We’re entering the age of AI agents, a transformative moment reshaping the landscape of business applications and platforms. AI agents aren’t just making incremental improvements, they’re helping to redefine productivity and can fundamentally change how work gets done.

Published today, the 2025 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot offerings introduces new and improved capabilities that help organizations to harness the full potential of this new era. These plans compile new capabilities slated for release between October 2025 and March 2026.
Integral to the wave 2 plans, AI assistants and agents not only help humans with day-to-day tasks, but also act as proactive partners to drive better business outcomes. Our upcoming release brings that vision to life, helping to make AI not just accessible but an essential component in daily operations. Whether it’s enabling sellers to close deals faster, providing service teams real-time trusted knowledge, or empowering finance professionals with AI-driven reconciliation and analysis, these enhancements can be transformative to the way we all work.

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

Highlights from Dynamics 365

The 2025 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovation to transform functions across your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data enhances Microsoft Copilot and agents with real-time, unified customer profiles, enabling teams to act on insights within their workflow. With enriched data, seamless platform integration, and faster processing, businesses can deliver timely, personalized experiences that boost engagement and conversions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys empowers businesses to craft personalized, AI-driven customer experiences across all touchpoints. With Copilot, agents, and enhanced orchestration tools, teams can engage the right audiences at scale, streamline lead generation, and accelerate growth.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers achieve their targets and automate busywork. Microsoft Copilot delivers actionable insights in the flow of work, while AI agents research and engage leads, drive purchase intent, and proactively bring key insights and emergent deal risks—helping sellers close more deals faster. A reimagined interface reorients sellers from data to insights. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features in this release wave for Dynamics 365 Sales.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to enhance agentic and Copilot capabilities for case and knowledge management, as well as AI-driven routing.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center continues to enhance agentic and Copilot capabilities to automate the service journey across digital and voice channels, along with the introduction of new omnichannel and supervisor capabilities in the 2025 release wave 2.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will deliver AI agents, enhanced scheduling tools, mobile usability improvements, and deeper Microsoft 365 integration in the upcoming release wave. With innovations across inspections, vendor coordination, and connectivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Field Service empowers organizations to deliver smarter, faster, and more seamless service at scale.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance brings global-scale finance and agentic operations to our customers, including agents that can lead to faster financial close, and provide additional automation and optimization across large scale operations, as well as enhancements to business performance analytics and planning solutions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can enhance demand planning with event and promotion forecasting, and help improve quality management for sample handling; and the Supplier Communications Agent will automate vendor interactions. New supplier engagement tools and warehouse app upgrades will also be introduced to further streamline operations and boost efficiency.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations will continue to deliver powerful enhancements across the project lifecycle. These include improved mobile and browser experiences for time and expense, better project planning with enterprise custom fields, streamlined billing and invoicing workflows, and expanded support for stocked items, investment projects, and migrations to the modern architecture.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources can enhance the hire-to-retire journey with Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Viva Connections integration to help reduce duplication. New agentic capabilities will be introduced to streamline onboarding with guided experiences and automation. Recruiter assist will also now support job description generation and interview assistance, helping to improve efficiency across hiring and onboarding.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce advances in-store experiences by providing a mobile-first point-of-sale that provides business continuity even during a business outage. Improvements to the Adyen payment connector allows modern payments like Pay by Link across channels, offering more purchasing options for omnichannel customers. Additionally, omnichannel unified pricing enables retailers to establish more intricate pricing structures, helping them remain competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces AI agents to enhance efficiency and automation in the 2025 release wave 2. These agents seamlessly integrate to execute complex tasks, generate reports, automate processes, and optimize order creation using natural language processing. Additionally, this release focuses on quality management, subcontracting, sustainability, and e-document capabilities.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

2025 release wave 2 updates for Microsoft Power Platform bring new and updated ways for organizations to analyze, act on, and automate data to digitally transform their businesses.

Microsoft Copilot Studio continues its journey to make agent creation and operation even easier and more powerful with autonomous agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, the ability to build complete teams of agents that work seamlessly together, and improved governance for enterprise scalability. Copilot Studio will offer even deeper integration with Azure AI Foundry and the Microsoft Graph, helping to ensure your agents can use the latest AI technology in coordination with your data in Microsoft Graph. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Copilot Studio can benefit your business.

Microsoft Power Apps enhances human and agent collaboration with a new agent feed to supervise the work of agents and extensible built-in agents for common tasks like enter, explore, visualize, and summarize data. Bring business problems to Plan Designer and a team of agents will help you build enterprise solutions, including apps, agents, Microsoft Power BI reports, and more. Vibe code with the App Agent to create data-connected experiences—just describe what you need or provide an image, and it can be done.

