Businesses are always evolving, and keeping up means embracing new tools and technologies. That’s why we’re excited to share what’s coming in the 2025 Release Wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and role-based Copilot tools. This update isn’t just about adding new features—it’s about making work easier with smarter automation, better integrations, and AI-driven solutions that help businesses run more smoothly. In this blog post, we’ll break down the key improvements and how they can make a real difference in your day-to-day operations.
Key Takeaways
AI Capabilities: The update expands AI capabilities and intelligent agents to automate tasks and improve decision-making.
User Experience: Focus is on more intuitive workflows, smarter resource management, and greater collaboration.
Security: The release prioritizes security, governance, and extensibility.
Dynamics 365 Updates: Includes enhancements across various applications like Sales, Customer Service, and Finance, using AI to improve productivity.
Microsoft Power Platform Updates: Introduces AI-driven features in Power Apps, Power Pages, and Power Automate to build and automate solutions.
Role-Based Copilot Offerings: Advanced generative AI capabilities are provided for Sales, Service, and Finance roles.
Early Access: Begins February 3, 2025, for testing, with user experience enhancements automatically enabled by April 2025.
Overall Impact: This release aims to transform business processes through AI and create opportunities for strategic growth.
Table of Contents
Key Themes of the 2025 Release Wave 1
This release wave is built on a foundation of key themes focused on empowering businesses to achieve more. At the forefront is the expansion of AI capabilities and intelligent agents. These advancements are designed to automate routine tasks, deliver actionable insights, and significantly improve decision-making processes across every level of your organization. The emphasis on user experience is also evident, with a focus on enabling more intuitive workflows, smarter resource management, and greater collaboration. The updates are not just about adding new tools but about creating an ecosystem where these tools work harmoniously to enhance your business operations. Importantly, this wave prioritizes security, governance, and extensibility, ensuring that your business can scale confidently while maintaining compliance and control. This balance between innovation and security provides a robust platform for growth.
Dynamics 365 Updates
The Dynamics 365 suite is seeing significant improvements across various applications designed to enhance specific business functions.
Dynamics 365 Sales
With the power of AI, Dynamics 365 Sales is set to help sellers meet their targets and boost productivity. Copilot and agents are enhancing performance and streamlining tasks to help grow the pipeline and accelerate deals. A reimagined user experience ensures that sellers never miss the best course of action. Automated research, ongoing follow-ups, and prioritized tasks provide continuous guidance, allowing sellers to focus on the right actions to drive success and grow the business.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
This update introduces agentic capabilities for case and knowledge management, as well as AI-driven routing. It also extends Copilot capabilities for customer service representatives and supervisors, with a strong emphasis on productivity improvements.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center
The 2025 release wave 1 is set to transform service experiences with new features for effortless self-service, accelerated assisted service, and increased efficiency. Copilot and agent capabilities are being introduced to automate intent determination for self-service and autonomous knowledge management. Additional features include multi-modal support in the customer intent agent, enhanced unified routing features, and new workforce and quality management capabilities.
Dynamics 365 Field Service
Copilot-first experiences are at the heart of this update, aimed at enhancing service operations and delivering exceptional customer experiences. Key features include automated inspection generation from templates, actionable insights for schedulers, and quick access to vital information for frontline workers and managers. There are also seamless integrations with Microsoft Teams and Outlook.
Dynamics 365 Finance
This release focuses on delivering a copilot-first experience with enhanced automation and agentic capabilities. Updates include simplifying complex tax management and regulatory compliance, automating account reconciliations, improving bank reconciliation processes, and adding intelligence to planning. There are also enhancements for business performance analytics.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
This update aims to enhance autonomy by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics. It improves operational efficiency by automating supplier communications, enhancing demand planning with cell-level explainability, and leveraging AI in manufacturing to align production data with actual processes.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
The focus here is on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability. Key areas of improvement include project planning, contract management, invoicing, and time and expense entry. The release will introduce a mobile app for time management and deliver scale improvements to support larger projects and handle higher invoice volumes. AI-assisted core functionality improvements will also be seen in areas such as what-if analysis, proposal generation, time and expense, and approvals.
Dynamics 365 Human Resources
This update enhances intelligence, automation, and analytics across the hire-to-separate process to boost productivity and enable business agility. AI-driven assessments and integrations with external job boards, including LinkedIn, are advancing recruiting capabilities. There are also improvements to benefits and people management experiences for employees and HR business partners through AI-first solutions and automation.
