, easing adoption and governance of Copilot and agents, and helping enterprises boost the adoption of Microsoft Power Platform at enterprise scale with a modernized admin center experience and a new admin connector for automating admin tasks.

Highlights from Role-based Copilot offerings

Role-based Copilot offering release wave

Check out the 2025 release wave 1 Role-based Copilot offering features.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales continues to drive innovation with advanced generative AI capabilities designed specifically for sales-focused roles. In this release, we’re enhancing our assistive features by surfacing further CRM platform insights and recommendations to the sales team across the Microsoft 365 product suite. We’re also streamlining SalesChat™ experiences and driving new agent workflows to put organizations in control of automation experiences and notifications.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for agents within their flow of work. In this release, we’ll be introducing connectivity with any CRM system and inline email summary and drafting.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance enhances efficiency for finance professionals by providing insights that aid strategic decision-making and reduce manual tasks. The 2025 release wave 1 focuses on intelligent automation of variance analysis in Excel, access to external data sources, extending functionalities through Copilot Studio, supporting collections calls in Teams, and taking advantage of generative AI to summarize macroeconomic conditions. Visit the release planner to learn more about upcoming features.

Early access period

Starting February 3, 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 April 2025. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2025 release wave 1 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 1 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2025 release wave 1 plan, and the Role-based Copilot offerings 2025 release wave 1. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2025 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Copilot offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’ve launched 2024 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and role-based Microsoft Copilot offerings—introducing a rollout of new features and enhanced capabilities releasing between October 2024 and March 2025. These updates include advanced Copilot capabilities for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance to empower your workforce, optimize business processes, and enhance customer engagement.

Catch all the highlights and demos from today’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event. In addition to newly-announced features, you’ll learn how companies like Lynk & Co, Lifetime Products, Stoneridge Software, AIS, and Schneider Electric are leveraging these new features to drive transformation.

Copilot and agents are the future of AI for business

2.1 million users engage with Copilot across Microsoft business applications every month, including employees at companies like PayPal, HP, Lumen, and McKinsey & Company. These Copilot experiences can drive new levels of productivity and efficiency while offering high standards of privacy, security, and compliance.

Moving forward, we envision AI-first organizations will comprise people, Copilot, and agents. Copilot is your AI assistant, designed to work for you. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, you can create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Organizations will have a network of agents, ranging from simple prompt-and-response systems to fully autonomous entities, that will operate on behalf of individuals, teams, or functions to execute and orchestrate business processes. Copilot serves as the interface for interacting with these agents, which can handle tasks such as accelerating lead generation, processing sales orders, and automating supply chains. At the Business Applications Launch Event, we showcased new features across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform that demonstrate what’s possible with Copilot and agents.

Thrive with customer experience applications

2024 release wave 2 brings exciting new features to Dynamics 365 customer experience apps designed to deliver connected and personalized experiences for both customers and employees. These innovations focus on optimizing customer interactions and streamlining sales processes across your organization.

New capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales include a multilingual bot (supported languages), Copilot-generated prompts, in-line email functionality, and more. These features are set to transform how businesses engage with customers and manage internal processes.

During the launch event, we showcased how Lynk & Co, an innovative car company, is leveraging the multilingual Copilot Studio bot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. By using AI-powered voice recognition and Copilot-generated prompts, they’ve been able to optimize customer wait times and improve case resolution speed. These tools have enabled Lynk & Co to significantly reduce case review times while keeping their sales team in the loop, thanks to seamless data sharing between service and sales teams.

With Copilot’s intelligent automation, sales managers at Lynk & Co can now focus on building customer relationships rather than manually sorting through documents. By streamlining workflows and providing actionable insights, Copilot empowers sales professionals to work more efficiently and drive business growth. These new capabilities—combined with tools like real-time prompts, the Sales Qualification Agent, and account summaries generated by Copilot—offer businesses a modern, intuitive way to stay connected with customers and make smarter decisions faster.

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Contact Center, and Dynamics 365 Sales.

