Consumer expectations are rising, but so are the expectations placed on the contact center. Consumers want faster, more personalized service, while contact center leaders are being asked to manage efficiency and increase loyalty, retention, and growth. The contact center is no longer just where issues are handled. It’s increasingly where some of the most important moments between an organization and its customers take place.

Agentic innovations like conversational intelligence creates an opportunity to rethink those moments. For decades, contact centers have been optimized around operational metrics like handle time, deflection, and cost per contact, rather than the customer and business outcomes that matter most. Conversational intelligence can help shift that focus, but contact centers weren’t built to change at the pace technology is moving. Simply bolting on existing solutions or deploying it in isolation risks creating another silo without the broader context needed to understand the customer, take the right action, and improve the experience. We think there’s a better way.

Today, we’re excited to announce Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence (CCI). Now in public preview, Microsoft CCI adds purpose-built agents, quality, and analytics to existing contact centers. We’ve taken the agentic capabilities built into Dynamics 365 Contact Center and extended them to work with any other contact center through an open connector.

For organizations that can’t wait for a multi-year rip-and-replace to access modern conversational intelligence, Microsoft CCI brings enterprise security, governance, and extensibility to the contact center they already have. Unlike other standalone solutions, Microsoft CCI is powered by Microsoft IQ, which combines your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM), contact center insights, and organizational intelligence into the real-time context that AI needs to reason, act, and resolve.

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence is organized around three agents and outcomes that matter most to the business: a Customer Assist Agent that resolves autonomously or empowers human representatives in real time to improve resolution; a Quality Assurance Agent that continuously evaluates interactions against quality, compliance, and brand standards; and a Service Operations Agent (coming soon) that helps configure, monitor, and optimize the contact center while managing costs.

Features in Microsoft CCI include:

• Agentic self-service: Create multimodal self-service experiences at scale more easily using a new designer and customer conversation harness. Design your interactions in the Customer Assist Agent to resolve customer needs across voice and digital channels, providing customers with fast, natural, and personalized support.
• Quality, analytics, and performance: Evaluate both agentic and human-led interactions, identifying opportunities for service improvements with the Quality Assurance Agent. Create your own customized guardrails across areas like greetings, brand compliance, or sentiment to help improve quality and consistency at scale.
• Easy integration to your existing contact center: Integrate Microsoft CCI with your existing contact center. An open connector easily integrates Microsoft CCI with third-party contact centers, enabling organizations to add AI without major migrations.
• Data and integrations: Ground agents in data from Microsoft IQ, knowledge sources, and more than 1,700 connectors.
• Biometric authentication: Authenticate customers in the moment using voice biometrics, helping establish identity within the natural flow of the interaction while reducing unnecessary authentication steps.
• Manage and govern agents at scale with Microsoft Agent 365: Deploy, monitor, and manage agents across the contact center through a centralized experience. Agent 365 gives organizations visibility into agent performance and business outcomes, with governance to help manage agents responsibly at scale.

Organizations can bring context, judgment, and natural conversation to interactions, whether they are handled by an agent, a contact center representative, or the two working together.

When a customer has a question or issue about any of our system/solution or administrative support, they need our support for resolution, fast, accurate, in compliant with safety as their need for their patient.

Our goal is to bring the same precision of our support experience that we bring via our engineering knowledge and capabilities of being able to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues. With Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence layered onto the Genesys and ServiceNow platforms that we have enabled, we’re building toward a future where both routine and complex remote support can be resolved immediately through agents, without a queue and long wait time and at times while our teams can focus on the moments that need human intervention. By extending conversational intelligence into the support ecosystems, we expect to deliver faster resolution, greater customer confidence, and a support operation that scales with our business for our customers.

Bishan Dass, Digital Development Lead – Americas, Siemens Healthineers

Modernize your existing contact center

Connectors make it easy to integrate Microsoft CCI with contact center vendors like Five9, Cisco WebEx Contact Center, and Avaya.

Once connected, you can start creating self-service agents across voice and digital channels with a new customer conversation harness. In Microsoft CCI, you can build, test, evaluate, and deploy an agent that is configured for your business needs and grounded in your data. Customers can also start configuring Microsoft CCI from the customer conversation harness in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Powered by a choice of models, your Microsoft CCI agent can handle a variety of interactions, helping resolve the questions that clog contact center queues today.

