As organizations continue to seek ways to differentiate through exceptional customer service, many are turning to emerging agentic AI capabilities as a catalyst for transformation. However, the promise of agentic service—better experiences, greater efficiency, and continuous improvement—can only be realized when AI is deeply embedded and seamlessly orchestrated across every workflow and channel. This requires more than just automation; it demands a unified context and intelligence layer that travels with the work.

At Microsoft, we believe the future of customer service is one where Microsoft Dynamics 365 becomes the context and intelligence platform for Copilot and AI agents, grounding every interaction in rich customer data and business processes. With Dynamics 365 providing composable skills across the tools people already use every day, we enable intelligent, proactive self-service and augment human capabilities. This empowers service reps, supervisors, and leaders to amplify their impact, delivering more consistent, personalized, and effective service at scale.

The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2026

Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader

Read the report

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, we’re already delivering on this vision, helping our customers achieve tangible business outcomes with agentic service. Dynamics 365 Customer Service combines our latest AI advances with robust core capabilities, all deeply integrated with the entire Microsoft portfolio across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Azure, and the Microsoft Fabric data platform.

​Today, we’re excited to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2026.

Delivering measurable outcomes with agentic service

Our customers and the industry at large recognize we’re leading the way in agentic service innovation and enterprise adoption.

In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, AI agents orchestrate context and automate workflows in simple and complex inquiries across voice and digital channels. Agents can handle routine interactions and execute actions autonomously within robust governance and compliance guardrails. Customer Intent Agent continuously discovers new intents from conversations across channels, enabling evergreen self-service.

Agents like Case Management Agent automate repetitive tasks and integrate with Copilot to surface next-best actions during human-assisted interactions, helping reps offer rapid resolutions.

Importantly, these service agents create self-learning loops, helping improve resolution accuracy and speed. This continuous improvement extends to service reps as well. Quality Evaluation Agent monitors service quality in AI-powered and human-assisted interactions to enhance agent performance and recommend coaching opportunities for reps. Meanwhile, Customer Knowledge Management Agent adapts knowledge bases, updating content and generating new articles based on fresh insights or recurring issues.

This powerful combination of agentic and human service is orchestrated through Agent Hub, which routes tasks to the most appropriate AI agent or service rep and optimizes task distribution based on real-time KPI results.

Customers like Visa are saving time by using the Customer Knowledge Management Agent to turn customer conversation data into knowledge articles.

Auto-knowledge generation reduces article creation time by 88%, from four hours down to 30 minutes per article. And by mining 7,000 cases, we’ve been able to produce 700 knowledge articles, just for one line of business and we continue to accelerate knowledge creation at scale.

Lidia Daldoss, Vice President, Service Digitization & AI Acceleration, Visa

Accelerating successful AI adoption

Despite the numerous benefits on offer, navigating the AI adoption journey can be extremely complex for many organizations. Sometimes there’s uncertainty about where to start, or a lack of clarity about how to get a measurable return on AI investments.

Microsoft simplifies AI adoption, enabling organizations to quickly realize significant efficiency and productivity gains in customer service operations. We offer structured guidance and proven methodologies to help accelerate adoption success for organizations at every level of AI maturity.

Our customers particularly value the FastTrack for Dynamics 365 program, which is built on our Success By Design framework that paves the way for effective solution design, deployment, and operation. With proactive, expert guidance, organizations can confidently implement an agentic service platform based on advanced technologies that are already delivering tangible business outcomes for enterprises worldwide.

Enhancing core customer service capabilities

While AI agents automate and orchestrate workflows, and Copilot provides contextual guidance for reps, Dynamics 365 Customer Service also offers a strong set of core capabilities.

Intelligent, omnichannel routing, for example, is a cornerstone of effective service, directing inquiries to wherever customers will find the fastest path to resolution. Similarly, Microsoft’s longstanding strengths in business intelligence, process management, and forecasting and scheduling provide an essential foundation for efficient operations.

Integration with Microsoft Teams also enables seamless collaboration across service, sales, and marketing, streamlining issue resolution and highlighting opportunities to enhance the end-to-end customer experience.

Another notable strength of Dynamics 365 Customer Service is its extensibility, both within Microsoft’s suite of business applications and productivity tools, and across our extensive partner ecosystem and third-party marketplace.

The biggest impact of Dynamics 365 is that the customer information is more centralized, which saves time and gives us a 360-degree view of the customer.

Petra Velten, Business Expert Customer Service, Lufthansa Cargo

With Dynamics 365, our team has a single pane of glass with all customer information and tasks in one place. The Rheem knowledge base within Dynamics 365 Customer Service also gives [reps] fast, easy access to specific product information during customer calls.

Jordan Bond, Senior Manager, Product Owner, Dynamics Service, Rheem

Amplify your impact with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

We’re delighted to be recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™, but this is just the beginning of the agentic service era that Microsoft and our partners are shaping. We’ll continue to make significant R&D investments that help accelerate AI breakthroughs and work alongside our pioneering customers to define the future of service.

Explore how you can boost efficiency and enhance service in every channel:

• Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.

The post Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2026 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights from Dynamics 365

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

Dynamics 365 Sales

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

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

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

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

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

Dynamics 365 Field Service

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

Dynamics 365 Sustainability

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

Dynamics 365 Finance

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

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

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

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

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

Dynamics 365 Commerce

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

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

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

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities

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

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data

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

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

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

Dynamics 365 Business Central

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

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

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

Power Apps

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

Power Pages

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

Power Automate

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

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot 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

Power Platform &

Copilot Studio edition

April 15, 9AM PDT

Register now

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.

When customers place an order, they expect speed, accuracy, and reliability. Behind the scenes, inventory-to-deliver processes are what makes that promise possible, helping to ensure the right products are available at the right time to meet customer expectations while controlling costs. For operational professionals, inventory isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, it’s the lifeline of the supply chain. It determines whether you can fulfill demand without delays, avoid costly stockouts, and keep working capital flowing. From procurement and production to fulfillment and customer satisfaction, inventory-to-deliver impacts every aspect of the supply chain.