Defining autonomous enterprise resource planning (ERP) with innovative agents

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP solutions introduce significant enhancements aimed at improving both core functionalities and autonomous capabilities. These updates include the introduction of five autonomous agents for Dynamics 365 designed to streamline processes and boost organizational efficiency. By automating routine tasks, businesses can focus more on strategic decision-making and adapt to the dynamic market landscape.

For Lifetime Products, a leading global producer of outdoor consumer goods, these improvements have substantially enhanced the productivity of their finance team. The Account Reconciliation Agent for Dynamics 365 Finance autonomously identifies discrepancies between subledgers and ledgers, offering actionable recommendations and reducing manual effort. Additionally, automated bank reconciliation now matches transactions and summarizes histories, saving time and improving accuracy. These features have streamlined their month-end close process across multiple legal entities, enhancing both efficiency and compliance.

In parallel, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central updates have improved operations for more than 40,000 customers. The Sales Order Agent enables businesses like Stoneridge Software’s clients to manage sales orders without needing additional staffing, speeding up order processing while maintaining service quality. Interoperability between Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service has streamlined service order management, reducing manual data entry and errors. This automation allows technicians to work more efficiently, improving the overall customer experience and ensuring timely service delivery.

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Unlock value everywhere with Microsoft Power Platform and Copilot Studio

Microsoft Power Platform offers new capabilities that enhance automation and app development using AI-powered tools. Copilot simplifies workflows, generates apps, and assists with complex processes, enabling businesses to manage tasks more effectively. With new AI-driven features across Microsoft Power Platform you can create solutions across your organization in record time.

At the launch event, we highlighted how Applied Information Sciences (AIS) is improving workforce efficiency in vendor invoice management using AI-enabled features in Microsoft Power Automate. With Copilot, automating processes such as routing and approvals based on predefined rules, AIS can handle a large volume of invoices daily, reducing manual input and increasing productivity. Users can easily update workflows with a few clicks, and the new summary functionality ensures clear tracking and sharing of updates.

AIS’s onboarding process for new consultants supports ongoing training with Copilot in Microsoft Power Apps. “Search with Copilot” allows users to retrieve records using natural language queries, while the AI-enabled paste feature efficiently fills out onboarding forms, reducing manual data entry. Copilot Studio improves IT Helpdesk automation with task assignment and grounding third-party data sources through knowledge management.  This provides analytics for monitoring agent performance and improves accuracy while also enabling a continuous improvement process.

Explore the release plans for Power Apps, Microsoft Power Pages,  Power Automate, and Copilot Studio.  

Bring automation to your business with Copilot

The latest improvements in Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance focus on enhancing user experience by automating routine tasks and providing actionable insights through autonomous agents. These advanced functionalities allow sales teams, customer service representatives, and finance professionals to offload repetitive activities, enabling them to concentrate on strategic initiatives. As a result, organizations can optimize efficiency and improve overall productivity.

For instance, companies like Lumen and Genpact have experienced significant time savings with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales and Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance capabilities. Lumen reported a 94% reduction in research time for sales data, while Genpact achieved over a 50% decrease in payroll processing time through automated reconciliation. These enhancements demonstrate how Copilot agents are not only improving workflows but also positively impacting the workforce’s efficiency.

Schneider Electric is another example of a company benefiting from these advancements. Its sales team can now effectively prioritize leads with the help of the Lead Intelligence Agent, which analyzes customer interactions and external data to deliver enriched insights. This streamlined approach allows sales representatives to engage with prospects more strategically, ultimately supporting their goal of enhancing efficiency and driving revenue growth.

Explore the release plans for Microsoft Copilot for Finance, Microsoft Copilot for Service, and Microsoft Copilot for Sales.

Business Applications Launch Event

Dive deeper into the new and enhanced AI capabilities included in the 2024 release wave 2.

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Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Join us for the on-demand Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event to discover the latest enhancements in Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Copilot apps. The event features in-depth demos of new autonomous agents and other capabilities designed to optimize your workflows and streamline operations.

Don’t forget to review the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Stay updated on the latest features and upcoming enhancements, and create your personalized release plan using the release planner to ensure you’re equipped with the knowledge needed to maximize these new capabilities.

The post 2024 release wave 2 launches with hundreds of Copilot capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re expanding our ambition to bring AI-first business process to organizations. First, we’re announcing that the ability to create autonomous agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio will be available in public preview in November 2024. Learn more on the Copilot Studio blog. 

