This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Make smarter, faster, and more confident quote decisions—right where you work.
Project quoting has always required a careful balance—aligning profitability with competitiveness, staffing strategies with delivery costs, and customer expectations with business outcomes.
But evaluating these trade-offs hasn’t always been easy. It often means jumping between tools, manually recalculating numbers, and relying on assumptions to guide critical decisions.
That’s where What-if Analysis (Preview) in Dynamics 365 Project Operations comes in.
This new capability brings real-time simulation directly into your quoting workflow—so you can explore options, compare outcomes, and make decisions with clarity before finalizing a quote.
What Is What-if Analysis?
What-if Analysis introduces a dedicated simulation workspace within a project quote, allowing you to model changes to quantities and pricing and instantly see their financial impact.
Instead of working through “what if” scenarios offline, you can now:
Explore multiple approaches within the quote
Compare their outcomes side by side
Apply the most effective scenario when you’re ready
All without modifying the actual quote until you choose to.
It’s a more intuitive, controlled way to move from estimation to decision-making.
Turn Everyday Questions into Clear Answers
Every project quote involves key decisions:
Should work shift to a lower-cost delivery center?
What happens if billing rates increase for specific roles?
Can you stay competitive while protecting margin?
With What-if Analysis, these are no longer hypothetical questions.
As you adjust quantities and pricing, the system instantly recalculates key financial metrics—including revenue, cost, gross margin, and budget variance—so you can clearly see the impact of every change.
This real-time feedback helps you move quickly from exploration to confident, data-backed decisions.
How It Works
Getting started is simple. From the What-if Analysis tab on a Draft quote, you can create a scenario based on the quote’s existing data. Each scenario is isolated, allowing you to experiment freely without affecting the live quote.
Within the simulation workspace, you can adjust quantities and pricing across dimensions such as resourcing unit, role, or any custom pricing dimension configured in your environment. Whether you’re making high-level adjustments or refining details at the quote line level, the experience is designed to be flexible and intuitive.
You can create multiple scenarios—each representing a different approach—and compare them side by side. Built-in comparison views highlight differences in financial outcomes, making trade-offs easier to evaluate.
When you’ve identified the best approach, applying the scenario updates the Draft quote in place—so you can move forward with confidence, without creating a new revision.
What This Means for You
What-if Analysis transforms how you approach project quoting—bringing clarity, speed, and confidence into every decision.
Make decisions with confidence: Instantly understand how pricing and staffing changes impact revenue, cost, and margin—before committing to a quote
Optimize for both competitiveness and profitability: Evaluate trade-offs in real time and choose the approach that best aligns with your goals
Reduce reliance on spreadsheets and manual iteration: Keep simulation and decision-making within Project Operations
Drive faster, more aligned conversations: Use data-backed scenarios to align stakeholders and move decisions forward
Instead of relying on assumptions, your team can now explore possibilities, evaluate outcomes, and finalize quotes with confidence—knowing the numbers support the decision.
Availability and Prerequisites
What-if Analysis is currently available as a preview feature in:
Project Operations Core (Lite deployment)
Project Operations integrated with ERP
To get started, enable the What-if Analysis feature flag in your environment. The What-if Analysis tab will then be available on qualifying Draft quotes.
A few things to keep in mind:
Scenarios can only be created on quotes in Draft status that contain estimates
Activated or closed quotes are not eligible
If the underlying quote changes, scenarios will need to be recreated
As with all preview features, we recommend evaluating this capability in a non-production environment.
The Bottom Line
Every project quote is a critical business decision. What-if Analysis gives you the tools to approach that decision with clarity—replacing guesswork with real-time insight and manual effort with seamless simulation.
The result is not just better quotes, but better decisions—ones that are competitive, financially sound, and aligned with your business goals.
Get Started
Enable What-if Analysis in your environment today and start turning “what if?” into “we know.”
Learn More
We are making constant enhancements to our features. To learn more about What-Analysis in Project Quotations, visit Quote What-if Analysis
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Growth is exciting—but it introduces complexity.
