How CFOs and finance leaders can make data-driven decisions and optimize business performance.

Why being data driven is key for CFOs

Amid the growing demand on CFOs to catalyze growth, maintaining a holistic view of business performance can be crucial. Data-driven finance leaders not only ensure this is possible within their team, but also empower the entire organization with access to the analysis and insights needed to make informed decisions within the flow of their work, securely.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

The data-driven CFO can use Business Central to optimize business performance.

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According to a recent white paper for CFOs (9 Emerging Trends for the Futurist CFO), more than 50% of the identified trends that will affect their departments and businesses over the next few years are about data and reporting.

And if you ask Microsoft Copilot: What are the top three challenges that CFOs in small and medium-sized businesses face in 2024 that can be improved with internal reporting?

You might get an answer such as: In 2024, CFOs in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face several key challenges that can be significantly improved with effective internal reporting. Here are the top three:

1. Economic uncertainty: With ongoing fluctuations in the global economy, CFOs need to make informed decisions quickly. Detailed financial reports can provide insights into market trends, helping CFOs to forecast and plan more accurately.
2. Cost management: Identifying and controlling costs is crucial for maintaining profitability. Internal reports can highlight areas of inefficiency and suggest where cost-saving measures can be implemented without compromising quality.
3. Performance measurement: Tracking the performance of various departments and projects is essential for strategic planning. Internal reports provide valuable data on key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling CFOs to assess progress and make data-driven decisions.

How can you as a CFO or financial leader turn this advice into something more practical, allowing you to help people become more data driven in their day-to-day work? Read on to understand how the business intelligence (BI) triangle model breaks analytics scenarios down into tangible tasks with suggestions of which tools are appropriate for each of them.

The BI triangle: Mapping analytics scenarios to tools

One of the challenges that you face is how to access, analyze, and present data in a way that suits your needs and preferences. Different scenarios and roles in the office of the CFO may require different tools and formats to deliver the best insights and outcomes. That’s why Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central offers a comprehensive and flexible set of analytics tools and capabilities that can address the diverse needs and preferences of finance leaders.

We call this the “BI triangle”, which consists of four types of analytics tools:

• Microsoft Power BI finance reports: Access these reports out-of-the-box including powerful semantic models and stunning and interactive visualizations. You can use the Power BI reports to get an overview of finance KPIs, dive deeper into your data, create custom dashboards and metrics, and share your insights with others. The new Power BI reports are coming in the 2024 release wave 2.
• Financial reporting: This capability set provides no-code financial reporting specialized for producing financial statements that look the way you want.
• Ad-hoc data analysis: Delivers the ability to filter, group, and pivot data directly in Business Central. Use it to get an overview of analytic scenarios not covered by standard reports, drill down into details, and export data to Excel.
• Excel finance reports: Excel reports use Microsoft’s familiar and widely used spreadsheet tool, which is loved by financial professionals for its powerful capabilities in performing calculations, analysis, and formatting. Whether you need to bring your financial data into Excel for easy manipulation, create charts and tables, apply formulas and functions, or analyze outliers with Copilot in Excel, the built-in Excel reports provide the flexibility to present your data exactly as you prefer.

With the BI triangle, you can choose the best tool for the job, depending on your scenario and audience. You can also switch between the tools seamlessly, as they are all integrated with Business Central and use the same data source.

Access more information about the BI triangle here.

Analyze your business data with new Power BI reports

One of the benefits of using Power BI reports is that you can access a rich set of new and improved reports designed specifically for Business Central and that cover various aspects of your business, such as finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, and projects.

These reports are available out of the box and can be accessed from within Business Central or from Power BI.

Another benefit of using Power BI reports is that you can access your data and insights while on the go from various devices. Whether you’re in the office, on the road, or at home, you can use the Power BI app on your phone or tablet to view and interact with your reports, get notifications and alerts, and stay on top of your business performance.

In the 2024 release wave 2, Dynamics 365 Business Central will include more than 70 reports covering analytics scenarios across finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, and projects.

Track your finance KPIs with Power BI metrics and get alerted in Microsoft Teams when they cross thresholds

With Power BI, you can create and monitor metrics, which are key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure progress toward your goals and objectives. You can easily create metrics on any number shown in your Power BI finance reports and set targets and thresholds for them. You can also view your metrics on your Power BI dashboard and see how they change over time and compare to your targets and thresholds.

You can even integrate your KPIs with Teams and get alerted when your KPI metrics cross certain thresholds, such as when your expenses exceed your budget or when your revenue falls below your forecast. This way, you can stay informed and act quickly and efficiently.

Get executive summaries on your finance data with Copilot in Power BI

Want to use AI to get more from your data? With Copilot in Power BI, you get a conversational AI assistant that can help you get answers and insights from your data using natural language. How about asking Copilot for an executive summary on your financial overview?