In today’s fast-paced market, poor inventory visibility can lead to stockouts, excess holding costs, and missed revenue opportunities. Conversely, a well-orchestrated inventory strategy drives efficiency, reduces waste, and strengthens resilience against disruptions. It enables businesses to optimize working capital, improve cash flow, and deliver on promises consistently. So, how can an agent-ready enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform reinvent the inventory-to-deliver process?

Microsoft Cloud and agent platform enables inventory to deliver transformation

Microsoft Dynamics 365 can transform inventory management from a reactive task into a strategic advantage with an agent-ready foundation that spans across finance, supply chain, sales, and operations for a single source of truth that is both scalable and secure.

This same data foundation enables customers to buy, build, and customize agents to infuse across processes. For a refresher on understanding the agent landscape available today, visit Reinventing business process with AI: Agents in record to report where we explore the difference between first party, third party, and custom agents.

Automate vendor communication with a first party agent from Dynamics 365

The Supplier Communications Agent in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is designed to automate routine procurement communications between purchasing teams and vendors. Traditionally, these interactions—such as following up on purchase orders or confirming changes—are manual, repetitive, and often handled via email, even in organizations using electronic data interchange (EDI). The Supplier Communications Agent can streamline these low-complexity tasks by automating vendor outreach and updates, freeing procurement professionals to focus on strategic activities. This not only seeks to improve efficiency but also reduces overall procurement costs by minimizing time spent on administrative work.

Explore partner agents to support the inventory to deliver process

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are configurable bridges between the business data within your line-of-business apps and the partner or custom-built agents you want to use. MCP serves as a universal intermediary, unlocking access to a unified platform and app data, modernizing how AI agents are interoperable with your apps. Let’s explore a few partner-built agents that will help you realize value across your supply chain today.

Warehouse Advisor Agent by MCA Connect

The Warehouse Advisor Agent leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to automate and improve key processes such as slotting, inventory consolidation, and cycle counting. By analyzing real-time data and historical trends, the agent delivers actionable insights that help warehouse teams make smarter, faster decisions.

This solution is ideal for warehouse managers, operations leaders, and supply chain professionals in distribution and manufacturing industries who are looking to reduce inefficiencies, improve inventory accuracy, and increase labor productivity. It integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365’s Warehouse Management System (WMS), enabling users to deploy intelligent automation without disrupting existing workflows.

Inventory Acquisition and Re‑Balancing Agent from RSM

The Inventory Acquisition and Re‑Balancing Agent from RSM enables smarter inventory decisions by analyzing demand signals, supply availability, and stock imbalances in Dynamics 365. The agent can recommend rebalancing and acquisition actions to reduce stockouts, minimize excess inventory, and improve working capital efficiency.

Inbound Load Agent from Fellowmind

Fellowmind’s Inbound Load Agent can streamline inbound logistics by intelligently composing and optimizing loads based on demand, capacity, and operational constraints within Dynamics 365. The agent seeks to help logistics teams reduce transportation costs, improve warehouse utilization, and simplify complex inbound planning decisions.

Get started with agents for inventory-to-deliver processes

The Microsoft platform brings together secure, scalable cloud services with Dynamics 365’s unified ERP capabilities to streamline the entire inventory-to-delivery process. By leveraging real-time data and intelligent workflows, businesses gain supply chain agility to better meet customer expectations with precision. Partner-built agents, powered by MCP, amplify this value, enabling autonomous actions and predictive insights that transform operations from reactive to proactive. Together, these innovations create a resilient, future-ready foundation for delivering efficiency and growth at scale.

The post Agentic AI for inventory to deliver: From procurement to fulfillment appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Retail Frontier Firms are evolving their operating models to keep pace with increasingly dynamic markets, using AI to support more responsive and resilient decision-making and execution across commerce channels. Rather than improving individual functions in isolation, these organizations are rethinking how commerce operates end to end, enabling AI agents to work alongside people to support faster, more consistent outcomes across the business. This evolution is accelerating as retailers navigate rising customer expectations, sustained margin pressure, volatile demand, and ongoing labor constraints: conditions that benefit from decisions being made and executed more continuously.

In Retail Frontier Firms, AI capabilities are embedded where decisions and value are created: in stores, at the digital shelf, across merchandising, pricing, fulfillment, customer service, and checkout. AI agents interpret signals from customers, inventory, suppliers, and channels and help coordinate actions across the enterprise. This supports retailers as they respond to change with greater speed, consistency, and scale across touchpoints.

This operating model is enabled by agents that share context and operate cohesively across the retail ecosystem. At the core of agentic commerce is Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides AI agents with access to a shared, enterprise-grade understanding of products, inventory, pricing, policies, and customer intent. By grounding agents in a common business context, MCP helps support aligned, governed, and consistent decision-making across channels and functions. The future of retail is increasingly shaped by a human and AI agent operating model, connected by shared context and open protocols.

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) unlocks hundreds of thousands of business functions for secure, real-time use by agents, developers, and applications. 
• Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) enables agents across merchandising, supply chain, store operations, and service to collaborate end to end, helping reduce fragmentation and align execution across functions.
• Payment and transaction agent protocols extend AI capabilities through checkout and settlement, supporting trusted, compliant transactions across in-store, online, and conversational commerce.

Together, these capabilities support a more outcome-driven operating model focused on availability, margin, conversion, service levels, and loyalty. Humans define strategy, priorities, and guardrails, while AI agents help orchestrate execution across day-to-day operations: supporting modern retail operations designed for Commerce Anywhere.

Emerging retail trends shaping the future of commerce

As consumer expectations continue to rise, shoppers increasingly demand seamless, continuous interactions where they move effortlessly from social-commerce discovery to mobile checkout, in-store pickup, curbside fulfillment, or voice-activated reordering. Frontier retail responds to this shift by dissolving the boundaries between channels and touchpoints, allowing commerce to adapt in real time to customer intent, location, and context. For brands, this means the ability to deliver frictionless, anticipatory commerce at scale by meeting customers wherever they are, with relevance and speed, without adding operational complexity.

The industry is rapidly shifting away from static, siloed channels toward autonomous, context-aware agents that orchestrate buying journeys seamlessly across stores, digital experiences, and conversational interfaces. Agents move beyond traditional personalization. They actively guide product discovery, shape contextual offers, negotiate availability, and coordinate fulfillment, helping to continuously optimize inventory, pricing, promotions, and supply-chain decisions behind the scenes. As personalization and automation become table stakes, agentic AI emerges as the strategic engine driving scalable growth and sustainable Commerce Anywhere.

Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce MCP Server

Agentic commerce introduces a new operating model in which AI agents collaborate through MCP, enabling continuous decision-making and coordinated execution across the retail value chain. The new Dynamics 365 Commerce MCP Server exposes core retail business logic including catalog, pricing, promotions, inventory, carts, orders, and fulfillment as MCP-enabled capabilities. Expected to be in preview in February 2026, this will allow retailers to build agentic commerce experiences where AI agents can securely discover, decide, and execute retail workflows across digital, physical, and conversational channels.

By combining the ERP, Analytics, and Commerce MCP servers, Dynamics 365 supports a more agent-driven operating model in which front-office experiences and back-office operations are connected and optimized, helping retailers operate with greater agility and readiness for Commerce Anywhere.

How retailers can begin adopting agentic commerce today

Retail leaders can begin moving toward agentic commerce by adopting AI agents in three practical ways:

1. Starting with agents embedded in Dynamics 365
2. Extending capabilities through custom-built agents using MCP
3. Leveraging partner-built agents across the broader retail ecosystem

Together, these approaches allow retailers to progress at their own pace while aligning agent adoption to their operating model, business priorities, and maturity.

1. Start with agents embedded in Dynamics 365

Purpose-built agents are designed to address common retail challenges and operational friction points. Dynamics 365 agents and retail industry agents can be embedded directly into core business processes, allowing teams to realize value quickly.

Microsoft retail industry agents, like the Catalog Enrichment Agent and Personalized Shopping Agent are examples of vertical-specific agents designed around retail data models, workflows, and decision patterns that support scenarios like product discovery, assortment accuracy, and personalized engagement without requiring custom development.

Today, in Dynamics 365 the Supplier Communications Agent is a good example of embedded agents in action. Retailers can proactively monitor supply signals and engage suppliers in real time to confirm availability, align delivery timelines, and respond to changes earlier. This supports faster coordination, fewer surprises, and more reliable execution at scale.

2. Build custom agents using MCP

Retail operations are shaped by business logic that is unique to each organization: driven by merchandising strategies, store formats, service models, and supply-chain constraints. Microsoft Copilot Studio enables retailers to build custom AI agents that encode their own rules across replenishment, allocation, fulfillment, and store execution, aligning agent behavior directly to how the business operates.

These custom agents can operate across planning and selling in the flow of work using MCP-powered access to enterprise systems. Inside Microsoft Teams, Merchandising Managers and Planners can collaborate in real time with agents that access products, demand forecasts, supplier relationships, inventory, and pricing through Dynamics 365 ERP MCP.

On the selling side, through the Dynamics 365 Commerce MCP Server, your custom agents can extend intelligence into customer experiences. Agents can discover products, personalize offers, assess availability, reserve inventory, and complete transactions across digital, physical, and conversational channels while operating with a unified view of pricing, promotions, and fulfillment.

3. Extend agentic commerce through partners and the ecosystem

Retailers can further accelerate agent adoption by leveraging partner-built agents designed for specific retail scenarios and industries. Commerce MCP enables software development companies and system integrators to build agents more quickly by reducing integration overhead, standardizing access to retail data, and maintaining enterprise-grade trust and compliance.

Early partner solutions already demonstrate the breadth of what’s possible, from store associate productivity and clienteling to conversational commerce and business-to-business (B2B) buying experiences, including:

• Amicis: The Store Commerce Agent is a voice-first, screen-aware assistant designed for in-the-moment store execution. It can help associates complete high-friction tasks like returns, exchanges, order lookups, and policy checks in Dynamics 365 Commerce using natural voice commands, while adapting to what’s on the POS screen.
• Evenica: The B2B Licensee Product Request Agent uses conversational AI and image recognition to support licensees in finding beverage products. When a product is not available in the catalog, the agent can create a request case to support the product intake process.
• Argano: The Retail Clienteling Agent offers a conversational clienteling experience by bringing together customer insights, product data, and agentic AI into a single, governed workflow. It helps retail associates improve customer relationships by delivering personalized, brand-aligned interactions before, during, and after in-store appointments.
• Sunrise: The Commerce Companion is a suite of retail agents that help simplify everyday store operations across inventory and fulfillment to purchasing and store processes. Using natural language, it is designed to deliver fast, accurate answers and guided actions, which can enable associates to serve customers efficiently while keeping operations moving smoothly.
• Visionet: FashionGPT Agent can turn natural-language shopping intent into real-time retail execution across product, pricing, inventory, and promotions. It drives the end-to-end shopping journey and help turn conversations into measurable actions across channels.

Together, embedded agents, custom-built agents, and partner solutions give retailers flexible entry points into agentic commerce supporting near-term impact while laying the foundation for a more adaptive, AI-enabled operating model across Commerce Anywhere.

Agentic retail with Dynamics 365 in action at NRF 2026

At NRF, we will demonstrate how Dynamics 365 works with Copilot and agentic capabilities to support Commerce Anywhere and more efficient, end-to-end retail operations. We will share examples of how retailers are using Dynamics 365 to evolve their operating models and advance Frontier Firm capabilities.

Visit us during NRF expo hours at Level 3, Booth 4503, and join the related theater sessions at our booth:

• Beyond the Boutique: How Frette Uses AI to Transform Store Experience
  January 11, 2026 (Sunday), 2:00 PM ET
  Session led by Sunrise Technologies
• Reimagine retail business processes with Agentic ERP
  January 13, 2026 (Tuesday), 2:30 PM ET

The future of retail belongs to frontier organizations that can sense, decide, and act in real time. With agentic commerce enabled by Dynamics 365, retailers gain the foundation to move faster with confidence, aligning strategy, execution, and customer experience through intelligent agents that operate seamlessly across every channel. We look forward to connecting with you in New York and exploring how agentic business applications in Dynamics 365 can support your next step forward.