As small and midsize businesses scale, finance and operations become harder to manage. Transactions increase, reporting requirements expand, and disconnected systems start to strain visibility and margins. What once worked becomes a constraint.
Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the potential return on investment organizations may realize by deploying Business Central. Based on interviews with four business decision makers, which were aggregated to model a fictitious composite organization1, the study projected that the composite organization could potentially realize:
More than 200% return on investment (ROI) over three years
An estimated $460K net present value (NPV) over three years
Potential payback in six months
Across finance productivity, enterprise resource planning (ERP) consolidation, improved profitability, and reporting efficiency, the composite organization modeled by Forrester realized more than $680K in three‑year, risk‑adjusted present value benefits.
These outcomes reflect the potential impact of modernizing finance and operations on a single, integrated cloud ERP platform—while also establishing the foundation for AI‑powered experiences like Microsoft 365 Copilot and intelligent agents.
Where the value comes from
The Forrester TEI study highlights several areas where organizations can potentially realize tangible, risk‑adjusted benefits when using Business Central.
Support faster, more efficient finance operations
Manual processes often slow growing organizations. Interviewed customers reported meaningful efficiency gains across accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), billing, and financial close.
By year three, the composite organization was projected to potentially achieve:
Up to 30% reduction in monthly close time
Up to 50% time savings for AP, AR, and billing activities
These improvements translated to more than $210K in present value over three years in finance productivity alone for the composite organization—allowing teams to shift focus from reconciliation to higher‑value analysis.
Standardizing data and workflows in Business Central also creates the conditions necessary for AI‑enabled automation. While AI benefits were not independently quantified in this study, interviewees noted that unified processes accelerate the adoption of Copilot‑supported approvals, variance analysis, and exception handling.
Lower total cost of ownership through ERP consolidation
Interviewees reported operating aging on‑premises ERP systems alongside spreadsheets and disconnected point solutions. Consolidating onto Business Central reduced infrastructure complexity and IT overhead.
The study projected the following potential benefits for the composite organization over three years:
More than 10% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)
More than $170K in present value savings from retired systems and reduced maintenance
Beyond direct savings, simplification can reduce operational risk and improved scalability—allowing organizations to grow without layering on new systems to compensate for gaps.
Enable improved profitability through better visibility
Unified, real‑time visibility across finance and operations enables faster, more informed decisions.
By year three, the composite organization was modeled to potentially experience:
Up to 3% improvement in net profit margins
More than $240K in present value from improved profitability
Better insight into costs, projects, and performance enables earlier course correction. AI‑powered experiences such as Copilot can further assist by surfacing cost variances, project overruns, or unbilled work sooner. While AI alone does not drive margin improvement, modern ERP data and standardized processes strengthen an organization’s ability to act with precision.
Fast reporting and audit readiness
Business Central’s integrated data model and native Microsoft Power BI capabilities streamlined reporting and audit preparation.
Based on modeling by Forrester, by year three, the composite organization was projected to potentially reduce:
Audit preparation time by up to 30%
Time spent creating internal and executive reports
These projected improvements were valued at nearly $50K in present value, while also enabling increased confidence in data accuracy and consistency.
Beyond the numbers: Building an AI-ready foundation
In addition to quantified financial outcomes, interviewees highlighted broader operational improvements, including enhanced customer experience, reduced days sales outstanding (DSO), better warehouse management, and a more intuitive user experience.
Just as importantly, Business Central provides an AI‑ready ERP foundation.
By unifying finance and operations data and aligning processes to best practices, organizations are better positioned to leverage Copilot, Power BI, and intelligent agents to:
Help reduce time-to-insight—not just report creation
Surface anomalies and trends quickly
Enable more proactive, data‑driven decision‑making
While AI‑driven outcomes were not directly measured in this TEI, the study reinforces a critical principle: realizing AI value at scale depends on clean data, integrated systems, and standardized processes. Business Central delivers that foundation.
Read the full study
For SMB‑focused organizations and partners evaluating ERP modernization, the full Forrester TEI study provides a detailed financial framework to help quantify potential projected value—grounded in customer interviews and risk‑adjusted modeling.
