This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft 365 Copilot can now bring your go-to apps directly into the conversation, which closes the gap between AI-powered insight and real, in-app action.
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.
Behind every modern contact center transformation is a group of passionate practitioners: people who don’t just adopt technology but shape how it’s used, challenged, and improved.
The Contact Center Champions Community brings together these practitioners from around the world. As customer advocates, they are deeply hands‑on with Dynamics 365 Contact Center. They actively influence product direction and share real‑world insights with peers and Microsoft engineering teams.
Below, we’re spotlighting those champions whose journeys reflect diversity, ambition, and impact. Bookmark this page to stay updated on new champion stories.
As Head of IT Operations at Sage Homes, Sachin Patel leads the organization’s end‑to‑end journey with Microsoft Dynamics 365, supporting a rapidly growing social housing portfolio of nearly 22,000 properties across England. As Sage Homes brought tenant services fully in‑house, the contact center became a critical hub—requiring a platform that could handle high volumes, protect sensitive interactions, and give agents immediate context across customers and properties. Dynamics 365 Contact Center provided the foundation to unify voice, case management, and data into a single operational experience.
Rather than rushing adoption, Sachin’s team focused on building trust in the system, simplifying routing, designing experience‑based skill handling for agents, and reducing friction through a true 360‑degree view of tenants and properties. With Copilot‑powered summaries now embedded into daily workflows, agents can quickly understand long and complex interaction histories. Meanwhile, AI‑assisted chat handles high‑volume inquiries, reducing escalations to human agents by around 30%. Strong governance, reporting, and access controls ensure the platform scales responsibly as Sage Homes expands its use of AI and digital channels. Sachin’s approach reflects what it means to be a Contact Center Champion. He leads with pragmatic adoption, measurable outcomes, and AI deployed only where it delivers real operational value.
“We recently built a new contact center and we’re expecting to get 10,000 virtual customers overnight. We could not have met that demand without the omnichannel capabilities we have in Dynamics 365 Contact Center.“
Lorenz Corradini Head of Center of Competence for Low Code/No-Code (Coc LCNC) SIAG – Südtiroler Informatik Ag – Informatica Alto Adige Spa
Lorenz Corradini is leading a major transformation in how public services are delivered in South Tyrol, Italy. As the in‑house IT provider for regional public administration, SIAG supports more than 350 services across 23 domains. It serves citizens through healthcare, education, housing, and digital administration.
Facing over 40 siloed legacy systems and a looming workforce shortage, the team at SIAG adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center to create a unified, data‑driven citizen engagement platform. Early results include 30% AI‑assisted resolution within weeks, faster service delivery, and rapid development of new digital services using Power Platform. Lorenz and team are laying the foundation for a more accessible, multilingual, and scalable model of public service delivery.
“We used to lose valuable citizen data across dozens of disconnected systems. That’s over. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Power Platform, every interaction is captured, connected, and actionable. The citizen is finally at the center, and we use that data to get better every single day.
Kamal Pandey Lead Develop, Dynamics CRM Sandvik Coromant
Kamal Pandey plays a key role in scaling a global, B2B contact center supporting manufacturing customers across industries such as automotive, aerospace, mining, and heavy engineering. Based in Sweden, Kamal leads CRM and contact center development for an organization with 3,000+ Dynamics users. In addition, it has four global customer service hubs spanning Europe, the Americas, India, and China.
Sandvik’s contact center runs fully on Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, handling chat, voice, and email in a multilingual environment. The majority of capabilities are delivered through out‑of‑the‑box configurations. Kamal’s team is actively adopting AI‑driven features—such as quality evaluation agents for scalable coaching. It also takes a thoughtful, trust‑first approach to Copilot adoption. His focus on maintainability, scale, and agent experience shapes Contact Center adoption in complex enterprise B2B environments.
“At a global scale, customer operations demand systems that stay reliable under pressure, and complexity is the default. With Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, we’ve created a sustainable architecture that supports thousands of users while using AI to enhance, never replace the human touch. For me, great customer experience starts with solid architecture and ends with people empowered to do their best work.”
Watch the Sandvik Coromant demo at Microsoft Ignite.