The post Agentic AI in retail: How Dynamics 365 powers Commerce Anywhere appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In October 2025, we announced the general availability of the Sales Qualification Agent (SQA) in Dynamics 365 Sales—a breakthrough in autonomous lead qualification. Sales Qualification Agent empowers sellers by helping build higher quality opportunity while eliminating tedious, repetitive work. Sales Qualification Agent autonomously researches every lead, initiates personalized outreach, and engages prospects to understand purchase intent, ensuring that sellers spend their time meeting prospects who are ready to take the next step. With modes enabling both seller-driven and fully autonomous qualification, the agent supports a key goal for sales organizations—increasing revenue per seller.

Customers are using Sales Qualification Agent in two ways: 

1. Helping boost revenue beyond current sales capacity
   • Responding to inbound leads within minutes instead of days, increasing response rates and in turn, qualified opportunities.
   • Engaging leads that sellers are unable to follow up on due to capacity constraints, or those deemed economically unviable to pursue.
   • Increasing pipeline quality by focusing the seller’s time on a handful of high intent, engaged leads recommended by the agent.
2. Helping reduce sales costs
   • Reducing back-office costs related to lead research and validation, using Sales Qualification Agent in “Research only” mode to hand-off only the leads that meet the ideal customer profile criteria.
   • Automatically disqualifying low-quality leads, saving hours of seller time during the week.

Continuing benchmarking the quality of sales AI agents

Microsoft is building the future of agentic Sales technology with prebuilt AI agents, such as Sales Qualification Agent, the Sales Research Agent, and the Sales Close Agent available in Dynamics 365.

At Microsoft, we’re committed to delivering quality, trust, and transparency with our agents, and that requires rigorous evaluation. As we continue to build new agents and improve existing ones for critical sales workflows, evaluation benchmarks provide a structured and transparent way for our customers to measure quality for the jobs the agent does.

Today, we’re announcing the Microsoft Sales Bench—a new collection of evaluation benchmarks designed to assess the performance of AI-powered sales agents across real-world scenarios. This framework brings together purpose-built metrics, hundreds of sales-specific scenarios, and composite scoring validated by both human and AI judges.

The Sales Bench isn’t starting from scratch. It now formalizes and expands what began with the Sales Research Bench, published on October 21, 2025, which evaluates how AI solutions answer business research questions for sales leaders.

Today, we’re extending the Microsoft Sales Bench with a second benchmark: the Microsoft Sales Qualification Bench, focused on measuring how effectively AI agents qualify leads and generate high-quality pipeline.

Introducing the Sales Qualification Bench for lead qualification

This Microsoft Sales Qualification Bench evolved from rigorous evaluations we conducted since the Sales Qualification Agent’s public preview in April, with the goal of objectively measuring quality as we further developed the agent, partnering with customers from a diverse set of industries. Since the preview, we measured every update against these standards, ensuring improvements are real and repeatable.

We generated a synthetic dataset modeled after companies from three different industries, with 300 leads, with attributes such as name, company, and email ID—representative of what sales teams typically work with before any enrichment or hygiene is performed. In addition to these typical attributes, we also added key knowledge inputs such as value proposition of the products being sold, customer case studies, and documentation for answering customer questions.

In addition to Sales Qualification Agent, we used the evaluation framework to measure ChatGPT by OpenAI on the same dataset. Since we didn’t have access to an autonomous agent from OpenAI, we mimicked how a human seller would use ChatGPT to recreate the three key jobs SQA performs. We provided each system—Sales Qualification Agent and ChatGPT—the exact same lead inputs, knowledge sources, and contextual signals under controlled evaluation configurations. We used a ChatGPT Pro license with GPT-4.1. This model is the closest match (and slightly better) to Sales Qualification Agent’s GPT-4.1 mini, which we intentionally chose to deliver optimal quality at lower cost per lead than newer models. Additionally, Pro license was chosen to optimize for quality: ChatGPT’s pricing page describes Pro as “full access to the best of ChatGPT.”¹

The framework evaluates outputs from the three jobs across Sales Qualification Agent and ChatGPT:

• Research: Company research for the lead—background, strategic priorities, financial health, and latest news.
• Outreach: A personalized email generated based on research, to make initial contact with the lead.
• Engagement: The agent’s conversation with a lead until it’s qualified or dispositioned.

Our scoring metrics span core quality (accuracy, relevance, completeness), trustworthiness (grounding and citations), and business-specific success criteria (e.g., relevancy of company research to highlight interest in the seller’s offerings, personalization of the initial outreach emails sent to catch the lead’s attention, accuracy of responses to the lead’s questions to drive purchase intent, and the timing of handoff to a seller when the lead is ready to engage).

Outputs were scored independently by both human reviewers and an LLM judge built with GPT-5.1, using a 1–10 scale for each metric. These metric-specific scores were then rolled up using a simple average to produce a composite quality score. The result is a rigorous benchmark presenting a composite score and dimension-specific scores to reveal where agents excel or need improvement. Our methodology, metrics, and their definitions are described in this technical blog.

Results

In evaluations completed on December 4, 2025, using the Sales Qualification Bench, Sales Qualification Agent outperformed ChatGPT on each of the three jobs required for sales qualification:

1. Research: The Sales Qualification Agent outperformed ChatGPT with 6% higher aggregate scores, leading on relevancy and completeness in research results that highlighted the lead company’s interest in the seller’s offerings.
2. Outreach: Sales Qualification Agent demonstrated 20% better results compared to ChatGPT, generating email drafts with accurate personalization and mentions of relevant recent events that will resonate with the lead.
3. Engagement: Sales Qualification Agent’s email responses to engage a lead over a multi-turn conversation scored 16% higher than ChatGPT’s. SQA generated emails that responded to the lead’s questions with accurate answers that develop their purchase interest and with precise discovery questions that qualify the lead before handing off to a seller.

In addition to performing better on these metrics, Sales Qualification Agent has the ability to run autonomously, which can help significantly reduce the time spent generating pipeline while helping sales teams build better quality pipeline.

Sales Qualification Agent scores well on these three jobs as its optimized for sales-specific scenarios and uses the following techniques to get great results:

1. It uses agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to relentlessly research each lead, ensuring greater completeness. More on this in the following section.
2. With knowledge of what the company sells, it can contextualize every workflow to increase relevancy for both the seller and the lead.
3. It can retrieve organizational knowledge from attached documents and internal repositories like SharePoint with greater precision, boosting accuracy of its responses when engaging with the lead.