You can shape self-service behavior by supporting deterministic flows when a call must follow a set path, generative interactions when the caller’s question is open-ended, or a hybrid of the two. And when an interaction meets your organization’s criteria for engaging human assistance, there is a built-in handoff in Customer Assist Agent to a human customer service rep through the contact center or even Microsoft Teams.

This provides a clear, reliable way to navigate questions about enrollment, eligibility, coverage, billing, and more as we bring specialized AI agents into our existing HR Service Desk workflow on our timeline. We began the preview in September, and just six weeks later, we are preparing to go live. That speed gives us a faster path to measurable value.

Luis Taveras, EVP, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Thomas Jefferson University

Quality, compliance, and brand at scale

Quality assurance is also available in Microsoft CCI, giving organizations a more systematic way to measure service quality, compliance, and brand adherence. Microsoft CCI evaluates historical self-service conversations today against out-of-the-box and custom metrics you define, with real-time evaluation coming soon. Measure up to 100% of conversations instead of relying on period sampling.

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence is held to the same Multimodal Agent Score (MAS) quality bar used for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, helping us consistently evaluate experiences across both human and AI agents. Learn more about MAS.

Trust in the flow of work

Microsoft CCI provides native biometric authentication support. With voice biometric enrollment and authentication, end customers can choose to use their voiceprint to verify their identity during a live call, bringing authentication into the natural flow of the conversation. Building identity into the interaction can create a smoother authentication experience by reducing the need to take customers out of the conversation for separate verification. This can reduce the time to authenticate and increase trust in the process.

When an organization’s guardrails determine that a conversation needs human assistance, the interaction can transition to a human contact center representative while preserving the authentication.

Manage and govern contact center intelligence at scale

Agent 365 provides a centralized control plane for managing, governing, and optimizing agents across the enterprise, including the contact center. Agent 365 had nearly 40 million registered agents across tens of thousands of companies as of July 2026. With Agent 365, available standalone or as part of Microsoft 365 E7, your agents don’t operate in a silo.

Customers don’t wake up wishing they could replace their contact center platform. They want better customer experiences, more productive agents, and the business outcomes AI can deliver. The challenge is that a full platform migration is often expensive, disruptive, and difficult to justify.

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence gives organizations another option. It allows them to bring Microsoft’s AI capabilities into their existing contact center environment, helping them modernize customer and agent experiences without a rip-and-replace project. That means faster time to value, lower risk, and the flexibility to adopt AI on their terms.

Karl Phenix Vice President, Microsoft GTM & Solution, TTEC

Getting started with Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence

Getting started with Microsoft CCI is simple. Unlike most contact center solutions, agentic capabilities in Microsoft CCI are usage-based through Copilot Credits, which scales cost with adoption.¹

Sign in to the Microsoft CCI portal, connect to your existing contact center, and configure your first agent against a single self-service scenario, such as a high-volume call type that fills your queue today.

Microsoft CCI is available now in global public preview, with the exception of Austria. Innovations available soon will include real-time evaluations and coaching, contact center agent assist, and more. Try Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence today!

Explore Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence resources:

• Get started with Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence.
• Explore Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence documentation.
• Read about the new customer conversation harness.

¹Please note: some contact center vendors charge for API access or licenses to access their voice channel. Those costs are not included in Microsoft CCI.

The post Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence: Transforming customer experience at agentic speed appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prabhath Yeluri, Senior Manager, Sales Strategy, Adobe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring CRM context and expertise into everyday work

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

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

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

Extend Dynamics 365 intelligence across AI experiences

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

Here’s how they work together:

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

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

Turn CRM tools into job-specific expertise

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

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

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

Combine skills to support complete customer workflows

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

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

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

Resolve customer issues more efficiently with service skills:

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

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

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

Keep people in control of business actions

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

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

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

Get started with skills using your existing access and controls

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

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

Explore the broader agentic CRM vision

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

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

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

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

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

Dynamics 365 Finance

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

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

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

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

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

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

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

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

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

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

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

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

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

Dynamics 365 Commerce

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

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

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

Dynamics 365 Field Service

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

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

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

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

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

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

Dynamics 365 Sustainability

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

Building the foundation for agentic ERP

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

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

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

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

Adopt agentic ERP at the pace of your business

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

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

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

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

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

How AI and new channels are reshaping commerce experiences

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

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

Why composable commerce starts with a decoupled architecture

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

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

Build custom experiences with commerce scale unit APIs

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

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

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

Retail transaction orchestration and import options for Dynamics 365 Commerce

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

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

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

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

Build a commerce architecture for what’s next

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

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

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

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

Sales teams have access to more information in the flow of work than ever before. Customer conversations, customer relationship management (CRM) data, meetings, emails, service interactions, and market signals can all provide valuable context—but only if sellers can quickly turn that information into meaningful next steps.