Second, we’re introducing 10 new autonomous agents in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams. These agents are designed to help you accelerate your time to value and are configured to scale operational efficiency and elevate customer experiences across roles and functions. 

Scale your team with new autonomous agents

Discover more ways to drive impact with autonomous agents and Copilot Studio.

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Rapidly drive impact with autonomous agents 

Microsoft Copilot is your AI assistant—it works for you—and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. We envision organizations will have a constellation of agents—ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team, or function to execute and orchestrate business process ranging from lead generation, to sales order processing, to confirming order deliveries. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents.

Introducing autonomous agents for Dynamics 365 

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy line of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today’s return on investment (ROI) and tomorrow’s competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams drive business value—and are just the start. We will create many more agents in the coming year that give customers the competitive advantage they need to help future-proof their organization. Today, we’re introducing ten of these autonomous agents which will start to become available in public preview later in 2024 and continue into early 2025. 

Sales: Help sellers focus time on building customer relationships to close deals faster

Agents will help sellers focus time on engaging customers to move through the sales cycle faster. The Sales Qualification Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can free up time for the seller to spend on higher value activities by researching and prioritizing inbound leads in the pipe and developing personalized sales emails to initiate a sales conversation.

For small to medium-sized businesses, the Sales Order Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central will automate the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers, capturing their preferences. See Sales Order Agent in action.

Operations: Empower teams to grow the business, optimize process, and meet customer demand

To maintain smooth business operations, it’s crucial that process in key areas such as finance, procurement, and supply chain are optimized to minimize cost, mitigate risks, and accelerate decisions. Autonomous agents operate around the clock to execute a range of process, helping professionals spend less time on manual work and more time on strategic tasks like planning and decision making.   

The Supplier Communications Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management autonomously manages collaboration with suppliers to confirm order delivery, while helping to preempt potential delays. With agents performing all the tasks related to confirming purchase orders, procurement specialists can focus on managing supplier relationships and improving overall supply chain resiliency.

Additional agents:  

• Financial Reconciliation Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance helps teams prepare and cleanse data sets to simplify and reduce time spent on the most labor-intensive part of the financial period close process that leads to financial reporting. Learn more in this brief video.
• Account Reconciliation Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, designed for accountants and controllers, automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger, helping them speed up the financial close process. This enhances cash flow visibility and can result in faster decisions to drive business performance. Watch this video to learn more. 
• Time and Expense Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows. It helps get invoices to customers promptly, preventing revenue leakage and helps ensure projects stay on track and within budget. See Time and Expense Agent in action.

Service: Transform customer experiences across self- and human-assisted service  

Contact centers face interconnected, compounding challenges to successfully and efficiently serve customers. For example, keeping vital knowledge base articles current relies on manual process. Valuable insights from seasoned customer service representatives are often locked away in chat logs, call recordings, case notes, and other data silos. And self-service tools rely on inflexible, hard-coded dialog with embedded knowledge that must be predefined for potential customer issues.  

The Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents, available for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, help contact centers transform customer experiences across self-service and human-assisted service. The Customer Intent Agent enables evergreen self-service by continuously discovering new intents from past and current customer conversations across all channels, mapping issues and corresponding resolutions maintained by the agent in a library. The Customer Knowledge Management Agent helps ensure knowledge articles are kept perpetually up to date by analyzing case notes, transcripts, summaries, and other artifacts from human-assisted cases to uncover insights. 

Additional agents:

• Case Management Agent for Customer Service automates key tasks throughout the case lifecycle—creation, resolution, follow up, closure—to reduce handle time and alleviate the burden on service representatives. See Case Management Agent in action.
• Scheduling Operations Agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables dispatchers to provide optimized schedules for technicians, even as conditions change throughout the workday—for example, accounting for issues such as traffic delays, double bookings, or last-minute cancellations that often result in conflicts or gaps. 

Collectively, these agents are trained to autonomously learn to address new and emerging issues via self-service, improve the quality of issue resolution across channels and help drive time and cost savings.