The technical blog details which metrics SQA excels at relative to ChatGPT, where it falls short, and why.

Translating evals to real-world impact

Running evals led to major Sales Qualification Agent improvements during its six-month preview. Early results prompted us to try agentic AI design patterns, especially agentic RAG, which improved our company research by allowing iterative web searches and real-time reasoning. They also led us to enhance data coverage by auto-linking existing CRM records to each lead and inferring company names from lead emails. These updates provided sellers with deeper insights, revealing strategic opportunities and risks beyond basic facts.

For instance, when researching leads for a security company, Sales Qualification Agent can link news on recent cyberattacks to increased demand for its software. As highlighted in the technical blog, research synthesized by the agent makes such inferences more consistently than ChatGPT. Enhancing the agent’s research also improved the relevance and personalization of outreach emails, helping agents better engage leads and clarify their ability and intent to purchase before handing them off to sellers.

Sandvik Coromant, a leader in precision cutting tools, partnered with us to pilot Sales Qualification Agent for their Digital Commerce program. After the updates, Pia Cedendahl, Global Sales Manager for Strategic Channels/Partners and Online Sales, noted, “Sales Qualification Agent’s answers became far more on-point to our business—it’s like having a research assistant that already understands what we care about.” Sandvik Coromant saw improved lead conversion and higher engagement from their Digital Account Managers, validating the impact of our evaluation-driven approach. Pia joined Microsoft leaders at the Microsoft Ignite 2025 session, “Accelerate revenue and seller productivity with agentic CRM,” where she shared how the team saved more than 120 hours and $19,000 in just the first three weeks since launching a pilot, and forecasted a 5% increase in revenue with full rollout.

Better insights, more personalization, proven value

Equipped with agentic AI design and backed by data-driven evaluation, customers can confidently use the Sales Qualification Agents so that:

• Sellers receive comprehensive company overviews, timely news highlights, and actionable recommendations that are consistently delivered with high quality—drawing a clear line from insight to action.
• Sales leaders can expand their qualified pipeline cost efficiently, with the agent ensuring high lead quality.
• Prospects benefit from more personalized outreach, enhancing their experience and supporting increased conversion rates.

What’s next

We’ll continue to refine Sales Qualification Agent using agentic design patterns, aiming to make every improvement measurable and meaningful. Stay tuned for the full evaluation results and methodology for the Sales Qualification Bench, which will be published for transparency and reproducibility. We also intend to add more evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to the Microsoft Sales Bench collection including benchmarks that cover future sales agent capabilities.

¹ChatGPT pricing page, accessed November 24, 2025

The post Dynamics 365 sets the bar for agentic sales qualification on new benchmark appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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

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

From automation to autonomy: The AI-first organization

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

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

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

1. Data: The foundation of agent autonomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Your strategic productivity partner

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

3. Agents: Plan, decide, and act

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

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

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

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

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

Partner-built agents that extend industry workflows

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

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

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

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

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

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

Convergence 2025

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

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

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

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

In today’s economy, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have evolved far beyond traditional back-office functions. They are now strategic drivers of growth, agility, and resilience. Modern business leaders require ERP solutions that deliver more than transactional processing; they need intelligence, insights, and automation at scale. Selecting a platform with embedded AI today helps set your organization up for tomorrow’s competitive advantage.

We’re excited to announce Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a Leader in three Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports:

• Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises
• Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises
• Cloud ERP Finance

We believe the recognition of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Leader placement in all three Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports shows our commitment to delivering end-to-end coverage for modern organizations. Our expertise is especially critical as most businesses today need the flexibility to manage both products and services, backed by the trust and security of a robust financial backbone. With embedded AI capabilities at the core of Dynamics 365, enterprises can confidently unify operations, adapt to evolving market demands, and help ensure their financial systems are secure, scalable, and future-ready.

Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises

The ERP landscape is evolving rapidly. Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for service-centric enterprises predicts “by 2027, 62% of ERP application spending will include AI capabilities, a significant leap from just 14% in 2024.”¹ Dynamics 365 is at the forefront of this transformation, helping businesses harness AI to drive efficiency, agility, and growth.

Dynamics 365 is a software as a service (SaaS) ERP, delivered from Microsoft Azure data centers worldwide. It combines natively developed ERP components with a robust partner ecosystem to deliver industry-specific functionality. Serving midsize to large service businesses across EMEA, the Americas, and APAC, Dynamics 365 is designed for scale and flexibility.

Our core competencies

• AI-powered innovation: Embedded AI through Microsoft Copilot delivers actionable insights and automates finance, operations, and service processes. Tasks like account reconciliation and cash flow forecasting can become simpler and smarter.
• Connected ecosystem: Smooth integration with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, and Azure enables unified data and workflows across the enterprise.
• Industry-specific capabilities: Our partner ecosystem extends Dynamics 365’s functionality for specialized industries, supporting flexibility and scalability.

Key strengths driving leadership:

• AI-powered capabilities: Advanced AI empowers organizations with actionable insights and automation to enhance critical business processes.
• Integrated business management: Core financial and operational systems seamlessly connect with productivity and collaboration tools, enabling holistic visibility and informed decision-making.
• Cloud platform advantage: Built-in integrations with enterprise-grade cloud services provide scalability, security, and a unified data foundation for innovation and growth.

Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises

Microsoft is also recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Supply Chain Management and Finance solutions, which in our opinion underscores our commitment to helping upper-midsize and large enterprises transform operations with intelligent, connected systems.

Dynamics 365 integrates with the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Azure provides scalability and security; Microsoft 365 enables collaboration, and Power BI delivers actionable insights. When data flows freely and tools work together, businesses can operate faster, smarter, and with greater confidence.

Key strengths

Three core strengths for driving enterprises success:

• AI-powered automation: Advanced AI and Copilot technologies enable intelligent automation and empower organizations to create custom agents for streamlined and tailored workflows.
• Unified cloud platform: Seamless integration across Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem delivers a secure, scalable, and unified foundation for business operations.
• Global capabilities: Comprehensive localization and language support helps ensure Microsoft solutions meet the needs of organizations worldwide.

Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP Finance

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance has been recognized as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP Finance for its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. In an era where CFOs face mounting pressure to deliver agility, transparency, and predictive capabilities, Dynamics 365 Finance stands out as a transformative solution.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance is a robust platform designed for enterprises operating across multiple geographies. It offers extensive financial dimensions, user-defined tags, and a global chart of accounts, enabling organizations to manage complex, multi-entity environments in over 50 countries. These capabilities support compliance with diverse regulatory frameworks while maintaining operational efficiency.

One of the most innovative features is Microsoft Copilot Studio, which empowers users to build AI agents using natural language. This functionality allows finance teams to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for strategic decision-making.

Key strengths driving leadership

1. AI automation
   Microsoft Dynamics 365 leverages Copilot and embedded AI agents to deliver advanced automation across core business processes. These capabilities support predictive analytics, automated transaction processing, and real-time insights, empowering finance leaders to:
   • Enhance forecasting accuracy by analyzing both historical and live data.
   • Minimize manual reconciliations, freeing up valuable time.
   • Identify anomalies in transactions to help reduce compliance risks.
2. Customer-driven innovation
   Microsoft’s product development is guided by direct customer feedback, gathered through surveys, advisory boards, and innovation hubs. This approach has resulted in:
   • Low-code automation tools that enable teams to build workflows without developer support.
   • Enhanced dispute resolution features, streamlining interactions between organizations and their customers.
   • Capabilities that optimize cash flow management, supporting business business resilience in dynamic markets.
3. A global partner ecosystem
   Transformation is a collaborative journey. Microsoft’s extensive global partner network brings specialized expertise in cloud migration, industry-specific solutions, and deployment support. Whether operating in manufacturing, retail, or professional services, organizations benefit from:
   • Tailored implementations that help accelerate time-to-value and mitigate risk during transitions from legacy systems.
   • Co-development opportunities that foster innovation and deliver best-in-class solutions for unique business needs.

Why this matters for CFOs

The role of the CFO is evolving from financial steward to strategic advisor. Today’s finance leaders must deliver insights that drive growth, manage risk, and enable agility. Dynamics 365 equips CFOs with tools to:

• Predict outcomes using AI-powered analytics.
• Automate routine tasks, freeing resources for strategic initiatives.
• Collaborate seamlessly across global teams through integrated workflows.

Looking ahead: The future of finance

As we approach 2026, the finance landscape will continue to shift toward intelligent automation and predictive capabilities. Microsoft’s vision for agentic AI promises a future where finance teams operate with unprecedented efficiency and foresight. From managing exceptions autonomously to delivering real-time scenario planning, these innovations will redefine what’s possible in enterprise finance.

Organizations that embrace these technologies today will be better positioned to navigate uncertainty, capitalize on opportunities, and maintain a competitive edge.

Your path to a smarter future

Microsoft Dynamics 365 exemplifies how technology empowers business leaders, including CFOs, operations executives, and IT strategists, to move beyond transactional processes and become architects of enterprise strategy. We believe being recognized as a Leader in three Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports: Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises, Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, and Cloud ERP Finance, Dynamics 365 sets the standard for modern ERP solutions.

With its combination of AI-powered automation, customer-centric innovation, and global scalability, Dynamics 365 delivers intelligent, adaptable solutions for organizations across industries and geographies. Whether optimizing operations, transforming supply chains, or streamlining finance, Dynamics 365 offers a clear path forward—one that blends intelligence, agility, and trust.

As organizations embrace the opportunities of an AI-powered future, Microsoft remains dedicated to empowering enterprises with solutions that are intelligent, seamlessly connected, and built to scale. Discover how we are positioned by Gartner and read the full Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ service-centric, product-centric, and finance reports for deeper insights. 

See how organizations using Dynamics 365 are enhancing operational efficiency, boosting flexibility, and unlocking intelligent insights throughout their business processes.

• Dynamics 365 drives Cat® dealership into the 21st century
• Camfil harmonizes processes with Dynamics 365 bolster sustainability and profitability
• Alltech fortifies business operations with Dynamics 365

1. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises, Robert Anderson, Johan Jartelius, Tomas Kienast, Sam Grinter, Denis Torii, Chaithanya Paradarami, 13 October 2025.
2. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, Greg Leiter, Tomas Kienast, Johan Jartelius, Denis Torii, Dennis Gaughan, 13 October 2025.
3. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Finance, Mike Helsel, Irmina Melarkode, Nick Duffy, Nisha Bhandare, 27 October 2025.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designations. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 named a Leader in three Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports: Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises, Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, and Cloud ERP Finance appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Frontier Firms put Copilot, agents, and agentic business applications at the core of their operating model to enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes, and bend the curve on innovation. Today, we’re announcing several new agentic capabilities to help customers move to the Frontier—read on to learn more.

Transforming sales with Sales Development Agent

Earlier in 2025, we introduced our vision for how AI agents will transform critical sales processes like building pipeline and qualifying leads. Today marks the next milestone in that journey with the Microsoft Sales Development Agent, available through the Frontier Program in December 2025. Many sales organizations are under pressure to deliver more revenue with limited resources, and the Sales Development Agent helps sales teams scale their impact. This allows sellers to focus on nurturing customer relationships and closing deals.

Features include:

• Revenue and pipeline growth: The agent continuously researches prospects, crafts personalized outreach, and automatically follows up to ensure no lead is left behind.
• Scalability: Fully independent, yet collaborative, the agent acts as a teammate, with the ability to hand off leads to human sellers when needed.
• Security and governance: Built on Microsoft’s trusted security and compliance foundation and when enabled with Agent 365, the agent adheres to robust policies and access controls to ensure user data and workflows are protected.

Sales Development Agent connects with leading CRM systems like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the Microsoft 365 apps your teams already use like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.

The Microsoft sales team is among the first to use Sales Development Agent to reinvent the sales engagement process. With the use of Sales Development Agent, there was a 15.1% increase in the lead-to-opportunity conversation rate. ¹

Sales leaders want to help sellers act on more leads, reach more customers, grow faster, and improve revenue per seller. Microsoft Sales Development Agent can make that possible by creating an infinitely scalable sales organization, so no lead is left behind. Accenture plans to pilot Sales Development Agent across our global inside sales-as-a-service business—which helps clients sell to customers around the world—to boost their reach and revenue while maintaining cost to serve. We’ll use what we learn to help clients leverage Sales Development Agent, scale their teams, and unlock new growth.