For many organizations, that is becoming the real challenge. The issue isn’t a lack of data or activity. It’s helping sellers understand what matters most, prioritize effectively, and confidently take the next step with customers.

That’s why the sales force automation market is evolving. Organizations are increasingly looking beyond traditional CRM capabilities and evaluating how AI can help transform research, decision-making, and execution across the sales process. They’re looking for a system of action, not just a system of record.

We’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Sales Platforms, marking the sixteenth consecutive year in the Leaders quadrant.

Microsoft is named a Leader in 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Sales Platforms

Read the report

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to evolve with AI-powered capabilities designed to help sellers work more efficiently and focus on customer engagement. Organizations can use these capabilities to streamline everyday sales activities, surface relevant information, reduce manual work, and support more informed customer interactions while maintaining control over how AI is applied within their sales processes.

Why this matters for sales teams

Sales organizations are under growing pressure to do more with less.

Buyers expect more personalized engagement, faster responses, and better experiences across every interaction. At the same time, sellers must navigate increasing amounts of information spread across multiple systems and touchpoints.

As a result, many teams are spending valuable time researching accounts, gathering context, updating records, and coordinating next steps rather than focusing on customer engagement.

This is where AI is beginning to play a meaningful role.

Rather than simply surfacing information, AI can help sellers synthesize insights from multiple sources, identify possible priorities, recommend actions, and support decision-making throughout the sales cycle. The goal is not to replace sellers; it is to help them move faster with better context and greater confidence—through a system of action that helps guide the next best step.

For sales leaders, these same capabilities can provide improved visibility into pipeline health, potential risks, and areas that require attention, helping organizations make more informed decisions and improve execution across teams.

How Microsoft is helping modernize sales execution with AI

Dynamics 365 Sales is designed to help organizations bring together CRM data, productivity tools, collaboration experiences, and AI-powered assistance into a unified sales experience. Gartner notes that Microsoft helps sales teams improve pipeline visibility and seller productivity through AI-driven research, analytics, and workflow automation. By combining CRM, productivity, and collaboration data with extensible AI agents, organizations can make more informed sales decisions while reducing manual effort.

For example, capabilities such as Sales Research Agent, Data Enrichment Agent, and Sales Agent help keep customer and opportunity data current, while Sales Qualification Agent can help sellers research, engage, and qualify leads more efficiently. Together, these tools help shift CRM from a system for recording sales activity to one that can actively support sellers throughout the sales process.

Microsoft also brings AI directly into the flow of work through Sales Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling context-aware meeting preparation, record summaries, follow-up assistance, and sales insights across Dynamics 365, Outlook, and Teams.

For organizations with unique business requirements, Copilot Studio and Microsoft Power Platform enable the creation of customized AI agents that connect systems, automate workflows, and support specialized sales processes subject to customer configuration, governance, and applicable product capabilities.

Together, these capabilities create a more connected selling experience—helping teams turn insights into action, collaborate more effectively, and execute with greater consistency across the sales cycle.

Hear from our customers

Sales Research Agent helps our sales leaders get from idea to business insight and action much faster. They can ask complex business questions in natural language and get clear, decision-ready insights in minutes. It simplifies disparate data sources into a centralized experience where we can make better planning and performance decisions with far less manual effort.

Karl Phenix VP, Global Microsoft Strategy & GTM at TTEC Digital

Sellers want more control and less manual work. Sales Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot prompts them to update records, assign tasks, and keep data current—without ever opening the CRM.

Keith Mescha, Executive Director, Tech Consulting, EY

AI‑driven data enrichment will improve the quality, consistency, and completeness of customer data in Dynamics, reducing administration for every person on the sales teams while improving our ability to action, analyst, and improve customer outcomes.