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be confident that they have robust data governance and security. The agents coming to Dynamics 365 follow our core security, privacy, and responsible AI commitments. Agents built in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls—all managed in Copilot Studio. This includes data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols, and more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. 

Transform your business with agents 

Start your journey with agents by reading more about the full set of capabilities announced today, as well as a closer look at new ways to build autonomous agents with Copilot Studio.  

The post Transform work with autonomous agents across your business processes appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms were designed to help integrate the fragmented processes that comprise the operation of a large enterprise. But the way we do business keeps fundamentally changing. New business models disrupt the way companies sell products and services, blurring industry lines and transforming customer experiences.

Business complexity continues to intensify, and the rise of data as a driver of business—plus the attendant proliferation of data streams—means reaping the full promise of comprehensive ERP platforms can still be elusive.

In fact, according to a Gartner® Research report, “by 2027, less than 30% of customers who adopted new solutions from ERP platform mega-vendors will have proven their original adoption business case.”¹

The arrival of generative AI brings hope of renewed promise. AI is elevating performance and creating advantages for those who understand how to apply it to data-centric systems like ERP platforms. By 2027, according to the same Gartner report, at least 50 percent of ERP systems with AI-enabled features will be enabled through generative AI capabilities.¹

People often think of generative AI as a tool to automate routine tasks, but its capabilities are so much broader. Improved decision-making is an area where AI becomes a valuable tool. In fact, a report from the market research firm IDC found that, by mid-2024, 30% of global organizations will take advantage of human-like interfaces in their enterprise applications to gain more insights quickly, improving decision velocity.²

While AI can inform and enhance any number of operations across an enterprise, it’s worth looking at some specific processes in detail to see how much AI can elevate ERP solutions. Learn more about current trends in ERP platform modernization in the age of generative AI in this webinar.

How AI creates a better plan-to-produce process

Most manufacturing firms implement a plan for how they will schedule production runs to meet materials capacity, deliver quality products on time, and maintain cost-effectiveness.

Sometimes, though, this plan-to-produce process becomes an accretion of good ideas at the time, a fragmented assemblage of tools and strategies trying to work together to paint the big picture of what’s happening on the production floor. This can lead to quality control issues, and manpower and equipment shortages that fail to meet production surges, or inaccurate forecasts that waste resources or leave customers high and dry—among other issues.

Generative AI integrated with a robust ERP system can aggregate data from across an enterprise—even data residing in multiple clouds—in real time, so managers have a clear picture of the state of play at any given moment, allowing them to reduce lead times necessary to plan or alter production runs.

The complicated interdependence of tasks on a manufacturing floor—for example, Part A must be installed before Part B can be attached—is a perfect puzzle for AI to help solve. The predictive analytics capacity of generative AI allows it to better forecast demand and synch production with supplies, and then optimize timing to match resource availability with manpower. AI can also forecast and build scenarios for supply chain disruption or changes in demand.

Whether a manufacturer needs to increase production volume to meet increasing demand or build whole new facilities, AI excels at building scalable networks, finding efficiencies, and reducing costly interventions.

Learn more about how Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and other applications optimize the plan-to-produce process.

Optimizing the procure-to-pay process

Another process most large organizations seek to optimize is the integration of procurement with accounts payable. When you need to spend the money, it’s good to know that you have the money. IDC reports that, by mid-2025, 70% of global businesses will use embedded financing to collect and make payments.²

More than most industries, healthcare organizations must reckon with a complex field of myriad payers, purchasers, and suppliers. Healthcare organizations face layers of challenging regulatory compliance and the need to control ever-rising costs. Many organizations in this field still rely on antiquated, paper-based invoicing and payables.

Fragmented processes and siloed data make regulatory issues more fraught, while also increasing attack surfaces to create security risks. AI can remove complexities by integrating processes in one ERP platform, helping to reduce vulnerabilities. By mapping operations to standards, AI supports compliance efforts, efficiently creating the audit trails and tedious reports that often take staff hours to produce.

AI streamlines procurement, reducing the potential for human error present when ordering supplies and equipment from a diverse range of providers. It tracks expenses to help control costs, providing easily accessible price information about competing products and services so the organization can continually find cost efficiencies.