You can use Copilot in Power BI to ask questions about your data, such as: “What is my net income for the last quarter?” or “How does my cash flow compare to the previous year?”. Copilot in Power BI will analyze your data and provide you with relevant and concise answers in the form of charts, tables, or text. You can also use Copilot in Power BI to get executive summaries on your data, by using prompts such as: “Summarize my financial performance for the last month” or “Highlight the main drivers of my revenue growth”. Copilot will generate a summary report that highlights the key facts and insights from your data in a clear and engaging way.

Other ways that Business Central supports the data-driven CFO

Power BI is not the only way that Business Central supports the data-driven CFO. Other analytics features and capabilities can help you access, analyze, and present your data in an effective and efficient way. Here are some examples:

Create financial statements with no-code financial reporting (new templates coming in 2024 release wave 2). This feature allows you to create and customize your own financial statements, such as income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, using a simple and intuitive interface. You can choose from a variety of templates; add or remove accounts, columns, and rows; and format and style your statements. You can also drill down into the details of your data or export your statements to Excel or PDF to share them with others. Access more information about the new Financial Reporting templates in the 2024 release wave 2 here.

Analyze finance data your way with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central analysis assist. This feature allows you to analyze your finance data using natural language and get suggestions and recommendations from an AI assistant. You can explore your data, discover patterns and trends, and find answers and insights.

If you prefer to slice and dice the data, you can open any list in Business Central, switch on analysis mode, and group, filter, and pivot the data your way. When your analysis is ready, you can save it, or maybe share it with a coworker.

Use out-of-the-box Excel reports for finance (when you want the power and flexibility of Excel). Business Central comes with pre-built and curated Excel reports that cover various aspects of your finance data, such as Trial Balance by Period, Aged Account Receivables, and Aged Account Payables. You can use these reports to view and manipulate your data in your familiar and preferred data tool, create charts and tables, and use formulas and functions, or analyze for outliers with Copilot in Excel.

Harness the full potential of the analytical tools within Business Central

As the roles of the CFO and finance teams continue to evolve, the ability to harness data for strategic decision-making is a necessity. Dynamics 365 Business Central offers a comprehensive and flexible set of analytics tools and capabilities that can empower finance leaders to make data-driven decisions and optimize business performance. Whether you need a quick and easy way to view and explore your data, a powerful and popular tool to analyze and visualize your data, or a familiar and widely used tool to manipulate and present your data, Business Central has you covered. With Business Central, you can also take advantage of the power of AI and cloud to access your data and insights while on the go from various devices, and to get answers and summaries from natural language queries and commands. You can also integrate your data and insights with other Microsoft products, such as Teams, to collaborate and communicate more effectively with your colleagues and partners.

Learn more about using Business Central

If you want to learn more about how the data-driven CFO can use Business Central, visit the financial analytics section of our documentation, where you can find more information and resources on the various analytics scenarios and tools.

The post Experience the new generation of financial analytics and reporting in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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

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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

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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. 

The post 2024 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform now available  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In this extraordinary age of AI, we find ourselves on the brink of a profound revolution. Companies are looking for generative AI to solve longstanding problems around customer connection, loyalty, and seller productivity. Businesses are on a journey to become a digital-first business, not only to connect with customers, but to benefit from the advances in AI. 

Both winning and retaining customers requires a unified customer understanding and ability to orchestrate experiences across sales, marketing, and service. To deliver exceptional experiences, businesses need a solution that breaks down data silos between applications and departments so sellers, marketers, and service agents can get the right information in the right interface at the right time.

Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1

Release wave 1 brings new innovations and capabilities to transform your business. 

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Imagine if your sellers could effortlessly collaborate with contributing stakeholders and had the exact right information at the exact right time to make a persuasive sales pitch that speaks to the needs and wants of each individual customer to cement the sale.

Imagine if your marketing team could create the perfect end-to-end campaign, one that aligns input across departments, that pulls in the perfect target audiences, that includes campaign assets aligned with your brand identity. And instead of doing so in months, being able to create a good draft…in minutes.

Imagine if each time customers interacted with your company, no matter what department or touchpoint they engage with, they felt known, and each interaction built on the last.

With generative AI and our Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience solutions, these “imagine ifs” are reality.

The innovative capabilities that are coming to you in Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation, optimize the buying journey with the power of data, and personalize every customer interaction.

Elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation

A recent study of sales professionals showed that up to 70% of their time is used for administrative and non-selling tasks that reduce the quality of their interactions with customers.

With Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365 Sales, we enable innovative AI-enriched experiences to support sellers as they move through the sales process. We help transform sales teams from just following leads and opportunities into being trusted advisors who can predict and support customer needs.