Rosa Lohman Business Analyst GVB
Rosa Lohman supports customer service operations for Amsterdam’s public transport network, including trams, buses, metros, and ferries across the city. Working with a lean team, Rosa oversees how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center are used to manage voice, email, and web‑based inquiries for approximately 30 customer service agents.
Her team embraced Copilot‑powered call summaries and transcriptions to reduce manual effort and improve efficiency. They are exploring AI‑driven knowledge and case management agents to further optimize service delivery. With a strong focus on insight‑driven improvements, such as identifying automation opportunities for low‑value cases and evaluating digital channels like WhatsApp, Rosa brings a practical, user‑centered perspective to modernizing customer service in the public transportation sector.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
A new way to bring service workflows, insights, and actions directly into Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming the primary interface for how people get work done. As more teams rely on Microsoft 365 Copilot to retrieve information, reason over data, and take action, the need for domain‑specific intelligence, especially for customer service, has never been greater.
On March 9th, we announced the frontier transformation, where we introduced a new type of business application integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Today, we’re excited to introduce Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot: a purpose‑built agent that brings customer service context, insights, and actions directly into the Copilot experience employees already use every day.
Service Agent enables service teams to move faster, stay focused, and resolve issues with greater confidence, without switching tools or losing context.
What is Service Agent?
Service Agent is a declarative agent that runs inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed specifically for customer service scenarios.
It combines:
The reach and familiarity of Microsoft 365 Copilot
The depth of Dynamics 365 Customer Service data
The power of agents that can reason, retrieve, and take action
With Service Agent, service professionals can interact with cases, knowledge, and service workflows using natural language—grounded in both Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 Customer Service system data—right from Copilot.
Why this matters for IT and service leaders
For years, service professionals have had to juggle multiple tools: CRM systems, knowledge bases, emails, internal chats, and reports, often switching context.
Service Agent changes that model by making Copilot the primary system of engagement for service work.
This approach delivers three key benefits:
1. One Copilot experience, across all applications including within Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Service Agent brings service workflows into the same Copilot surface used for everyday productivity, reducing friction, training overhead, and context switching.
2. Faster resolution through richer context
By grounding Copilot in both Microsoft 365 data (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint) and Dynamics 365service data (such as cases, emails, knowledge, customer history), service professionals can build case understanding in seconds—not minutes.
3. Action, not just answers
Service Agent doesn’t stop at reading and synthesizing data. It can help service professionals prioritize cases, update records, draft responses to customers, and trigger workflows—all through natural language.
What Service Agent can do in Public Preview
In its initial release, Service Agent enables scenarios such as:
Case understanding and summarization Quickly generate rich summaries of customer cases, including context from prior interactions and related knowledge.
Case prioritization and workload awareness Ask Copilot what needs attention now, based on customer signals and service data.
Service knowledge retrieval Get relevant answers grounded in Dataverse and SharePoint knowledge, directly within Copilot.
Make data updates and initiate workflows Make updates to service records, add case notes and initiate workflows such as child case creation without leaving Copilot.
Cross‑app continuity, shared history, shared memory Move seamlessly between applications such as Teams, Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service while maintaining shared memory and chat history.
Figure 1: Getting answers from Dataverse and SharePoint in Copilot Service Workspace
Figure 2: Customer interactions summaries across Dataverse, Teams and Outlook in Microsoft 365 Copilot app
Built for enterprise requirements
Service Agent is designed with enterprise IT needs in mind:
Grounded in Microsoft 365 Copilot with enterprise‑grade security and compliance
Aligned with existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service investments
Extensible, Service Agent will extend to supporting additional skills, apps, and workflows over time
Admin‑friendly, building on familiar Copilot and Dynamics management models
Service Agent acts as an intelligent layer on top of existing service systems, bringing the right information and actions to users, when and where they need them across the application ecosystem.
Getting started
Service Agent is now available in public preview, with several ongoing enhancements planned as we expand capabilities, performance, and extensibility.
Engage with your Microsoft account team for preview guidance
Looking ahead
Service Agent is a significant step toward a future where Copilot is the primary way people engage with business systems—not just to ask questions, but to get work done.
We’re excited to partner with customers and IT leaders as we continue to evolve Service Agent and bring more service capabilities into Microsoft 365 Copilot.
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