Nick Segger, Head of Sales & Agency Transformation, NFU Mutual

As selling continues to evolve, Microsoft remains focused on helping organizations apply AI in practical ways that drive business outcomes while empowering sellers to focus on building customer relationships and moving opportunities forward.

1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for CRM Sales Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Guy Wood, Wendy Butler-Mafuz, August 6, 2026

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.

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

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. 

**Microsoft Dynamic CRM has been recognized as a Leader since 2011 and Microsoft Dynamics CMR Online has been recognized in the report since 2011. In 2017, Gartner combined all feedback for both products into a single Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales evaluation.

The post Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Sales Platforms for the sixteenth consecutive year appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Open by design: Dynamics 365 Sales and first-party agents are extensible through the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

AI agents are only as capable as the tools, skills, and information they can easily connect to. In sales, the intelligence that drives great decisions—buying signals, conversation insights, market and account context—often lives outside the customer relationship management (CRM). Getting it into the flow of work has traditionally meant costly integrations or data-duplication projects only the largest companies could sustain.

The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open standard that lets AI agents securely connect to external tools, systems, and data sources. MCP helps organizations unlock the full value of their CRM data by connecting agents to the systems, tools, and knowledge they already use. It extends first-party agents, unifies fragmented business data, brings CRM intelligence into any experience, and accelerates the development of custom agents. For Dynamics 365 Sales, that means agents can securely tap trusted intelligence in real time without requiring sellers or IT teams to rebuild integrations or duplicate data. The value shifts from data plumbing to intelligent action, giving sellers and sales leaders a more complete, connected, and actionable experience inside Dynamics 365 Sales.

Our Microsoft-built sales agents in Dynamics 365 Sales—including the Sales Qualification Agent and Sales Opportunity Agent—are built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, where MCP tools plug in natively. You can bring your existing partners, licenses, and trusted data directly into Dynamics 365 first-party agent experiences without standing up new CRM integrations or duplicating data.

The result

• Higher-value Dynamics 365 first-party agents that reason over trusted third-party intelligence and improve output and results.
• Lower friction to adoption, because you can use the tools you already have and trust across multiple experiences.
• Clear differentiation, where the Microsoft experience can better support agentic sales use cases and workflows, connecting CRM data, partner intelligence, and business context across Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft 365, and beyond.

MCP helps turn Dynamics 365 into an agent-powered engine for action

Data and sales intelligence are just the beginning. Because MCP is an open protocol, the same model that brings trusted data into your agents can connect them to nearly any external system or capability, from research and enrichment to workflow, analytics, and tools your teams have not even adopted yet. Today’s launch partners are a powerful starting point and as the MCP ecosystem grows, so does what your agents can do. This strengthens the broader Microsoft Copilot ecosystem and reinforces Microsoft’s agent extensibility.

Not just first-party agents

These partner MCP servers also work with any custom agent built in Copilot Studio, not only our first-party Dynamics 365 Sales agents. Customers can bring this same flexibility into the agents they build for their own specific workflows.

If you already subscribe to these solutions, this is immediate added value. Your existing subscription now flows directly into your agentic workflows in Dynamics 365 Sales, putting data and capabilities you already have to work inside the agent experience, with no duplicate integration or added licensing.

Announcing new MCP partners

1. ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo: Connect ZoomInfo’s verified business-to-business (B2B) data and context to Microsoft Copilot Studio via ZoomInfo’s headless go-to-market (GTM) context layer, GTM.ai. This surfaces 400M contacts, 100M companies, 120M direct dials, and billions of buying signals inside Microsoft Dynamics 365. In Dynamics 365 Sales agents, customers can enrich contact and account records inline with verified contacts, firmographics, technographics, funding history, and intent signals without manual entry or tab switching.

2. Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet: Anchored by the global standard D-U-N-S® Number identifier, the D&B Commercial Graph MCP server provides the foundational context layer that allows AI agents to understand business identity, relationships, and risk across the global economy, delivering outputs that are consistent, explainable, and auditable. Leverage the Commercial Graph in Copilot Studio to create custom agents and workflows across finance and credit, supply chain, compliance, risk, sales & marketing, and enterprise master data use cases.