Copilot for Sales is designed to be an invaluable assistant helping drive productivity and improve sales efficiency. It combines all the unique role-based sales capabilities with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to deliver a unified and highly relevant seller experience right within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, keeping the seller in their flow of work. Sellers can use chat to identify answers to top sales questions, whether it’s to find out more about an account or opportunity, or to view the sales pipeline. We deliver relevant sales context using natural language and prompt-based actions.

Let’s look at some of the newest features within Copilot for Sales, an application for sellers who use either Dynamic 365 Sales or Salesforce but prefer to work within their Microsoft 365 productivity apps to manage their day:

• Enhance email summaries and replies to minimize app switching and provide a response that’s aware of the customer context. Insight related to sales such as buying intent is emphasized, and suggested changes such as updates to sales stages, opportunity budgets, or estimated close dates appear in the side panel allowing instant updates.
• Easily create meeting preparation reports that give you the information you need to engage your customers confidently. You can share the meeting prep with your team members so everyone can be on the same page with knowledge about the customer and the account. Using the power of Copilot in Word combined with Sales insight from your customer relationship management (CRM) application.
• Get immediate AI-generated tips, suggestions, and advice in Microsoft Teams meetings to help sellers concentrate on the meeting dialogue and ensure they can respond quickly to requests and possible challenges, such as competitor references, by surfacing relevant information when and where they need it.
• Generate post-meeting follow-up quickly and easily allowing sellers to follow-up with tasks and notifications that are generated from the Teams intelligent recap screens and review the key questions that need to be answered. Follow-up work with their team members can be managed using deal rooms and planner activities to review task suggestions and assignments ensuring no follow-up is missed.
• Keep systems up to date without the pain of manual effort. Copilot for Sales allows for quick creation of records, such as leads and opportunities, right in the Microsoft 365 surface area. In the Copilot side panel, create new records and update fields using pre-filled suggestions without leaving the screen.

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to be our market-leading CRM solution designed to streamline sales processes, cultivate customer relationships, and expedite deal closures for businesses of all sizes. We bring the power of generative AI right inside this surface area and help sellers transform their CRM interactions to support customer conversations and land deals. With the latest release we’re helping sellers to:

• Transform the CRM sales experience by using the immersive full-screen Copilot view right in Dynamics 365 Sales. Get all key information in one place including pipeline, suggested actions, deals in progress, and real-time insights on key accounts. Sellers can query that information to get further details and insights using natural language and suggested prompts. Use it to get started every day as a homepage for all sellers using Dynamics 365.
• Make the best use of prospecting time with intelligent lead management to make sure that sales development teams are using their time wisely and focusing on leads that have a higher chance of closing quickly. In this release, we’re adding qualification criteria that incorporate signals to help show how interested the customer is. The distribution of those leads is then improved based on seller capacity and our new notification alerts make sure that sellers don’t lose the opportunity to interact when the timing is right.

Optimize the buying journey with the power of data

It all starts with data. Generative AI takes what used to be specialized and trained roles and democratizes them so customer experience (CX) professionals can use and take advantage of the data, insights, and workflows from their CRM system. Generative AI will autonomously assist customers and sellers in their day-to-day experiences to:

• Elevate customer experiences in real time: With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, CX professionals can now ensure customer profiles and associated insights are updated in real time based on data signals, allowing them to provide the most targeted and personalized experience as they engage with your website or mobile app, which will foster loyalty, increase engagement, enhance satisfaction, and drive higher conversion rates.
• Know your account better with AI-generated account summaries in Dynamics 365 Sales: With integrated data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, sellers can now quickly access a comprehensive overview of each account, enabling them to prioritize their work effectively and engage with customers in a more personalized and targeted manner.
• Maximize sales success with AI-suggested past successful deals: In Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers now have the ability to use the collective intelligence from past successful deals to identify and pursue similar opportunities effectively. This AI-driven feature simplifies the decision-making process and increases the likelihood of closing deals quickly. By analyzing personal success stories and industry-specific data, sellers can make well-informed decisions that enhance sales effectiveness. The strategic use of AI suggestions not only improves efficiency but also significantly raises the chances of winning deals, thereby boosting overall sales performance.