The Forrester TEI study highlights the potential value organizations may realize with Business Central—from faster financial processes to improved profitability and lower total cost of ownership.
We’ll continue these conversations at Directions North America 2026, where partners, Microsoft engineering, and product leaders come together to discuss what’s next for the Business Central ecosystem and the future of AI-powered ERP.
Join me for the keynote, where I’ll explore how Business Central is evolving into an AI-powered system of action with Copilot and intelligent agents.
Attendees will:
Gain insight into the Business Central roadmap
Prepare for upcoming AI-powered capabilities
Connect directly with Microsoft engineering and product experts
Engage with partners across the Business Central community
Composite organization assumption: Results are based on a Forrester modeled composite organization derived from customer interviews, with $50M in annual revenue, 300 employees, 15 core finance and accounting users, and 100 light users, using Dynamics 365 Business Central in a cloud deployment. All quantified benefits represent the three-year, risk-adjusted present value for the composite organization.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In modern contact centers, not every customer question can be resolved by a single representative. Complex interactions often require quick collaboration—bringing in subject matter experts, supervisors, or external partners—without breaking the flow of the conversation or forcing customers to repeat themselves.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center addresses this challenge with powerful consult capabilities, enabling service representatives to collaborate in real time while keeping conversations seamless across voice and digital channels.
To see how these capabilities come together in practice, let’s step inside Contoso Health, a multi‑specialty healthcare provider delivering patient support at scale.
Inside Contoso Health: Coordinated Care Without Disruption
Contoso Health serves thousands of patients every day through its Patient Access and Care Coordination teams. Representatives handle a wide range of interactions—appointment management, referral validation, insurance questions, post‑discharge follow‑ups, and care plan clarifications.
Their goal is simple: connect every patient to the right expertise instantly, without transfers, repetition, or uncertainty.
Here’s how consult capabilities in Dynamics 365 Contact Center make that possible.
Consult with a Representative: Real‑Time Peer Collaboration
Some situations require a quick second opinion before responding to a patient. Rather than transferring the interaction, representatives can consult another service representative or supervisor while keeping the patient on hold.
Contoso Scenario: Referral Eligibility Check
A patient calls to reschedule a specialist appointment and asks whether their referral is still valid. The Patient Access representative initiates a consult with a Scheduling Specialist, who can see the conversation context and confirm referral rules in real time.
What the patient experiences:
A short, informed hold.
No handoff or repetition.
A confident, accurate response from the same representative.
Consult to Queue: Access to Specialized Expertise
When the required expertise isn’t known upfront, representatives can consult an entire specialist queue. Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses routing logic to connect the representative with the most appropriate expert based on skills and availability.
Contoso Scenario: Pre‑Procedure Instructions
A patient asks detailed questions about preparing for an upcoming procedure. The representative consults the Nursing queue, allowing the system to route the consult to an available clinician.
Why it works:
No manual searching for the right person.
Faster access to clinically accurate information.
Safer, more reliable guidance in high‑stakes interactions.
Consult with External Numbers: Coordinating with Healthcare Partners
Healthcare interactions often depend on information outside the organization—insurance providers, labs, or partner clinics. Representatives can consult external PSTN numbers directly from the communication panel.
Contoso Scenario: Insurance Coverage Verification
A patient wants to confirm coverage for a diagnostic imaging procedure. The representative consults the insurance provider via an external number, verifies eligibility, and returns to the patient with confirmed details—without ending the call.
Outcome:
Verified information in a single interaction
Fewer callbacks and follow‑ups
A seamless, unified patient experience across organizations
Consult with Microsoft Teams Users: Bridging Contact Center and Care Teams
Many clinicians and care coordinators work primarily in Microsoft Teams, not the contact center. Dynamics 365 Contact Center allows representatives to consult Teams users directly.
A recently discharged patient calls with concerns about medication timing. The representative sees the assigned Care Coordinator is available in Teams and initiates a consult to confirm instructions before responding.