Dynamics 365 Commerce
The focus here is on advancing the in-store experience by providing a mobile-first point-of-sale that reduces store hardware footprint and boosts sales conversion. Improvements to the payment connector allow modern payment methods, further reducing hardware requirements and offering more purchasing options for customers. Omni-channel unified pricing enables retailers to establish more intricate pricing structures to remain competitive.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
This release introduces intelligent AI agents to enhance efficiency and automation for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). These agents seamlessly integrate to execute complex tasks, generate reports, automate processes, and optimize order creation using natural language processing. This release also focuses on manufacturing, sustainability, and electronic document capabilities, along with enhanced Shopify and Dynamics 365 Field Service integrations.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
This will empower Copilot and agents with the latest customer insights, enabling teams to leverage this data directly within their daily workflow. It also features enriched marketing behavioral interactions and streamlined data ingestion to provide access to up-to-date customer profiles.
Microsoft Power Platform Updates
The Microsoft Power Platform is also seeing a range of updates designed to empower users to build and automate solutions.
Microsoft Power Apps
This update changes how software solutions are built with the introduction of the plan designer, where makers can describe a business problem, and a set of agents helps them build a Microsoft Power Platform solution. Apps created using Power Apps are intelligent and powered by a set of extensible agents that support common tasks like exploring, entering, and summarizing data. Users can automate common tasks by creating agents from existing apps and deploying them to take care of work autonomously.
Microsoft Power Pages
AI-driven features are at the forefront of this update, including Web Agents for multi-platform engagement (email, Teams, WhatsApp), AI-assisted form filling for improved productivity, dynamic list visualizations, and enhanced governance policies.
Microsoft Power Automate
This update is transforming how businesses automate complex processes through new human-in-the-loop experiences, including advanced approvals and AI native capabilities like generative actions and intelligent document processing. There is also a comprehensive suite of governance, observability, and security controls to help manage complex automation at scale.
Microsoft Copilot Studio
This release introduces new autonomous agent capabilities and the extension of Microsoft 365 Copilot with Custom Agents. There are also new capabilities for the Copilot Studio embedded builder in Microsoft Copilot, support for actions, new enterprise knowledge sources, and the ability to upgrade a declarative agent to a custom agent.
AI Builder
The AI Builder in Copilot Studio brings advanced automation to routine processes like email handling, document processing, and image management. The AI Builder has multi-modal content processing capabilities, allowing businesses to handle various data types, including text, documents, and images, within a single natural language instruction.
Dataverse
This update continues to extend maker experiences by enriching app and agent-building capabilities. Dataverse can connect all your data together with an expanding set of external data sources. Dataverse can also convert enterprise data into knowledge, which can be used to customize and extend agents that are built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and the agent builder experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Microsoft Power Platform Administration and Governance
This update focuses on providing enhanced tools and insights for admins to get the most from the Microsoft Power Platform. The focus is on security, easing the adoption and governance of Copilot and agents, and helping enterprises boost the adoption of Microsoft Power Platform at the enterprise scale.
Role-Based Copilot Offerings
The 2025 release wave 1 also includes updates to role-based Copilot offerings.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales
This update continues to drive innovation with advanced generative AI capabilities designed specifically for sales roles. Enhancements include surfacing further CRM platform insights and recommendations to the sales team across the Microsoft 365 product suite, streamlining SalesChat™ experiences, and driving new agent workflows.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service
This update focuses on delivering and enhancing cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for agents within their workflow. Key features include connectivity with any CRM system and inline email summary and drafting capabilities.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance
This update enhances efficiency for finance professionals by providing insights that aid strategic decision-making and reduce manual tasks. It also focuses on the intelligent automation of variance analysis in Excel, access to external data sources, extending functionalities through Copilot Studio, supporting collections calls in Teams, and using generative AI to summarize macroeconomic conditions.
Early Access and How to Prepare
Starting February 3, 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 April 2025. This early access period provides an opportunity to test the updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout.
You can explore the 2025 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information.
Conclusion
The Dynamics 365 2025 release wave 1 is a significant leap forward in business solutions, offering a host of AI-powered features and enhancements designed to transform how organizations operate. With a focus on automation, intelligent insights, and user experience, this update promises to empower businesses to achieve new levels of efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. This release wave isn't just about upgrading technology; it's about transforming business processes and creating opportunities for strategic growth. We encourage you to explore these new features and see how they can benefit your business.
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