—Chris Hergesell, Sales Reinvention Lead, Accenture Song

Learn more about Sales Development Agent with Accenture

From System of Record to System of Action

In October 2025, we shared our vision for agentic business applications—built on agents, Copilot, and unified data. These components are what define Dynamics 365 as a system of action.

Today, we’re taking that vision further with updates to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, strengthening the foundation for agentic capabilities across your entire business. MCP servers are configurable bridges between the business data within your line-of-business (LOB) apps, and the agents you build using tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio. It serves as a universal intermediary, unlocking a unified platform agnostic access to app data, modernizing how AI agents are interoperable with your apps.

For customers of Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, we’ve used MCP to simplify integration between agents in Dynamics 365 and the platforms used by sellers and service reps to execute complementary workflows, like lead research, engagement, and qualification, as well as case management and case resolution, available in public preview on November 21, 2025.

For customers of Dynamics 365 ERP, we are announcing the public preview of the MCP server that unlocks hundreds of thousands of ERP functions for real-time use. We are also introducing a new analytics MCP server in public preview starting in December 2025. These two servers provide a secure, standardized foundation to connect ERP data with AI-powered analytics, helping customers make faster, more accurate decisions and innovate without sacrificing governance.

We are also announcing the Power Apps MCP server in public preview that enables agents to seamlessly trigger app capabilities such as approvals, form submissions, and data retrieval. This makes every Power App a composable, reusable building block in your organization’s AI ecosystem empowering both citizen and professional developers to expose app functionality to agents with confidence and control.

Lastly, the Dataverse MCP server, now generally available, allows people to benefit from natural language interactions, receiving real-time answers grounded in Dataverse data, while makers and admins gain powerful, built-in tools for data operations, search, and prompt execution.

We see tremendous excitement from customers and partners for agentic Dynamics 365 applications. Take Ramp, a financial operations platform designed to save companies time and money. Ramp built an agentic solution, currently in preview, using Microsoft Foundry that integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central and Teams to streamline employee expense management.

Join the movement to the Frontier with Copilot, agents, and agentic business applications

We know that moving to the Frontier isn’t just about technology. That’s why we’re partnering with Harvard Business School to collaborate on research and executive education to help you put this into practice at your own company. We’re also sharing new resources for leaders on their journey to the Frontier Firm with Frontier Function Guides for Sales, HR, and IT and a look inside our learnings at Microsoft–including three ways to turn insight into action. We’re committed to helping you transform—we’ll see you at the Frontier!

If you’re interested in learning more:

• Explore the Microsoft Ignite 2025 sessions to see agents and agentic business applications in action.
• Register for our year-end webinar to learn about more agents in Dynamics 365 (December 2, 2025)
• Join us at the Convergence ERP Conference (December 9-11, 2025).

¹ Internal Microsoft sales team data based on time period January 1 to November 7, 2025. Total customers outreach by the agent: 61,734. Lead-to-opportunity ratio (sales qualification): 15.1%.

The post Microsoft Ignite 2025: Powering Frontier Firms with agentic business applications appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Tariffs change at lightning speed, threatening profits and forecasts. But for companies that stay ahead, volatility can become an edge—unlocking smarter sourcing decisions and resilience competitors can’t match. The 4,400-page Harmonized Tariff Schedule alone changes dozens of times a year.¹ One week, your steel imports have a 15% tariff. The next week? Maybe 25%. Or maybe zero if a new trade agreement sneaks through.

Every shift in the 4,400-page Harmonized Tariff Schedule puts supply chains at risk. A single misclassification can mean six-figure fines, delayed shipments, or missed revenue targets. Compliance teams burn endless hours chasing updates, while procurement and operations scramble to adjust forecasts and supplier contracts. And despite all that effort, if there is an unexpected policy change, most companies pay the price in lost time, money, and customer trust. The reality is that no human team can easily keep pace with this level of volatility and should instead look to agents and AI to help reduce the busy work and stay ahead of disruptions.

Tariffs are a textbook example of where agents have the potential to excel. No team can realistically monitor 4,400 pages of classifications that shift as chaotically as they do today. Agents take on the repetitive monitoring and data tracking that overwhelm even the best compliance team. When these kinds of tasks are handled by agents, leaders and teams can focus on decisions that move business forward. Microsoft offers multiple ways to make that real, whether you want to start small or transform your entire approach to tariff intelligence.

The Microsoft advantage: 3 ways to build tariff intelligence

Microsoft offers three distinct paths for tackling tariff changes, whether you’re ready for a complete transformation or need to start small and scale up.

1. Use first-party agents in Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 offers a built-in supplier communication agent that automatically researches supplier information and generates outreach so you can quickly navigate tariff changes and supply chain disruptions. It pulls data from your procurement history, current inventory levels, and supplier performance metrics to identify suppliers that can answer questions about capacity, lead times, and alternative shipping routes.

When tariff changes threaten your delivery schedules, you can quickly compose communications that include relevant data from multiple systems. You no longer need to hunt through spreadsheets to find supplier contact information or manually request alternative sourcing options.

2. Build custom agents in Copilot Studio

With Copilot Studio, you can build custom agents that can calculate the impact of tariff changes on your products and contracts when asked, surface sourcing alternatives, and flag agreements that may need renegotiation.

These agents can connect to the Harmonized Tariff Schedule and Outlook as knowledge sources, and monitor supplier communications for mentions of tariffs, delivery delays, or capacity constraints. Document scanning capabilities mean contracts, shipping manifests, and regulatory updates become searchable, contextual data that informs agent recommendations. Behind the scenes, Microsoft Dataverse maintains data integrity and security with its unified structure and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). You can deploy quickly without sacrificing governance.

These agents can also connect with your Dynamics 365 and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, whether that’s SAP, Oracle, or another platform, alongside your product data, supplier information, and procurement contracts through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

MCP is an open standard that enhances the relevance of agent responses. It facilitates the connection of AI agents to various data systems and standardizes how applications provide context to large language models (LLMs). With integration between LLM applications and external data sources, the protocol is useful for building AI-powered tools and workflows like customized tariff agents.