Benefits:
Faster access to care teams
No context switching or manual follow‑ups
Better alignment between service and clinical teams
Filtered Consults: Connecting to the Right Expertise with Confidence
In complex service environments, not every expert, team, or specialist should be available for every consult. An unfiltered list can slow representatives down and increase the risk of engaging the wrong resource. Dynamics 365 Contact Center supports filtered consult experiences, ensuring representatives see only the most relevant queues and users based on organizational rules and roles.
Contoso Scenario: Targeted Consults in Care Coordination
A customer interaction is routed into the Care Coordination queue based on intent. Once the conversation lands in the queue, consult options are filtered. Representatives see only approved specialist queues and users aligned to Care Coordination roles and policies. This ensures consults stay within the correct domain, prevents accidental misrouting, and helps Contoso resolve complex requests efficiently after work enters a specialized queue.
Why it matters:
Filtered consults help Contoso Health maintain clinical accuracy, reduce decision fatigue for representatives, and ensure collaboration happens within the right care boundaries—supporting safer, more confident patient interactions.
Confident Collaboration, Better Outcomes
Great customer experiences depend on confident, well‑informed conversations. Dynamics 365 Contact Center enables representatives to stay in control while collaborating in real time with the right experts—peers, specialist queues, external partners, or Microsoft Teams users.
The primary representative remains the single point of contact, preserving continuity while bringing in additional insight when needed. Customers experience faster resolutions, fewer handoffs, and clearer answers—without repeating themselves or losing context.
Learn more
To explore the consult capabilities in detail, visit the official documentation:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s customer-focused landscape, every interaction matters. Modern contact centers must quickly connect customers with the right expert through voice, chat, or digital channels. Effective transfer options are critical—especially in multi-intent conversations, where a customer may start with one request (for example, a loan inquiry) and then pivot to a completely different need.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center solves this by offering robust transfer features, allowing service teams to route conversations efficiently to experts, specialist groups, or external partners. From direct transfers to warm handoffs or collaboration, these tools keep service smooth and consistent, helping representatives get customers the support they need without disruption.
To see how these capabilities play out in a real-world setting, let’s visit Contoso Bank.
To see these transfer capabilities in action, let’s walk through a real-world example from financial services. Contoso Bank is a global financial institution known for its premium wealth management offerings. Its Wealth Desk Support team assists high value clients each day. They answer investment queries, clarify portfolio allocations, manage insurance-related questions, and coordinate with Relationship Managers and specialists across the bank. Their mission is simple: connect every client to the right expert instantly, with a service experience that feels seamless, personal, and trusted.
Here’s how Dynamics 365 Contact Center empowers Contoso Bank’s service representatives to deliver that promise across voice and digital channels.
Direct Transfer: Fast, Seamless Connections
Direct Transfer enables service representatives to move a voice or digital conversation to another representative instantly, without a consult step.
A customer initiates a chat with a general banking question, such as loan eligibility. As the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that the Relationship Manager (RM) is the right person to guide the customer further. The representative performs a Direct Transfer to the customer’s assigned RM.
What the client experiences:
From the client’s perspective, the experience feels immediate and effortless. There is minimal wait time, no need to repeat information, and the conversation continues directly with the Relationship Manager who understands their portfolio best.
Warm Transfer (Consult → Transfer): Perfect for High-Value, Sensitive Cases
Warm Transfer allows a representative to first consult with another expert while the customer is on hold. This ensures the handoff is informed, confident, and respectful of the client’s needs.
A customer contacts their Relationship Manager (RM) to discuss concerns about recent market volatility and its impact on their portfolio. The RM consults a Wealth or Portfolio Specialist to review the customer’s risk profile, preferences, and current holdings. Once aligned, the RM completes a Warm Transfer, briefing the specialist before bringing the customer into the conversation.
Why it works well:
This approach preserves the personalization and trust already established by the Relationship Manager. It also reduces customer anxiety during sensitive financial discussions, and ensures the specialist receives full context before engaging with the client.