Microsoft Power Pages enables businesses to build secure, data-driven portals effortlessly. In this wave, we will further expedite site building for low-code makers and pro developers to help build intelligent sites for your employees, customers, and partners. The introduction of enhanced security agent features will further empower low-code makers, pro developers, and admins with actionable insights and abilities for securing their websites.

Microsoft Power Automate is transforming how enterprises automate complex business processes through new human-in-the-loop experiences, such as advanced approvals and AI-native capabilities, such as generative actions and intelligent document processing. To manage complex automations at scale, a comprehensive suite of governance, observability, and security controls will be introduced to the Automation Center and Power Platform admin center.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to serve as a trusted low-code data platform, enabling the creation of scalable agents, Copilot applications, and automations. This update introduces enhancements to core agentic capabilities, including Dataverse for Agents and Dataverse Search to support smarter, AI-ready experiences. New features such as Dataverse Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server and AI-powered business logic tools further expand the ability to build dynamic, intelligent solutions grounded in enterprise data.

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration will become the unified governance hub for managing intelligent agents, agent-driven apps, and automated workflows across the Microsoft ecosystem in this release wave. This will provide a secure, governable, reliable platform for agent development.

Updates to Copilot offerings

Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot help maximize business impact across sales, service, and finance. Learn more about the 2025 release wave 2 updates for Copilot offerings. Agent updates for sales will help sellers work smarter, engage strategically, and close deals faster. Agent updates for service will expand CRM connectivity and enhance email insights and drafting—all within the tools reps use daily. Updates for finance will offer easily customizable agents that can be launched from familiar tools like Excel, boosting efficiency and insight.

Early access period

Starting August 4, 2025, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by October 2025. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2025 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2025 release wave 2 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2025 release wave 2 plan, and Copilot offerings 2025 release wave 2. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

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In today’s fast-moving world, it’s not enough to just hear what customers say—you need to understand what they really mean. Whether they’re talking to a voice agent (IVR) or chatting with a virtual agent, it’s important that the technology behind the scenes can truly understand them. That’s where Natural Language Understanding (NLU) comes in. It helps contact centers respond more naturally, reduce the need to transfer calls, and make every interaction smoother and more helpful. 

To help businesses improve how they talk to customers, we’re introducing NLU+, a new feature in Microsoft Copilot Studio. NLU+ is designed for companies that have a lot of customer conversations and want more control over how their virtual agents respond. It’s especially useful for teams that have collected years of chat or call data. With NLU+, they can fine-tune how their bots understand and reply, making conversations feel more personal and effective. 

Why now? Many companies are curious about using generative AI but aren’t quite ready to go all in. NLU+ offers a reliable and customizable option that gives you accurate results and full control over your data. It lets you build smart language models using your own past conversations, tailored to your business’s unique way of speaking and working. This means your agents can better understand even tricky or industry-specific language, leading to faster and more natural customer service. 

Think of NLU+ like a smart engine that gets better the more you use it. It doesn’t just pick up on keywords—it understands full sentences and the meaning behind them, letting customers speak freely and still gets what they’re saying. This makes conversations feel more human and less robotic. 

Training the model

NLU+ works by learning from examples. You give it sample conversations with notes that explain what each part means. This helps it understand full sentences instead of just following a step-by-step script. While it takes a bit of effort to set up, the payoff is a system that keeps getting better over time. If you want a virtual agent that grows with your business and keeps delivering great service, NLU+ is a great choice. 

By introducing NLU+ with other NLU’s like Generative AI, standard NLU, and Azure CLU, you can build a wide range of self-service agents. Generative AI is great for low maintenance agentic systems, standard NLU is great for rapid setups while NLU+ is better for more complex tuning needs. Azure CLU helps you connect with existing Microsoft language tools. Together, these options let you find the right balance between speed, accuracy, and control. 

Custom ontology 

An ontology is a formal representation of knowledge within a specific domain. NLU+ allows you to define your own intents, entities, and relationships using annotated data, forming your custom ontology. This gives you full control over how your agent understands and processes language. For example, in a flight booking scenario, you can define variables like origin, destination, travel date, and number of passengers. We can now add entity annotations within the topic triggers, allowing tighter coupling of intents and entities.  

Advanced slot filling

Once your data is annotated, NLU+ can extract multiple data points from a single utterance. This eliminates the need for repetitive back-and-forth questions. For instance, if a customer says, “Book a flight from Miami to Boston for two people tomorrow,” the model can simultaneously extract the origin, destination, number of passengers, and travel date. This not only saves time but also creates a smoother, more conversational experience. 