Security and compliance controls are built into the platform, so you can deploy agents rapidly while maintaining governance over what data they can access and what actions they can take. Want an agent that can read tariff schedules but not modify procurement contracts? Copilot Studio makes those boundaries clear and enforceable.

3. Explore partner solutions through the agent ecosystem

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends your capabilities with specialized agents tailored for industry-specific needs. Partners like Avanade are already building tariff and trade solutions that plug directly into Dynamics 365, so you can scale faster with proven expertise.

Avanade’s Tariff Navigator provides a single, intelligent agent experience to assess tariff exposure, model “what-if” scenarios, and proactively adjust purchasing, sourcing, and pricing decisions. The cost of inaction is steep and includes margin erosion, unexpected cost spikes, and reactive decisions that weaken competitiveness. And trying to tackle these challenges alone often leads to fragmented efforts and limited impact. Avanade is a trusted advisor with deep technical expertise and experienced industry specialists. Its consultative approach means Tariff Navigator is built around your people, tailored to how they work and the unique business challenges they face.

Using Microsoft’s low-code technologies, Avanade also allows for fast deployment of customized approaches that integrate with your existing systems and empower your teams to act quickly. The result is a practical, business-first application designed for measurable impact.

The Tariff Navigator solution by Avanade doesn’t just manage tariffs—it strengthens your organization’s ability to compete in a volatile global market. It’s about protecting profitability today while building the agility to seize opportunities tomorrow.

Beyond tariffs: Building resilience for what’s next

Tariff management offers you the opportunity to reimagine how supply chain operations handle complexity and uncertainty. The same agent architecture that helps you navigate trade policy changes can tackle other operational challenges, such as supply chain disruptions and vendor performance monitoring.

Agents you build in Copilot Studio or access from Microsoft Marketplace and the partner ecosystem have the potential to help organizations prepare trade agreements, navigate natural disasters, accidents, and other events that reshape supply chains temporarily or permanently. From a Suez Canal blockage to a geopolitical shift that reroutes global trade overnight, agents help you adapt fast.

Ready to take on changing tariffs?

Tariff volatility isn’t slowing down, and the next policy shift could hit tomorrow. The question is whether to react after the fact or build resilience now to better navigate future disruptions. Microsoft empowers customers to get started today, with custom or prebuilt agent options, depending on your needs. Dynamics 365 gives you the intelligent foundation and embedded supplier communications features. Copilot Studio lets customers build custom agents that track schedules, calculate impacts, and surface risks. Or you can use our partner solutions, like Avanade, to extend and customize agents. Either path puts AI agents to work for you, protecting margins, safeguarding compliance, and addressing volatility before it disrupts your supply chain.

Next steps

• Explore updates from the Copilot Studio and Power Platform teams to learn about Power Platform Community Conference 2025.
• Visit Avanade Tariff Navigator.
• Visit Dynamics 365 ERP solution page.
• Watch part 1 and part 2 of the day-in-the-life of a procurement manager videos on YouTube

¹Harmonized Tariff Schedule, United States International Trade Commission.

The post 3 ways to navigate changing tariffs with AI agents appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Frontier Firms are a new type of organization that puts AI at the heart of business—reinventing customer experience and employee productivity while reshaping processes and bending the curve on innovation. Copilot is powering this transformation with unprecedented adoption by more than 100 million commercial and consumer users and by more than 70% of the Fortune 500. Today, we’re announcing the addition of role-based AI solutions to Microsoft 365 Copilot for sales, service, and finance professionals to help these critical functions move to the Frontier.

Reinvent productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Sales
Sales professionals are the revenue engine for every organization and the function where time is literally equal to money. The Sales solution in Microsoft 365 Copilot brings AI directly into the applications that sellers use daily—Copilot, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams—to help them move with speed and agility while staying focused on customer engagement.

For example, sellers can now prepare for customer meetings with the help of Copilot, right in the flow of work, with fast access to customer relationship management (CRM) opportunity details, recent communications, and company insights. They can also ask Copilot to help with tasks like “Give me a list of deals at risk of falling through,” “Help me create a plan to close this deal,” and even “Update this CRM record” all in the flow of work.

Microsoft 365 Copilot connects with leading CRM tools, including Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, to make it easy to stay informed and engaged.

The role-based sales solution can transform the way our teams work. Now that it’s part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, we can scale AI across the business much faster to accelerate adoption.

Shaun Worsley, Sales Process & Technology Manager, Sandvik Coromant

Sales solution preparing for upcoming meetings and updating CRM records in Outlook.
Service
Customer service professionals are the frontline of brand loyalty, balancing rising customer expectations with growing workloads and fragmented toolsets. The Service solution in Microsoft 365 Copilot helps these professionals resolve issues faster and deliver personalized experiences that build lasting relationships.

For example, customer service professionals can now generate a concise case summary to quickly get up to speed without poring through pages of notes, draft a customer-ready email with resolution details and other contextual information that can be further customized before sending, or simply view and update records without having to switch windows and navigate to the CRM. This can mean fewer clicks, faster responses, and more time spent helping customers.

Finance
Finance is about more than transactions—it’s about making sure the business has accurate numbers, steady cash flow, and insights needed to pursue a growth agenda. The Finance solution in Microsoft 365 Copilot brings enterprise resource planning (ERP) connected data directly into Copilot, Excel, and Outlook to help finance teams manage tasks and gain faster insights.

For example, finance teams can now draft customer emails with account details and payment history; enable accelerated financial reconciliation by matching transactions, flagging discrepancies, and preparing reports; perform variance analysis (public preview) that highlights anomalies, surfaces potential drivers, and generates draft explanations for leaders; and use data preparation (public preview) to clean, reshape, and structure ERP exports into analysis-ready reports and enabling time savings on manual work.

Microsoft 365 Copilot connects with leading ERP tools, including Dynamics 365 and SAP.

inance solution showing a financial workflow in Excel, with variance analysis and data preparation tools within a Finance pane. The interface supports financial reconciliation tasks, with the cursor interacting across spreadsheet cells and tool options.
Powering Frontier sales, service, and finance teams
With role-based solutions in Microsoft 365 Copilot, sales, service, and finance teams can work smarter and faster—right where work happens. These role-based solutions will be available for installation to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers via the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Store starting in October 2025.

The post Moving sales, service, and finance to the Frontier with Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.