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.
// Modify player theme based on localStorage value.
let options = {“autoplay”:false,”hideControls”:null,”language”:”en-us”,”loop”:false,”partnerName”:”cloud-blogs”,”poster”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/image/microsoftcorp/3414450-Business-Applications-Sizzle-D365_tbmnl_en-us?wid=1280″,”title”:””,”sources”:[{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3414450-Business-Applications-Sizzle-D365-0x1080-6439k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HQ”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3414450-Business-Applications-Sizzle-D365-0x720-3266k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3414450-Business-Applications-Sizzle-D365-0x540-2160k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”SD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3414450-Business-Applications-Sizzle-D365-0x360-958k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”LO”}]};
if (currentTheme) {
options.playButtonTheme = currentTheme;
}
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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We’re pleased to introduce a new capability for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations archive with Dataverse long-term retention: parallel processing for archive jobs. This enhancement allows the Archive job scheduler to run multiple archive jobs at the same time, dramatically reducing the time required to archive high volumes of transaction data across legal entities.
The challenge: Sequential bottlenecks
Previously, archive jobs within the same scenario were processed sequentially. For organizations operating across dozens of legal entities—each with millions of transaction records in General Ledger, Sales Orders, or other scenarios—this approach created a bottleneck, and archiving could take days or even weeks to complete.
For example, a multinational organization may have 50–200+ legal entities, each containing one fiscal year of General Ledger transactions. Archiving one legal entity data at a time delays storage optimization, increases SQL Server load, and slows the movement of data into long-term retention in Dataverse.
The solution: Use Job criteria key partition to enable parallel processing
Parallel processing introduces the Job Criteria Key—a partition identifier you set when you build the archive job contract. The job criteria key tells the archive job scheduler which archive jobs operate on independent data sets. This allows them to run simultaneously without conflict.
How it works
Define the partition key — When you build the archive job contract, set the criteria key (typically the legal entity) that represents the data partition.
The scheduler identifies parallel candidates — The archive job scheduler detects that jobs with different criteria keys target non-overlapping records.
Jobs run concurrently — Rather than waiting in a queue, archive jobs for different partitions execute in parallel.
The zero-overlap guarantee
The job criteria key depends on one critical invariant: when multiple archive jobs run within the same scenario, each job with a different job criteria key must process a completely distinct set of records with zero overlap.
For example, if you run two Sales Order archive jobs at the same time—one with job criteria key “USMF” and another with “DEMF”—the records archived by the USMF job must not overlap with those archived by the DEMF job. This is why DataAreaId is a natural choice for many scenarios: it inherently partitions data by legal entity.
Monitoring parallel jobs
You can monitor archive jobs running in parallel from the Archive with Dataverse long term retention workspace in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Each job shows its criteria key value, making it easy to confirm which partitions are being processed concurrently.
Join the private preview
Parallel processing for archive jobs is currently available in private preview. If you’d like to try this capability in your environment, we’d be happy to have you participate.
By joining the preview, you’ll get early access to parallel archive job execution. You’ll also have an opportunity to provide feedback that helps shape the final release. The preview is open to all Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations customers and partners.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Work is changing at a structural level.
Three forces are converging. The interface layer is shifting to AI assistants. Agents handle workflow orchestration. And an intelligence layer is consolidating information across structured and unstructured sources. Together, these forces mark Frontier Transformation, where AI moves beyond basic efficiency to open new opportunities for creativity, innovation and growth.
This transformation also creates a new kind of business application: one that is integrated with the AI assistant people use every day, accessible to agents and grounded in the unique intelligence of each organization.
We call these agentic business applications. The applications themselves still reflect real business processes. But how people interact with them, how work moves through them and how they connect to the rest of the business is fundamentally different.
// Modify player theme based on localStorage value.
let options = {“autoplay”:false,”hideControls”:null,”language”:”en-us”,”loop”:false,”partnerName”:”cloud-blogs”,”poster”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/image/microsoftcorp/AgenticBusinessAppsFrontier_tbmnl_en-us?wid=1280″,”title”:””,”sources”:[{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/AgenticBusinessAppsFrontier-0x1080-6439k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HQ”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/AgenticBusinessAppsFrontier-0x720-3266k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/AgenticBusinessAppsFrontier-0x540-2160k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”SD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/AgenticBusinessAppsFrontier-0x360-958k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”LO”}]};
if (currentTheme) {
options.playButtonTheme = currentTheme;
}
Interact with business applications inside Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming an interactive workspace for business applications. Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and custom apps built with Power Apps will surface directly as agents with rich UX inside chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Agents using Apps SDK and MCP Apps can also bring Microsoft partner apps into the conversation, including tools teams already use, like Adobe Express, Figma, and Wix. This is the interface layer shift in practice. Instead of switching between applications, users state what they need in Copilot and the system responds. You can review data and take action without leaving the conversation. Copilot becomes the place where work gets done.
As an example, a human resources (HR) employee can now call on their custom HR app, built with Power Apps, right within Copilot to compile a list of office locations with the highest new hire counts this quarter, viewing the results in an organized table with filter options. Additionally, they can prompt the application to show the results in a map view, all without leaving their Copilot interface.