Personalize every customer interaction

Marketers and CX professionals are being empowered to go beyond automated spam to creating cross-channel cohesive, conversational experiences that drive loyalty and retention. The innovative capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that are releasing in this wave enable CX professionals to:

• Take campaigns from concept to launch in minutes using Copilot in Customer Insights Journeys: With Copilot, instead of breaking down a series of fragmented work items, the team begins by telling Copilot the outcome they want to achieve. In minutes, they’re presented with the new project board, curating ideas for every component central to the campaign: such as segments, content, and journeys, all ready for review. It’s fueled by unified data from all sources of customer data, brand guidelines, past campaigns, and creative briefs.
• Generate unique on-brand creative assets in minutes: No more scouring media libraries or resorting to use of stock images. You can ensure images are on brand and personalized for each audience, generated by Copilot using the new Typeface integration. Copilot allows you to generate variations that then can be used for personalization—no special photo editing abilities required.
• Personalize omnichannel experiences with no code using Optimizely: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely now unlock omnichannel personalization and experimentation capabilities, enabling marketers and citizen developers to personalize every customer touchpoint with no code or prior expertise required. By combining insights and segments from Customer Insights with Optimizely audiences, you can create experiences that are tailored to your customer’s browsing activity, their loyalty, past engagement history, and other real-time signals. Moreover, you can continue the conversation or re-target your visitors by delivering the same consistent experience through customer journeys, based on which Optimizely treatment cohort the customer was part of.

With generative AI and Copilot, we’re revolutionizing the workflow for sellers and CX professionals. First, sending personalized content at every stage of the marketing campaign, improving the quality of sales leads, and next, optimizing the productivity of sellers and enhancing every single engagement with their customers, helping them to close deals faster, all thanks to Copilot. There has never been a more exciting and productive time to be a seller or marketer. We can’t wait for you to experience it.

Learn more about 2024 release wave 1 capabilities

The future of customer experience is here, and it’s driven by cutting-edge AI technology that empowers businesses to better connect with their customers, drive sales, and improve overall satisfaction for both customers and employees. This release wave is truly driving transformative change for customer-facing roles, so get your organization set up today.

To see how all of this comes to life, watch the CX overview segment of the Business Applications Launch Event and check out the 2024 release wave 1 plans to read more about these game-changing capabilities.

The post 2024 release wave 1: Transforming experiences with Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of new and enhanced experiences in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as part of our 2024 release wave 1 cadence. This release focuses on extending Microsoft Copilot capabilities by infusing generative AI into customer, agent, and supervisor experiences. We’re also enhancing voice, messaging, and email channels to provide a unified, omnichannel experience.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations improve every aspect of contact center operations. We’re continuing to invest in generative AI to help contact centers create seamless self-service options for common questions. Plus, it helps every agent become a super-agent when it comes to more complex, high-touch issues.

Copilot and AI innovation in Customer Service

Since we announced Copilot capabilities a year ago, organizations have been realizing the benefits of generative AI in the contact center. Copilot answers agents’ questions, drafts email, provides case and conversation summaries, and automates time-consuming tasks. We’ve enhanced the email drafting capability further by including a contextual inline email editor, making it even easier for agents to deliver personalized service.

Also in this release, we’re enabling agents to generate AI-powered timeline highlights to get an overview of key activities like emails, notes, appointments, tasks, phone calls, and conversations. This minimizes the amount of clicking and scrolling an agent must do to get caught up on case and customer details.

Organizations can extend Copilot capabilities with prompt plug-ins in public preview this month. With plug-ins, agents can generate a summary of their customers, products, cases, or any other entities in Microsoft Dataverse without having to switch tabs or log in to a separate app.

Generative AI in external apps with Microsoft Copilot for Service

In February, we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Service, which enables organizations to use Copilot capabilities with their existing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as Salesforce, and other productivity apps like Microsoft Teams and Outlook. It helps organizations by making their knowledge more accessible. This speeds up training and problem-solving, making work easier for agents.

In Teams, agents can save time by accessing a customer’s CRM records during a meeting. Agents can update the case and contact details, and link to open CRM records from Teams.

In Outlook, Copilot for Service can draft personalized, contextual customer service emails based on predefined intents, or agents can provide their own custom intents. Copilot can also help agents catch up on email quickly by generating summaries of long email conversations and display summaries of all the activities and information of a case. They can then save the summary to the CRM system and access it later.

Preparing for meetings is easier for agents because Copilot for Service provides the case summary associated with the meeting, along with access to view and edit CRM records. Furthermore, Copilot for Service can recommend CRM updates to agents based on information it finds in Outlook, such as contacts, emails, meetings, and summaries.

Voice channel enhancements in Customer Service

The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service help organizations provide support to customers across multiple channels, including email, voice, text message, chat, and social media. This release brings several voice channel enhancements and certifications.

With enhancements to outbound dialing, agents can easily search for a customer in the outbound dialer and open the customer record right from the call history. They can now test the microphone and speakers before and during calls. Agents can also rate the call quality using a five-star rating system with the ability to describe issues with lower quality calls. We’re also enhancing customer trust, compliance, and security with sensitive data masking in data storage, during interactive voice response (IVR) sessions, and agent sessions.