3. LeadIQ

LeadIQ: LeadIQ connects directly into the Sales Qualification Agent, the same AI agent already researching and scoring every lead that enters Dynamics 365 Sales. Instead of bolting on a separate enrichment step, LeadIQ becomes a knowledge source inside that existing research flow: as the agent evaluates a lead, it calls LeadIQ for a verified work email and phone number, and the result lands in the lead’s Deeper insights alongside the agent’s other findings, cited, sourced, and ready before a seller ever opens the record. There’s no new tool to learn and no separate enrichment step to run. Verification just becomes part of your Dynamics 365 workflow.

4. Draup

Draup: Draup brings context-rich account and market intelligence into the Sales Qualification Agent—hiring surges, funding events, IT spend shifts, executive moves—then converts those buying signals into clear next actions. Every lead arrives researched, prioritized, and paired with a recommended play.

5. Gong

Gong: Bring Gong’s account and deal insights directly into the Dynamics 365 agent experience. With real-time customer insights like objections raised, risks flagged, or agreed-upon next steps right at sellers’ fingertips, GTM teams can execute on informed next-best actions.

6. Enlyft

Enlyft: Enlyft helps B2B technology vendors and their partners turn deep account intelligence—technology adoption, buying propensity, and competitive footprint into pipeline. Our MCP connector brings that intelligence into Dynamics 365 Sales agents, so a qualification agent reasons over a prospect’s real tech stack, competitive install base, and fit signals before a seller ever engages.

7. HG Insights

HG Insights. HG Insights extends Dynamics 365 Sales agents with trusted B2B market context through Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving sellers direct access to company intelligence—such as technology adoption, cloud and AI maturity, IT investment signals, firmographics, and market context—right inside the agent experience. By combining CRM data with this external market intelligence, Dynamics 365 Sales agents help reps prioritize accounts, uncover whitespace opportunities, and recommend more informed next actions throughout the sales cycle. HG Insights is trusted by 95% of Fortune 1000 B2B tech companies and every major hyperscaler to find, target, and convert their best opportunities faster, and this integration brings that same market intelligence to Dynamics 365 users.

These launch partners highlight how powerful and extensible Dynamics 365 Sales agents can become with MCP: more connected, more contextual, and easier to extend with the partner intelligence customers already trust. Customer can use parter MCP tools with Microsoft-built agents such as Sales Qualification Agent and Sales Opportunity Agent, or bring those same tools into custom agents built in Copilot Studio.

To get started, choose the sales scenario you want to improve, connect the right partner MCP tool, and define the insight or action the agent should support. Learn how to add custom research insights and MCP tools to Dynamics 365 Sales agents.

Want to become a partner? The MCP ecosystem on Copilot Studio is open and growing. Certify your MCP server to make your solution available to Dynamics 365 Sales customers.

Microsoft MCP Server Guide

Explore certification prerequisites, package requirements, and publishing guidance for Microsoft MCP servers in Copilot Studio

Get started

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights from Dynamics 365

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

Dynamics 365 Sales

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

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

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

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

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

Dynamics 365 Field Service

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

Dynamics 365 Sustainability

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

Dynamics 365 Finance

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

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

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

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

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

Dynamics 365 Commerce

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

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

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

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities

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

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data

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

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

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

Dynamics 365 Business Central

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

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

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

Power Apps

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

Power Pages

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

Power Automate

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

Microsoft Copilot Studio

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

Microsoft Dataverse

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

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration

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

Business Applications Update

Power Platform &

Copilot Studio edition

Watch on demand

Updates to role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

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

Sales Agent

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

Finance Agent

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

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

Business Applications Update

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

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

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

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) decisions are among the most consequential investments a business can make; shaping how organizations operate, scale, and compete for years to come. Yet many ERP transformations have historically carried risk: high costs, long timelines, heavy customization, and uncertain returns.

To bring clarity to these decisions, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct two independent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) studies examining the business value of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP on enterprises and midmarket organizations.

• The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP for Enterprises
• The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP for Midmarket Organizations

From fragmentation to integration: Why ERP modernization matters

Across both 2026 studies, Forrester’s projections showed organizations from a similar place: fragmented ERP landscapes, siloed data, manual processes, and highly customized legacy systems that were difficult to upgrade or scale. These environments could limit real-time visibility, slow decision-making, and increased operational risk; particularly as organizations grew, expanded into new markets, or managed increasingly complex supply chains. These constraints didn’t just slow operations; they could limit a leader’s ability to respond to volatility, growth, and supply chain disruption with confidence.