Or a customer service representative can begin their day in Microsoft 365 Copilot by reviewing a summary of priority cases they need to focus on, easily viewing and updating their data from Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
// Modify player theme based on localStorage value.
let options = {“autoplay”:true,”hideControls”:null,”language”:”en-us”,”loop”:true,”partnerName”:”cloud-blogs”,”poster”:”https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GIF1.png”,”title”:””,”sources”:[{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256201-D365-Service-in-M365-Copilot-0x1080-6439k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HQ”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256201-D365-Service-in-M365-Copilot-0x720-3266k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256201-D365-Service-in-M365-Copilot-0x540-2160k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”SD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256201-D365-Service-in-M365-Copilot-0x360-958k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”LO”}]};
if (currentTheme) {
options.playButtonTheme = currentTheme;
}
Public preview for this capability will be available later this month for Power Apps, with availability for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service launching in early April 2026. Throughout the next month, we’ll also introduce support for this capability across a handful of Microsoft partner apps, including Adobe Express, Adobe Acrobat, Base44, Box, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Miro, Monday.com, Optimizely, and Wix. All pre-built partner app experiences will be accessible via the Microsoft 365 Agent Store for users with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
window.addEventListener(‘load’, function () {
const slot = document.getElementById(‘ms-demo-slot’);
if (!slot) return;
Bring Copilot and agents into Dynamics 365 and Power Apps
The experience works in both directions. Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents like Researcher and Analyst will be accessible directly within Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and custom apps built with Power Apps. Employees get the same Copilot capabilities they trust across Microsoft 365 while staying grounded in their operational systems.
Consider a seller working in Dynamics 365 Sales who asks Researcher to generate a full account overview: customer relationship management (CRM) context, internal knowledge, and external research combined in one response, surfaced in place. The unit of value shifts from “find the right screen” to “get the answer and act.” This creates a more consistent experience across productivity tools and business applications. Work moves from insight to execution with less friction between systems.
// Modify player theme based on localStorage value.
let options = {“autoplay”:true,”hideControls”:null,”language”:”en-us”,”loop”:true,”partnerName”:”cloud-blogs”,”poster”:”https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GIF2.png”,”title”:””,”sources”:[{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256500-Frontier-Transformation-D365-0x1080-6439k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HQ”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256500-Frontier-Transformation-D365-0x720-3266k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256500-Frontier-Transformation-D365-0x540-2160k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”SD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256500-Frontier-Transformation-D365-0x360-958k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”LO”}]};
if (currentTheme) {
options.playButtonTheme = currentTheme;
}
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and canvas apps in Power Apps will be available in public preview by early April 2026. Microsoft 365 Copilot in model-driven apps built with Power Apps will reach general availability by early April 2026. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required. This experience with Power Apps also requires a Power Apps premium license.
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Power Apps allows us to ask questions and make decisions directly against our Dataverse data, while also combining insights from Microsoft 365 when needed. The experience now feels truly unified, allowing our users to summarize complex operational data, trigger actions, and seamlessly access insights. We’ve seen significant increases in the value provided to both our internal solutions and customer-facing products.
Peter Kestenholz, Founder & Head of Innovation, Context&
Grounded in your organization’s intelligence with Work IQ
Underpinning all of this is Work IQ. Work IQ connects signals from Microsoft 365 with operational data from Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. It follows work as it happens across documents, meetings, chats, and business processes. This is the intelligence layer: the thing that resolves entities and relationships across structured and unstructured sources, so agents and Copilot share a common understanding of what is happening across the business.
Decisions discussed in a meeting or email can connect to live data in a business application. Changes in one place surface where attention is needed elsewhere. And because this intelligence is grounded in Dataverse and your organization’s own data, actions stay aligned to real processes and real context.
For example, when a pricing change is discussed in a meeting, Work IQ understands how that decision impacts active opportunities in Dynamics 365 Sales, surfacing the affected opportunities within Copilot for review.
// Modify player theme based on localStorage value.
let options = {“autoplay”:true,”hideControls”:null,”language”:”en-us”,”loop”:true,”partnerName”:”cloud-blogs”,”poster”:”https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GIF3.png”,”title”:””,”sources”:[{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256450-D365-Work-IQ-0x1080-6439k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HQ”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256450-D365-Work-IQ-0x720-3266k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”HD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256450-D365-Work-IQ-0x540-2160k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”SD”},{“src”:”https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/3256450-D365-Work-IQ-0x360-958k”,”type”:”video/mp4″,”quality”:”LO”}]};
if (currentTheme) {
options.playButtonTheme = currentTheme;
}
Work IQ plays an important role in making business applications agentic. Without it, agents operate on partial information. With it, they act on the full context of the business.
Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can experience Work IQ with Dataverse integration directly inside Power Apps, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service in public preview by early April 2026.
Copilot, agents, and Work IQ come together as a system of work. Within that system lies a new generation of business applications: applications that understand context, respond to intent, and support execution where work actually happens. The business application stack is entering a significant architectural shift. What we’re announcing today is one step in that larger transition. We are building a platform where applications, intelligence and execution converge so teams operate with more clarity and less overhead.
You’ll see this foundation expand across Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 as we bring more agentic capabilities into the flow of work. Agentic business applications are already taking shape.
Recent Comments