An ERP solution enhanced with AI allows planners to automate the maintenance of inventory with both real-time and predictive information, reducing the risk of stockouts or overstock situations and more effectively communicating with suppliers.

Quicker quote-to-cash with personalization and automation

AI integrates and improves the sales, finance, and supply elements of an ERP platform by increasing automation in negotiations, contract lifecycles, production, order management, billing, and delivery. For businesses with retail components, making the quote-to-cash cycle faster and more accurate creates efficiencies—which can help keep customers happier.

Automating price and quote information speeds up the resolution of even highly complex deals. The same is true once a quote is accepted—an accurate, automatically generated proposal follows immediately. AI-generated purchase orders and invoices free sellers to spend more time interacting with customers and accounting teams to focus on tasks that increase the organization’s productivity.

AI’s predictive analytics ensure on-time delivery of products but also allow firms to quickly identify current and future trends and make data-driven decisions about ordering and pricing. Automating invoicing tracks payments accurately and creates a real-time picture of cash flow. AI can continually improve cash flow forecasts by comparing projections with results and adjusting from the outcomes over time. And analytics enabled by AI offer suggestions for improving sales performance and strategic decisions.

Learn more about how Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance optimizes the quote-to-cash and other retail business processes.

Get more from your business data with AI-enabled ERP processes

Across the organization, optimizing finance and supply chains can create a connected enterprise that allows enterprises to infuse AI, automation, and analytics into ERP processes. Today, companies can confidently move to the cloud with AI-powered ERP solutions, modernize business processes, and unlock the agility needed to lead the way in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. 

A recent Forrester Research study interviewed IT leaders and professionals who had experience using Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software.³ Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that has 5,000 employees and generates USD1 billion in annual revenue. Forrester found that, over a three-year period, the value added to the composite included:

• USD1.2 million in increased profitability from real-time visibility and enhanced decision-making.
• USD8.9 million in increased productivity from unified data access, streamlined processes, automated workflows, and other gained efficiencies.
• USD3.9 million in reduced infrastructure and IT operations spend from cloud migration.
• USD8.9 million in productivity improvements in finance/accounting, supply chain/logistics, and other personnel.

The study estimated a net present value of USD8.1 million and an ROI of 106%, as well as additional benefits like an improved cybersecurity posture and enhanced employee experiences. The composite organization would pay back its investment in Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software in 17 months.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software

Learn more about the total economic impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software

Read the report

AI-enabled ERP platforms allow you to protect, connect, and get more from your business data while gaining security. With the right ERP solution, you can scale globally to drive business expansion and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) while ensuring regulatory compliance, supercharging productivity, and realizing the business impacts of generative AI even faster.

Sources

¹ Predicts 2024: ERP Evolves Planning With Automation and AI, Denis Torii, Gartner Research, April 5, 2024

² IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Intelligent ERP 2024 Predictions, doc #US51300923, October 2023

³ The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP, Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Dynamics 365 ERP, a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study commissioned By Microsoft, April 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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On July 16, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. These plans are a compilation of the new capabilities planned to be released between October 2024 to March 2025. This release introduces a wealth of new features designed to enhance customer understanding and improve overall user experience, showcasing our dedication to driving digital transformation for our customers and partners. 

The upcoming wave is centered around utilizing advanced AI and Microsoft Copilot technologies to enhance user productivity and streamline operations across diverse business applications. These enhancements include intelligent automation, AI-powered insights, and immersive user experiences that are designed to break down barriers between data, insights, and individuals. Watch a summary of the release highlights. 

Discover the latest features that empower organizations to operate more efficiently and adaptively. From AI-driven sales insights and customer service enhancements to predictive analytics in supply chain management and autonomous financial processes, the new capabilities enable businesses to proactively address challenges and capitalize on opportunities. 

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 release wave

Check out the 2024 release wave 2 Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot for business features

Learn more

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to enhance customer understanding and boost sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. In this release, we are focused on including natural language copilot for summarizing information, creating a new full-screen Copilot Home with curated insights and role-specific actions, and using AI-powered insights to find leads. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features included in this release wave. 