IVR enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Omnichannel add-on help customers self-serve before they must speak with an agent. In addition to improved speech recognition accuracy, these new voice features enable organizations to set prompts on silence, control timeouts, enable barge-in at any step, and suppress noise. The result is a smooth, contextual experience for customers.

Customers in Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) Moderate can now access features from the voice channel. In addition, we’re submitting Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certifications for the components of the omnichannel stack in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This high-level certification for government clouds will ensure the security of newly integrated features.

Workforce management

Intelligent forecasting with Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces an AI-powered forecasting feature designed to predict service volumes and agent demands effectively. By analyzing historical data and trends, this intelligent model provides accurate predictions for up to six months into the future. Organizations can use this capability to optimize resource allocation, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction, thanks to daily and intraday forecasts for cases and conversations.

Forecasting is tailored to the unique needs of front-office and back-office operations. It distinguishes between direct customer interactions (conversations) and internal processing (cases), offering flexibility in forecasting for different service channels. This allows organizations to plan resources efficiently, ensuring optimal service levels and agent availability for both immediate and future service demands.

Operational metrics such as service level, shrinkage, and concurrency are considered in forecasting agent demand, aligning capacity with operational constraints. The model’s auto-detection of seasonality and holidays further refines accuracy, enabling businesses to adapt to service demand variations. User-friendly charts and the ability to slice forecast data by channels and queues provide valuable insights, while the export functionality enhances usability and integration with other tools.

Email enhancements

An intuitive agent experience is key to connecting with customers. Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a robust agent desktop with generative AI, collaboration tools, and productivity features in a customizable workspace.

Agents now have a more efficient way to search for customers. They can use any part of the customer’s name to quickly find the right recipient. Email addresses are displayed alongside recipient names, making it easier for agents to identify and select the correct contact. Additionally, agents can see if recipients have set an out-of-office status, so they can adjust their communication accordingly.

The enhanced email attachment experience allows agents to quickly drag and drop attachments in emails. It also includes a reminder system that prompts agents if they mention an attachment in the email but forget to include it. These capabilities help agents save time and increase productivity when handling email communications.

To benefit the support organization, we’re also introducing the ability to create multiple cases from emails. The feature allows for automatic case creation for all mailboxes that receive an email, ensuring full visibility into customer issues. It enables teams to respond independently to customer issues, without case transfers, leading to quicker first responses and improved handling times. By avoiding case transfer delays, teams can more quickly meet service level agreements.

Next-generation AI that’s ready for enterprises

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We’re putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Empower agents to resolve issues quickly using generative AI and automation.

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Learn more and try Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Learn more about how to elevate your service with AI and enable Copilot features for your support agents.

The post AI-powered innovations enhance customer service with 2024 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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.

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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) 

The post 2024 release wave 1 kicks off with hundreds of AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers, service agents, and supply chain professionals share a common goal: delivering quality goods and services to customers on time, every time. Today, we are announcing new experiences for Microsoft Dynamics 365 that help professionals across business functions to collaboratively solve challenges, streamline workflows, and focus on what matters most—key factors for transformative customer experiences. These new products and capabilities join hundreds of other features launching between April and September as part of the 2024 release wave 1.

Innovations announced include:

• New AI demand planning capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium, a new product offering that’s now available.
• New AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations to improve operational processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences, from sales to service.
• Updates to Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service, extending Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions that integrate with your existing contact center, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and productivity apps.

New AI capabilities with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium

In October 2023, we announced the public preview of new demand planning capabilities for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. These capabilities are available today in a new product offering, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium. The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. By combining insights with streamlined collaboration, planners can have an increased level of trust for a more reliable forecast. Customers like Poloplast, an Austrian pipe manufacturer, is using Dynamics 365 to enhance its demand planning and forecasting.      

“The storage space allocation of our goods has improved because it is now based on statistical methods surfaced in Dynamics 365 … . We have seen a measurable reduction in external storage costs as a result, significantly less than what we used to require.”

Holger Kreisel: Head of Enterprise Resource Planning, Poloplast

With general availability, we are also adding several new capabilities that significantly enhance demand planning. Users can engage with Copilot-provided data insights that bring a new level of intelligence and automation to demand forecasting, and allowing for more accurate and data-driven decision-making. The new product phase-in-phase-out process helps support smoother transitions in product life cycles, minimizing disruptions and optimizing inventory levels. The introduction of row-level security enhances data protection, allowing for granular access control and safeguarding of sensitive information. Moreover, the new cell-level commenting feature complements the existing plan-level commenting, providing users with the flexibility to annotate specific data points. This fosters a more detailed and collaborative planning process, where insights and context can be shared directly within the demand planning workspace.