Transfer to Queues: Seamless Routing for Specialized Work
When the next handler depends on deeper expertise or workload balancing, conversations can be transferred into a queue, where routing logic selects the best representative.
Contoso Scenario: Mutual Fund Switch Request
A client wants to switch mutual funds via chat. The representative transfers the conversation into the Wealth Operations queue, ensuring the next available specialist picks it up.
Benefits:
This ensures efficient workload distribution across specialists, supports compliance-friendly handling of regulated requests, and delivers consistent, reliable service for customers.
Transfer to External Phone Numbers (PSTN): Connect with External Partners
Banks frequently rely on external insurance, investment, or brokerage partners. Service representatives can transfer voice calls directly to an external PSTN number, creating a unified client experience even across institutional boundaries.
Contoso Scenario: Insurance Policy Maturity
A client needs details from Contoso’s insurance partner about an insurance product. The representative enters the partner’s PSTN number and transfers the call seamlessly.
Outcome:
The customer experiences a smooth handoff without channel disruption, while Contoso Bank maintains a connected end-to-end journey even when collaborating with external partners.
Transfer to Microsoft Teams Users: Collaboration Without Barriers
Many Relationship Managers and wealth specialists work primarily in Teams. Dynamics 365 Contact Center enables representatives to transfer conversations directly to Teams users, bridging contact center operations and collaboration tools.
Contoso Scenario: Urgent Conversation with a Relationship Manager
A VIP client calls needing immediate portfolio guidance. The representative sees the Relationship Manager is active in Teams and transfers the call instantly.
Benefits:
This enables faster access to advisors, eliminates context loss between systems, and gives Relationship Managers greater flexibility to engage from their primary workspace.
Wrap Up After Transfer: Protecting Time for Compliance & Documentation
After transferring a call or chat, representatives often need to document the interaction — capturing notes, updating CRM fields, tagging compliance steps, or recording follow-ups.
Wrap Up After Transfer provides dedicated time to the expert before new work is assigned, helping maintain accuracy and quality.
Contoso Scenario: Logging KYC and Notes
During this wrap up time, the representative can complete KYC verification, add investment-related notes, and schedule any required follow-ups without pressure from incoming work.
Why it matters:
This reduces operational errors, strengthens compliance posture, and ensures customer records remain complete and accurate.
Filtered Transfers: Showing the Right Queues, Every Time
In large contact centers, not every queue or user should be available for every transfer. An unfiltered list slows representatives down and increases the risk of incorrect or noncompliant handoffs. Dynamics 365 Contact Center addresses this by allowing organizations to control which queues and users are visible during transfer, ensuring representatives see only the most relevant options.
Contoso Scenario: Precision Transfers in Wealth Operations
A customer’s chat is transferred into the Wealth Operations queue once their request is identified as a fund switch. Representatives can now see and transfer only to approved Wealth Operations sub-queues and eligible specialists, based on role and policy. This ensures the conversation stays within the correct domain, prevents accidental rerouting, and helps Contoso maintain accuracy, compliance, and faster resolution once work enters specialized queues.
Why it matters:
Filtered transfers reduce cognitive load for representatives, improve transfer accuracy, and reinforce compliance—especially in multi-intent conversations where choosing the right next destination is critical to a seamless customer experience.
Elevate Every Conversation with Dynamics 365 Contact Center
In any industry, strong customer experiences depend on connecting people with the right expertise quickly. Dynamics 365 Contact Center offers flexible transfers and intelligent routing to keep conversations efficient, regardless of complexity.
Learn more
To explore the transfer capabilities in detail, visit the official documentation:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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
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.
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
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:
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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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.
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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 – Journeysempowers 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 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 Automateis 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 Dataversecontinues 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 consumption with pay-as-you-go (PAYG) caps, and connector dependencies help you optimize costs, demonstrate return on investment (ROI), and enforce compliance with organizational policies using features within the Power Platform Admin Center. GitHub integration and deploy from Git mature your application lifecycle management (ALM) practices with full audit trails.
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 Agentbecomes 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 Agenthelps 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.
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