NLU+ also allows makers to add additional training data to help the model understand the many ways customers might answer a question, thereby improving entity extraction accuracy. 

Bulk data import 

NLU+ supports the import of large volumes of training data—making it easy to scale and refine your models. With simple import/export functionality, you can quickly update topic triggers, append new data, and iterate on your model without starting from scratch. This is especially useful for enterprises that need to manage multiple topics or frequently update their conversational flows. 

Consistent latency using a precompiled model

You can use the Train feature to pre-compile your model. This ensures low-latency, deterministic performance—critical for high-volume environments. The training process also includes a unique feature for voice agents (IVR), where the recognizer is trained alongside the model to improve speech recognition accuracy. Once training is complete, you’ll receive a status update, and if there are any issues, you can export the results for easy troubleshooting and refinement. 

Get started with NLU+ 

Getting started with NLU+ is simple. All you need is a Dynamics 365 Contact Center license. Once enabled, navigate to the Language Understanding section in Copilot Studio and select NLU+ as your orchestration engine. From there, you can upload your data, annotate it, train your model, and test it –all within the same intuitive interface. Once you’re satisfied with the results, publish your agent and start delivering smarter, faster, and more personalized conversations that are designed to always understand meaning. 

Learn more 

Watch a quick video introduction. 

Read the documentation: 

• Set up IVR agents in the voice channel using Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn 

• Integrate a Copilot agent | Microsoft Learn 

• Natural language understanding (NLU) overview 

• Configure NLU+ 

• Responsible AI FAQs for NLUs in AI agents | Microsoft Learn 

The post NLU+: Fine-tuned language intelligence for smarter conversations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In customer service, efficient workload distribution is vital for high customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Unified routing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center help organizations continuously fine-tune their operations. Least active routing assigns work items based on when service representatives finish their last conversation. Initially used for voice channels, this strategy is now extending to messaging channels, with the additional ability to factor in the load on a service rep, based on the concurrent conversations being handled. 

What is least active routing?

Least active routing fairly distributes tasks among service representatives by considering last capacity release time. This ensures adequate rest between tasks, better utilization, improved customer satisfaction, as well as better customer service representative satisfaction. 

Enhancements to least active routing 

The extension of least active routing to messaging channels brings two significant enhancements. First, it has the ability to factor in the concurrent workload of a service representative. And second, it considers the workload and conversation completion across voice and messaging channels. These enhancements ensure fair and efficient workload distribution in a blended workforce handling multiple channels and individual service reps handling multiple conversations at the same time. 

Least active routing in action  

Contoso Health is a multinational healthcare and insurance provider. It has a large customer support organization covering more than 20 product lines, handled by more than 5,000 service representatives worldwide. Customers either call the contact center or use the chat option on the website to get their queries resolved. 

In the contact center, a service representative can talk to only one customer at a time while engaging with up to three customers over chat in parallel. Eugenia, the director of customer support at Contoso, observes that some of her service representatives are being utilized up to 95% in their schedule. Meanwhile, others are occupied only for only 70-75%, and she wants to solve this problem. While doing that, she also wants to make sure not to impact the key metrics like customer satisfaction and SLAs. She comes across the least active routing assignment method and tries it for voice and messaging queues. 

Scenario 1: Different workloads across service reps 

Oscar Ward and Victoria Burke are two service representatives with the same skills. Oscar works on the Members Messaging queue, while Victoria works on Members Messaging and Returns Voice queues. 

• Number of conversations with Oscar: 1 chat 

• Number of conversations with Victoria: 1 call and 1 chat 

At 1:00 PM, a new chat conversation arrives. 

Because Oscar has fewer concurrent conversations than Victoria, the new chat is assigned to Oscar. 

Scenario 2: Equal workloads across service reps 

Maya and Hailey are two service representatives with the same skills. Maya works on the messaging queue for Orders, while Hailey works on the messaging queue for Orders and Voice queue for Delivery queries. 

Let’s assume that Hailey is working on a call and chat at the same time while Maya is engaged in two chat conversations. 

Maya completes one of the chats at 1:55 PM, and Hailey completes the chat at 2:00 PM. A new chat conversation arrives at 2:05 PM. 

• Number of conversations with Hailey: 1 call 

• Number of conversations with Maya: 1 chat 

Because both Maya and Hailey have the same number of active assignments, the least active assignment strategy considers the last capacity release time across both voice and messaging queues. 