New AI capabilities help boost seller productivity and close deals faster

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to bring new capabilities that extend customer insights and boost sales through intelligence, collaborative selling, and Copilot-enhanced sales processes. A new proposal summary feature recaps important details within lengthy customer proposals associated with a specific contact, opportunity, lead, or account. The summary briefs sellers on the budget, authority (decision maker), need and timeline gleaned from the proposal or agreement documents, and recommends next best steps.

Additionally, sellers can access enhanced AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations in the flow of work, including in the immersive Copilot homepage, helping them stay on top of active customer email conversations and post-meeting actions to move deals forward faster.

New lead qualification enhancements enable sellers to assign opportunities to the right seller, view an AI-generated lead qualification summary, and create multiple opportunities from a single lead. These features will be available in public preview in mid-May 2024.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales introduces new generative AI capabilities that enable sellers to access sales-specific skills, data, and actions from within Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook and Microsoft Teams. With the new conversation intelligence platform, managers can measure and guide their sellers’ activities without physically shadowing them. Sales managers can use this dashboard to coach sellers to improve their sales interactions, understand customers and analyze market trends, and get insights which will help you build a sales strategy. You can download the public preview here, available since March 15.

Activity orchestration across various accounts and activities is one of the biggest challenges for sellers. When sellers work in a collaboration space in Teams, Copilot will monitor conversations and suggest tasks based on the selling team’s activities. Once accepted, the tasks are automatically generated with assigned owners. Sellers can add a tab in the collaboration space to access and view the status of tasks assigned to team members. This capability will be generally available in mid-April 2024.

New AI innovations continue to boost agent productivity and deliver personalized experiences

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to deliver innovations that empower agents to accelerate case resolution and provide exceptional customer experiences. Agents can now get a succinct overview of the most recent and significant updates related to any record in the Dynamics 365 timeline, and swiftly catch up in just a single click. Copilot generates the streamlined timeline highlights, summarizing key developments from various activities, such as those in emails, notes, and conversations, enhancing agent productivity by minimizing unnecessary clicks and lengthy scrolling. This helps agents to have faster and clearer interactions with customers to meet their expectations.

Agents can also conveniently use Copilot inline right within the email editor, in addition to the side panel, to generate contextual draft email responses. They can refine their existing drafts with follow-up custom prompts and single-clicks, using Copilot without requiring any knowledge articles. Together, these enhancements make navigation in the workspace more flexible and deliver an easier email authoring experience. The capabilities will be generally available in North America this month with a subsequent planned rollout for other regions.

In addition to currently supported knowledge sources such as Microsoft SharePoint, Copilot can now be extended to access customer, product or case data in Microsoft Dataverse, with prompt plug-in support. Agents can get a unified experience using these plug-ins, as they no longer need to switch to other tabs and tools to connect to information residing in Microsoft Dataverse. Agents save time as well, as Copilot can automatically identify the right prompt plug-in needed, based on the question being asked and through a deep understanding of the intent implied by the question. Available in public preview later this month, support for prompt plug-ins created in Microsoft Copilot Studio helps agents deliver faster resolution and increased customer satisfaction.

AI innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel capabilities also significantly uplevel self-service automation, redirecting more cases that would be typically escalated to an agent. Customers can engage with a robust conversational AI driven experience, with IVR enhancements that now include fine-tuning speech for optimized authoring, improved speech recognition accuracy, and an overall better customer experience when dealing with interrupts, latencies, and information collection.

Additionally, Copilot for Service features previously available in preview status will reach general availability later this month. These include the ability to use Copilot in Outlook and Teams to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and more. Download the Copilot for Service app to experience Copilot for Service in Teams and Outlook.

In May, we will introduce in preview the ability for agents to ask Copilot for answers to questions about CRM data—such as case, contact, or knowledge details, as well as use Copilot to summarize case details.  

Be sure to explore 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.

Business Applications Launch Event

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Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in to the Business Applications Launch Event this Wednesday, April 10, at 9 AM Pacific Time 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.

The post New Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot innovations for supply chain, sales, and service join the 2024 release wave 1 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.

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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.

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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.

AI is revolutionizing the way sellers operate, enabling them to work smarter, not harder and achieve fantastic results. With AI-powered tools, sellers can access real-time insights, streamline their workflow, and make data-driven decisions, all while minimizing manual effort. These advancements empower sellers to engage more effectively with customers, enhance their productivity, and ultimately achieve better results in today’s competitive market.

Our latest release is working to make AI become a natural addition to a sales toolkit. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot drive forward the lead to opportunity process providing insights, suggestions, and system updates with the click of a button. Each capability released across this wave helps build a fantastic set of scenarios to foster a better understanding of customers and provide ways to collaborate and accelerate deals with personalized and relevant insights.