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales-specific workflows, data, and actions. We will focus on using AI-powered insights to create leads, deepen the integration into Copilot in Microsoft 365, and use natural language capabilities to allow sellers to ask data-related questions of their CRM. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through new copilot capabilities such as proactive prompting, ability to access data from external systems securely with plugins, email enhancements, and AI-infused routing. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Customer Service can benefit your business. 

Microsoft Copilot for Service is now generally available, bringing new capabilities to enhance user experiences. These features will be integrated across Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Chat, and Copilot embedded in third-party CRMs. View this video about the features launching in this wave for Copilot for Service. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center will add new features for voice, messaging, Copilot, AI-infused routing, and contact center operations including out of box support for additional CRMs. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Dynamics 365 Contact Center this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables a shift from reactive to proactive and predictive service, empowering digital transformation and innovative business models. Using Copilot, frontline workers will be able to retrieve critical information and initiate mixed-reality remote assist calls within Teams through Copilot. Managers will be able to create, update, and manage work orders effortlessly across web, Outlook, and Teams interfaces. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues its journey of leading in autonomous finance, using AI to transform common end-to-end financial processes. This release focuses on in-app copilot capabilities, immersive persona-based user experiences, expanding country coverage, electronic invoicing enhancements, business performance analytics and planning enhancements, and autonomous reconciliation capabilities. Discover how the latest enhancements to Finance can benefit your business in this video. 

Microsoft Copilot for Finance is expanding data reconciliation capabilities in Excel with assisted data sanitization and preparation routines. Extending variance analysis capabilities with support from additional data sources and enabling collaboration on findings with stakeholders will also be a focus in the upcoming wave. Additionally, the Teams integration will facilitate collections calls with suggested scripts and automated recording of action items in the financial system. Check out this video to see the exciting new features releasing in Microsoft Copilot for Finance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is advancing along the path of an autonomous supply chain by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics into every facet of business procedures, thereby improving user productivity and enhancing organizational adaptability. In this update, the spotlight is on improving order-promising capabilities for manufacturers. Demand planning is upgraded to incorporate forecasting with external signals, and the inclusion of Copilot weaves insights and analyses directly into workflows, identifying trends and irregularities, while also allowing for specific data inquiries at the cell level. Additionally, Traceability Copilot keeps track of actual products in production and compiles a comprehensive historical record of related activities. Watch this video to discover the exciting features launching in this release wave. 

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 AI-assisted core functionality improvements in estimation, proposal generation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities and scale improvements to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Project Operations this wave. 

Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities will continue to invest in capabilities applying to Finance, Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and Project Operations. We are infusing copilot experiences across applications, including natural language chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for copilot scenarios. We will also bring more value and insights to finance and operations apps data and enhancements to ensure continued enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to build intelligence, develop automation and analytics around the hire-to-separate process, increase user productivity, and empower business agility. We are enhancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and offer management, improving experiences for employees and HR business partners in benefits and performance management, and advancing analytics, insights, and planning through business performance planning and analytics capabilities. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to empower retailers to streamline their operations and drive increased customer loyalty and conversions. With Copilot, retail managers, sales associates, and merchandisers will gain new AI-powered insights into customer buying patterns and preferences, recommendations for positioning and selling products, and business intelligence on store performance. Improvements to the self-checkout POS make customer checkouts more efficient, and user experience updates to Store Commerce app streamline daily tasks for faster, more efficient sales and service. Watch this video to see the new features releasing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is focused on maintaining service reliability performance and security standards. We’ll continue enhancing productivity by optimizing core processes with Copilot, expanding to cover more than 170 countries, and offering enhanced reporting with more than 80 Microsoft Power BI reports. Additionally, integration with Field Service will be expanded, along with new financial management features. We will also enhance development tools and governance, along with improved data privacy and compliance management. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist will bring significant improvements to the quality of Mixed Reality (MR) annotations in Teams mobile for both iOS and Android users. The update will enhance the accuracy of MR ink on irregular and complex surfaces, making it easier for remote experts and technicians to collaborate seamlessly. Mixed Reality annotations in Teams mobile will be generally available in the next wave, along with ongoing investments in stability, performance optimization, and usability improvements across HoloLens 2 and iOS and Android applications. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, leveraging it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. This release enables you to streamline data integration by using Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric, attach your data in OneLake to Customer Insights, accelerate time to insights with data in Data Lake format, increase control when attaching to data in Dataverse, and seamlessly generate insights from marketing. Discover how these latest enhancements can benefit your business in this video. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys brings the power of AI to redefine the workflow for marketers, enabling them to be more productive than ever before. Businesses can optimize every interaction with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, you will have more flexibility and control when it comes to journeys, managing your web forms and tailoring Copilot to your business. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in this wave. 