Maya is determined to be least active compared to Hailey and therefore, the new chat is assigned to Maya. 

Note: Least active routing can also be used as an Order by  condition in the custom assignment methods.

Build custom reports to monitor an agent’s last capacity release time  

The least active assignment method works based on when the agent ended his or her last conversation. This data about the agent’s last call end time or last capacity release time, is available in the Dataverse entity ‘msdyn_agentchannelstateentity’. Organizations can use the model customization feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to build a custom report that provides a view of this data. 

Learn more 

To learn more about least active routing, read the documentation: Assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Learn 

Related articles:

• Enhance agent utilization and engagement with least active routing  – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog 

• The right work assignment method can improve agent satisfaction and utilization – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog 

The post Use least active routing on messaging channels  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In addition to the contact center agent desktop, service representatives frequently interact with multiple platforms to participate in meetings and trainings. Also, they might use various tools for managing customer interactions across channels. To prevent overbooking contact center service reps, presence APIs synchronizes their availability and reflects it in real time across all relevant systems. 

Dynamics 365 Contact Center provides presence synchronization APIs for server-to-server synchronization. These APIs allow for programmatically accessing and updating the status of service representatives, subscribing to presence change events, and maintaining consistent status updates across platforms. This ensures that service rep availability is accurate across all systems.  

To understand the practical application of presence synchronization APIs, let’s consider the example of Contoso Bank. Contoso Bank has developed a collaboration application for their bank managers who handle priority customer calls in Dynamics 365 Contact Center but also need to use the collaboration tool for internal communications. By leveraging the presence synchronization APIs, Contoso Bank can synchronize the availability of managers between the collaboration tool and Dynamics apps. This ensures that when a bank manager is on a call, their status appears in the collaboration tool, preventing any interruptions or overbooking. 

Presence APIs offer several key benefits to enhance your contact center operations: 

• Access and update presence status: Programmatically access and update the presence status of service representatives in Dynamics 365. This ensures their availability is accurate across all systems. 

• Avoid overbooking: Synchronize presence status to prevent service representatives from receiving multiple tasks simultaneously. This helps to avoid overbooking and potential service disruptions. 

• Cross-platform synchronization: Maintain consistent service representative status updates across platforms. 

How does it work? 

Presence APIs provide several methods to manage service representative availability: 

• Get presence: Retrieve the current presence status of a service representative. 

• Modify presence: Update the presence status of a service representative. 

• Subscribe to presence changes: Subscribe to presence change events to receive real-time updates. 

Learn more about presence APIs

To learn more, read the documentation: Synchronize service representative presence status across multiple systems | Microsoft Learn 

The post Synchronize service rep availability across platforms with presence APIs  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

One year ago, Microsoft launched its Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, powered by AI. This is built on top of the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service capabilities. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Desktop companion application (DCA) to further seamlessly allow service representatives and customers to speak more reliably and efficiently. 

Faster connections, reliable service 

Web crashes, freezes, and refreshes occur as a part of routine service. But what if these web glitches didn’t have to disrupt your service?

We built DCA to ensure representatives and customers stay connected during web application malfunctions. This vision is already enhancing customer service outcomes at scale. Customers across the world, including VIVID, use DCA daily after starting as our first preview customer months ago.

VIVID is a major housing provider that used our CCaaS solution to transform both the customer and employee experience. Call abandonment rates have plummeted, average speed to answer has fallen from six minutes to under a minute, and digital engagement has surged. Since adopting the platform, customers have seen faster first responses, a decrease in Bluetooth connectivity issues, and calls handled with increased reliability without call drops.  

“Our calls are connecting quicker. It’s so speedy for agents to be able to answer the call and talk directly to them. The delay between accepting calls and being able to hear the customer has gone.” – VIVID 

Explore how VIVID enhanced customer and staff experiences

How to use DCA 

Once the admin for the organization installs DCA onto all service representatives’ machines, reps will be able to see all the important details of a call on the DCA screen. These details include calls on hold, active calls, and mute and end call buttons. The bottom line shows the connectivity status of DCA, and in the web application, a web browser extension does the same. 

Further, CSRs can set their own language and device settings while checking for updates in the Settings tab. 

With the Desktop companion application (DCA), contact centers can ensure a faster, more reliable calling experience for customers. Additionally, service reps can work more effectively with fewer disruptions.

Learn more  

Watch a quick video introduction.

Read the documentation: 

• Install and manage Desktop companion application for voice channel | Microsoft Learn 

• Use the Desktop companion application with the voice channel | Microsoft Learn 

The post Try Desktop companion application for Dynamics 365 Contact Center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.