Let’s take a closer look at how the latest capabilities are transforming sellers into agile and informed professionals, helping them stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional value to their clients.

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Revolutionizing the seller workspace

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: With the general availability of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, we are changing the customer relationship management (CRM) work patterns for sellers. By seamlessly integrating AI into the application, Copilot alleviates sellers from routine tasks, expedites their actions, and ultimately enhances business outcomes. It achieves this by offering valuable recommendations, summarizing essential data, retrieving information, and facilitating context-specific actions, all seamlessly integrated into the natural flow of work.

Not only in a side panel, expect to see Copilot across the CRM application within email replies and across search and homepage experiences to help salespeople think less about data entry, record search, and activity timelines and instead spend more time building strong customer relationships.

Insightful record summaries: We’re introducing new AI-generated summaries, for lead and opportunity summaries including citations and CRM-linked highlights to validate the accuracy of the information. Now a salesperson can see an instant summary to help keep them up to date with the latest changes and news items.

Elevated customer profiles: Sellers understand the importance of seizing the moment with customers, and staying promptly informed to support their deals. Sales Copilot can now integrate with People.ai and Seismic to expand and enrich screens with valuable references and insights, thereby amplifying stakeholder and deal intelligence.

Real-time intelligence: Our objective is to empower sellers with timely, relevant information. When customers mention a competitor or brand during sales conversations, real-time information cards instantly populate the Microsoft Sales Copilot pane within Microsoft Teams meetings. This ensures that sellers are consistently well-prepared and informed.

Efficient sales qualification: Copilot also plays a pivotal role in streamlining the sales qualification process. It proactively prompts sellers with crucial questions during interactions with prospects, ensuring that vital data points are captured to advance the deal. Employing established frameworks like budget, authority, needs, and timeline (BANT) qualification, Copilot guarantees that budgets, key stakeholders, needs, and timelines are all well understood and accounted for in customer interactions.

Automation and assignment enhancements: In addition to all the AI capabilities arriving to Dynamics 365 Sales, we want to ensure quality leads and opportunities get to the doors of the sellers, fast. With the latest assignment features, new leads or opportunities can be automatically assigned to sales teams or added to queues based on lead attributes and matching team or sales queue attributes.

Refreshed user experience: The Dynamics 365 Sales user experience has been refreshed to enhance the look and usability of the system, providing updated styling, including drop shadows and brighter background colors; new fluent-based controls in forms; business process flows; and dialogs and refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows in form pages. This new and refreshed user experience delivers improved productivity, increased user satisfaction, and better decision-making.

Manage key stakeholders and buyer relationships: Account team members often need help identifying the right stakeholders within a customer organization for their deals. With the new smart organization charts, sellers can build and visualize a customer’s organization, capture the buyers’ roles easily, and get a snapshot of each contact’s activity levels with your organization. This helps sellers maintain a healthy business relationship with their customers.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot

These are just a few of the new capabilities we’re rolling out for sellers in 2023 release wave 2. To learn more, check out the resources below.

• Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot release wave documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Microsoft Sales Copilot webpage.

If you’re not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

The post New sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 2—Helping sellers work smarter appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As businesses around the world increasingly recognize the value of generative AI in driving growth through better customer experiences, Microsoft has taken the lead in developing advanced AI features within its journey orchestration and customer data platform product—Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Our AI journey began more than two years ago. Since then, we’ve already implemented 10 groundbreaking AI features, with more coming each month. Our AI features already assist data analysts and marketers in their daily tasks—improving data quality, unlocking data to understand customers, identifying audiences, and building journeys and content to engage customers. This demonstrates our commitment to promptly deliver announced product innovations offering cutting-edge solutions that boost productivity, unlock capabilities, and leverage data, effectively addressing the needs of organizations worldwide.

As we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, we’re delighted to give you a sneak preview of the new features releasing as part of 2023 release wave 2.

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Unleash the power of AI and real-time insights to fuel customer experiences

To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. Dialog with data offers an intuitive way to explore your data across all your data sources and uncover new opportunities to grow your business. Chat with your data and ask questions using everyday words to receive answers as well as additional insights within seconds. Dialog with data is available in all geographies in 23 languages.

As customers engage with your business, they constantly provide signals about their interests, such as adding a product to a cart or signing up for a trial. It’s crucial to build on these signals as they happen so you can deliver the right experience at the right time. With this release, we are introducing in public preview real-time capabilities to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, enabling you to now personalize your customer’s experience on web and mobile in real-time, whether they’re anonymous or known. You can deliver the most relevant offer, content, or experience by combining their latest interactions and activities with your brand together with their profile data, the segments they belong to, and insights about them, such as their lifetime value.