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform

Check out the 2024 release wave 2 Microsoft Power Platform features

Learn more

Watch this video to explore the exciting new features releasing across Microsoft Power Platform. 

Microsoft Power Apps will continue to transform app experiences with infused intelligence, enabling users to be more productive by using Copilot to work with data, get insights, and improve their apps. Makers will continue to benefit from AI-assisted development, enabling rich and complex applications to be built with monitoring, control, and unmatched governance for admins, ensuring organizations can adopt low-code and AI transformation at scale. 

Microsoft Power Pages will expedite site building for a low-code maker or pro developer to build intelligent sites that reimagine the way you interact with your employees, customers, and partners. 

Microsoft Power Automate will continue to make it easier to build flows by using natural language and multi-modal generative AI capabilities across cloud flows and desktop flows, troubleshooting runs, and managing your automation estate with an end-to-end view. This, along with improvements in process mining to jumpstart creation of automation through Microsoft 365 integration and ongoing improvements to scaling, means it’ll be easier than ever for new users to get started and scale. 

Microsoft Copilot Studio is advancing copilot capabilities and IVR support with Customer Service and will expand geographically to the United Arab Emirates and Germany. Additionally, the team is improving software lifecycle management capabilities with topic-level import/export and role-based access control (RBAC), as well as enhancing governance and administration functionalities. 

AI Builder is investing in Prompt Builder for creating and deploying GPT prompts with enterprise data to enhance flows, apps, data tables, and copilots. We are also enhancing Intelligent Document Processing with a new validation station in Power Automate, application lifestyle management (ALM) support, and pre-built AI models for translation, classification, and personally identifiable information (PII) detection. Lastly, we’ll improve AI governance through capacity management, data policies, and including AI Builder capacity in the Power Apps developer plan. 

Microsoft Dataverse is enhancing the maker experience by boosting app building productivity with Copilot, ensuring seamless connectivity to external data and knowledge sources, and integrating AI-powered Enterprise Copilot in Microsoft 365. These investments aim to streamline development and use AI for more efficient and intelligent solutions. 

Governance and administration continues to advance via tools and insights that empower Microsoft Power Platform admin to easily get their job done. This wave focuses on governing Copilot adoption and easily securing low-code assets, helping enterprises boost adoption of Microsoft Power Platform solutions in their organization while keeping their digital environment safe. 

Early access period 

Starting July 29, 2024, 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 2024. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2024 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 2024 release wave 2 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 2 plan. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform. 

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Today we launched the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a rollout of new features and enhanced capabilities slated for release between April and September 2024. These updates include new Microsoft Copilot capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform—as well as role-based extensions of Copilot for Microsoft 365—that transform business processes with natural language processing, AI-generated insights, and assistance with time-consuming tasks.

This morning’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, available to view on-demand, includes highlights and demonstrations of features from the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Lenovo, Sonepar, Ford, Omnicom Group, and G&J Pepsi are using these capabilities in transformative ways.  

Extend Microsoft 365 with role-specific Copilot capabilities

The central theme across this release wave is how, across the business and productivity applications organizations depend on, Copilot is helping to better empower employees, improve business processes, and engage customers. In fact, 68% of surveyed Copilot users told us that it helps them jumpstart their creative process, and 70% said Copilot made them more productive so that they could do their job faster and easier.¹

Since each role is unique, we have extended Copilot for Microsoft 365 even further to tailor Copilot experiences for specific business functions. This includes Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Service and the recently announced Microsoft Copilot for Finance—all integrated with the apps and data you use every day so that you can spend less time searching for data and more time engaging with customers and driving a strategic agenda for your organization.