In response, organizations turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP to consolidate finance and supply chain operations with a unified, cloud-based platform. By centralizing data and standardizing processes, organizations can improve operational efficiency and gain timely, actionable insights across the business.

Importantly, this shift reframed ERP from a back-office system of record to a platform for informed, faster decision-making that connects data, people, and processes across the enterprise.

Quantifying business value with Forrester’s TEI methodology

The strength of the TEI studies lies in their focus on quantifiable business impact. Forrester evaluated benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks over a multi‑year period, modeling a composite organization based on real customer interviews and survey responses. This approach allows leaders to evaluate ERP investments using a transparent financial framework rather than vendor claims alone.

Enterprise ERP: Financial impact at scale

In the enterprise TEI study, Forrester modeled a composite organization representing large, complex businesses using Dynamics 365 ERP. The analysis projects that over three years, the organization achieved:

• 101% return on investment (ROI)
• Net present value (NPV) of $12.9 million

These results were driven by a combination of operational efficiency gains, productivity improvements, and cost reductions, particularly from consolidating legacy systems and reducing infrastructure and IT operations spend.

The study highlights that value did not come from isolated features, but from standardizing processes, unifying data across finance and supply chain functions, and reducing reliance on heavily customized, on-premises ERP environments.

Key enterprise findings business leaders should note

For business decision makers evaluating ERP at scale, several findings stand out:

• Improved operational efficiency and productivity can be enabled through streamlined workflows and better access to real-time insights
• Reduced infrastructure and IT operations costs can be enabled by retiring multiple legacy systems and shifting to a cloud-based ERP model
• Faster, more confident decision making enabled by unified financial and supply-chain data

Together, these benefits contributed directly to the projected positive NPV and ROI modeled in the study, reinforcing ERP modernization as a business investment, not just an IT upgrade.

Midmarket ERP: Enterprise-grade value without enterprise complexity

While enterprises face complexity at scale, midmarket organizations often face a different challenge: how to grow without adding disproportionate cost or operational overhead. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ study of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP for midmarket organizations examined how modern ERP can support expansion, improve visibility, and standardize operations without the burden of traditional enterprise‑scale implementations.

In the study, Forrester modeled a composite midmarket organization based on customer interviews and survey data. The analysis projects that the organization would achieve:

• Payback in 16 months
• Net present value (NPV) of $3.3 million over three years

These outcomes were driven by streamlined finance and supply chain operations, automation of manual processes, and the replacement of disconnected legacy systems with a single, cloud‑based ERP platform. By consolidating systems and standardizing processes, organizations can reduce operational friction while supporting improved visibility and control across the business.

Key midmarket findings business leaders should note

For midmarket decision-makers, the study highlights several critical outcomes:

• Enabled faster time-to-value, with measurable financial returns realized in just over a year
• Enabled improvements to operational efficiency and productivity through streamlined finance and supply chain processes and automation of manual tasks
• Potentially reduced complexity and IT overhead by replacing disconnected legacy systems with a unified cloud ERP platform

These benefits contributed directly to the projected positive NPV and rapid payback modeled in the study, reinforcing ERP modernization as a financially disciplined investment for midmarket organizations focused on growth and resilience.

Why independent research matters for ERP decisions

ERP investments shape the future of an organization for years—sometimes decades. That’s why independent, third-party validation is critical. The Forrester TEI studies do not ask leaders to accept conclusions at face value; instead, they provide:

• A transparent financial model
• Explicit assumptions and risk adjustments
• Clear linkage between operational improvements and economic outcomes

For executives, CFOs, COOs, and IT leaders, these studies offer a common language for aligning stakeholders and setting realistic expectations for ERP transformation.

Go deeper: Explore the full Forrester TEI studies

This summary only scratches the surface. The full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ studies include detailed benefit breakdowns, cost considerations, and financial modeling that business leaders can adapt to their own organizations.

• The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP for Enterprises
• The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP for Midmarket Organizations

For organizations considering ERP modernization, these studies provide a data-driven foundation to evaluate options, build a credible business case, and make informed decisions with confidence.

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