As customers engage across digital and human-assisted channels, it’s essential for sellers also to have access to comprehensive data and insights to ensure a seamless cross-channel experience. By unifying, enriching, and transforming customer data and interactions into actionable insights using data from multiple sources, Customer Insights equips sellers with unparalleled knowledge. We’ve made these insights readily available to sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot. Sellers can consult customer profile summaries, an at-a-glance view of essential customer engagement, predictions, and insights to help the follow-up conversation. Metrics such as lifetime value, churn risk, and buying propensity, displayed right on the page where sellers are working, assist them in identifying high-value opportunities and enable them to have hyper-personalized conversations.

Orchestrate personalized journeys using Copilot

In the past, the idea of completing complex tasks by simply describing them seemed like something out of a sci-fi movie. But with AI and natural language models, this is becoming a reality. Journey creator, a Copilot feature, streamlines the process of designing customer journeys. Just describe your journey in English, and let Copilot build it for you. Get suggestions to create the journey on segments, triggers, communication timing, branching options, and easily make journey edits. Journey creator is now available in North America and coming to all geographies in December.

Query assist, our AI powered segment builder, is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys, so both marketers and data analysts can build complex segments just by describing them. Thanks to intelligent segment summaries, teams can easily collaborate. Sharing segments, understanding the intent of the segment, and ensuring the logic matches the intended outcome has never been easier. Marketers also receive recommendations to optimize their segments.

In addition, with this release, you will receive a variety of features aimed at enhancing customer engagement and streamlining communication. These include setting up quiet times, preventing duplicate emails to the same address, choosing the most effective email address for reaching customers, and allowing the use of your brand as an SMS sender.

Boost content impact, streamlining creativity and efficiency with Copilot

Designing content that resonates with your audience requires a combination of creativity and time, and with the assistance of Copilot, this process becomes more efficient and impactful. Content ideas, your solution for generating captivating emails in minutes, is now accessible worldwide in English, and in seven additional languages. Continuous enhancements, such as sample key points for typical email types or choosing a tone of voice best suited to your brand, have made content generation even more efficient.

While content ideas is perfect to kickstart new emails, you can now use Content rewrite to rapidly iterate and perfect your existing messages. Whether you are creating emails, text messages, push notifications, or forms, you can easily rephrase your messages, adjust the tone of voice, shorten or lengthen your copy, and uplevel your campaigns.

To complement your content, Copilot automatically recommends a selection of images from your library matching your copy, so you can easily add images in your emails, forms, and push notifications without spending hours searching.

Finalizing your campaigns often required dedicated time from you or a designer to achieve just the right look. Using Copilot, you can effortlessly style your emails, event registration pages, and forms to interpret your website and instantly apply a similar design. Maintain a consistent brand identity by saving those themes in your brand profiles and easily apply them to your future campaigns. This streamlines the process, reducing the time spent fine-tuning styles and allowing you to focus on other core activities.

Generate higher quality leads to maximize your opportunity pipeline and increase win rates

Organizations that prioritize sales and marketing alignment are typically more likely to achieve their organization’s growth goals. Sellers want marketers to deliver good quality leads. Marketers want sellers to follow-up on the leads they generate and convert these into revenue. To boost conversions, it’s crucial for marketers to identify prospects that are most likely to make a purchase and send them to sellers when they are ready to engage. Our enhanced lead scoring model, with its granular qualification criteria and signals, helps your team in assessing a prospect’s likelihood to purchase. Once you’ve identified qualified leads, you can automatically handoff in Dynamics 365 Sales at exactly the right time for the seller to reach out.

Thanks to the analytics dashboard, you can see the impact of your marketing efforts. It enables you to drive better conversion rates and optimize your activities to deliver higher return on investment (ROI). Marketers can better align with Sales by sharing a comprehensive view of the pipeline, from prospects to won opportunities.

Recognizing that each business has unique needs and requirements for aggregating data from various sources, we will now provide additional custom reporting capabilities. In Customer Insights – Journeys, you can leverage Microsoft Fabric, an all-in-one analytics and business intelligence reporting solution, to create custom Power BI reports. You can unlock more insights using data science and machine learning, without the need to move your data or conduct any data transformation activities.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

These innovations are just a small part of what is coming in this wave release. With real-time capabilities, generative AI, and by unifying sales and marketing efforts, your teams can do more with less and focus on customer experiences that win you customers for life.

Don’t wait to get started, the era of AI is now.

• Explore Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Leverage all our new AI innovations for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys by transitioning to real-time marketing.
• Get a full view of what is coming in 2023 release wave 2 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys.
• Check the 2023 release wave 2 video.
• Discover Microsoft Fabric.

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