Underpinning these Copilot extensions is Microsoft Copilot Studio, which makes it easy to customize and build your own customer and internal-facing copilots using your data and workflows. We are excited to dive deeper into Copilot this release wave and help you use it to transform your business.  

Business Applications Launch Event

Tune into demos of new capabilities, on demand.

Watch here

Transforming customer and field service with generative AI 

Release wave 1 introduces new Copilot capabilities to help customer service agents and frontline workers boost efficiency, reduce training costs, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Copilot for Service—which infuses generative AI into your existing contact center and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—include Copilot-drafted knowledge articles to streamline the knowledge creation process, as well as proactive Copilot responses for conversations with customers. 

At the launch event, we shared how Lenovo is integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Service, third-party solutions, and custom bots to scale its innovative service delivery solution, Premier Support Suite for PC devices. Thousands of agents can now provide omnichannel support to customers in 200 regions and in more than 40 languages globally.   

We also spotlight how G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler in the U.S., has reduced operating costs by 6.6% and increased revenue by 8% with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Power Platform. They expect Copilot to further streamline work order management and enhance their best-in-class service by giving the field service teams access to a complete picture of their accounts in real time.   

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot for Service, and Dynamics 365 Field Service.  

The future of enterprise resource planning (ERP)

ERP is going through a once-in-a-generation transformation. For decades, employees across the globe have manually completed a significant amount of ERP processes daily to keep their companies running. Microsoft is pioneering a new vision for ERP—a world where ERP solutions powered by AI operate more independently, continually adjusting to evolving circumstances, involving users when necessary, and opening new possibilities for businesses.  

At the launch event, we spotlighted how Omnicom Group, a global leader in marketing communications, envisions leveraging Dynamics 365 for a new, autonomous ERP model that will help it to accelerate growth, become more efficient, and power its ability to innovate. They can use the new Copilot to optimize their strategic decision-making and transform their operational processes, such as prompting Copilot to identify opportunities for growth expansion and gauge the performance of initiatives.  

We also introduced new Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that help small and medium businesses to automate processes and complete tasks faster. A new Copilot chat pane allows users to quickly find and go to data, reveal insights, and get help with tasks. Users can prompt Copilot to create sales lines, match e-invoices with purchase orders, answer questions about data analyses, help with repetitive tasks, and more.  

Other updates include sustainability tracking, the ability to connect Business Central with Shopify B2B (business-to-business), and developer tools for Copilot.  

Explore the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Copilot for Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.  

Accelerate development with Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform is the rapid modernization platform of choice of hundreds of thousands of organizations, providing AI-first, low-code tools to build enterprise-wide solutions and automations. Copilot is seamlessly integrated across Microsoft Power Platform, empowering you to create applications, automations, and analytics through simple, natural language and conversational interactions.  

At the launch event, we demonstrate how Ford is leveraging Copilot to produce connected services to enhance the driving experience. Like Ford, organizations can take advantage of new Copilot capabilities in this release wave to transform workflows. Microsoft Power Automate introduces new ways to create cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining using natural language prompts. Microsoft Power Apps accelerates app development with enhanced user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. Microsoft Copilot Studio enables organizations to build custom copilots, with new ways to build custom prompts and generative actions, along with access to OpenAI’s custom GPTs and AI Builder models for extended scenarios.   

Explore the release plans for Power Apps, Microsoft Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI, and Copilot Studio.  

Deliver more personalized customer experiences  

Buyers expect businesses to cater to their unique set of needs. To do so, marketing and sales teams need a unified understanding of the customer and the ability to orchestrate experiences across marketing, sales, and service.  

Sonepar is leveraging Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to become the first global B2B electrical distributor to provide a fully digitized and synchronized omnichannel experience to every customer. With Copilot alongside sellers, Sonepar can personalize marketing content, improve the quality of leads, and enhance every engagement with customers.  

New Copilot capabilities in release wave 1 provide recommendations, summarize data, retrieve information, and perform actions in context and within the flow of work—so they can stay productive and focus time on engaging customers.  

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event  

We invite you to tune into the launch event on-demand for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.  

Be sure to read the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan in the release planner.  

Sources:

¹ Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report: What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com) 

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