As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for April 2025, we take a look at the key innovations and changes.
Due to Microsoft’s increasing focus on AI and Copilot, the release plans have been divided up into three areas – Dynamics 365, the Power Platform and Role-Based Copilot Offerings. As some of the improvements will become available in early access from February 3rd, we would recommend familiarising yourself with them ahead of time by enabling the Wave 1 Preview in a sandbox environment. If you are an existing Strategy 365 customer and need assistance with this, please get in touch.
Dynamics 365 Key Changes
Dynamics 365 Sales
- Sales Qualification Agent. Removes the human toil of analysing leads to determine which should be pursued first. The Agent includes three separate Agents:
– Research Agent. Get a 360-degree picture through lead and account summaries, including the integrity of the data, suggested internal contacts to reach out to a lead, financial checks and more.
– Prioritization Agent. Based on authority, budget, and other factors, the Agent identifies leads with the highest likelihood to close.
– Engagement Agent. Based on information gathered by the Research Agent, the Engagement Agent composes a personalised email to maximise response rates. The Sales Qualification Agent also has a number of other features:
– Automatically send follow-up emails with configurable response times based on the context of a lead’s response.
– Automatically identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities by analysing data on existing customers.
– Automate the task of reading each email reply from prospects and classifying their intent. Details such as budget, need, timing, or other purchase criteria are extracted, allowing sales teams to act swiftly on warmer leads. While much of the data used by the Sales Qualification Agent comes from CRM data, key insights can also be generated from outside the CRM—proprietary tools, public web resources, SharePoint files or internal data.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Case Management Agent. When a live chat is accepted by a customer service representative, the Case Management Agent automatically creates a case, filling in required information. As the conversation progresses and eventually ends, the Agent can continue to update the case with additional data from the conversation. This same functionality is also applied to emails, with data from follow-up emails automatically being used to update an ongoing case.
- Customer Knowledge Management Agent. When a support agent closes a case, the Customer Knowledge Management Agent can analyse the case and related notes, conversations, and emails to draft a knowledge article to help your organisation respond to similar cases in the future more easily. The Agent compares the content of the case against your Dynamics 365 knowledge base to determine if a new article is needed, while also ensuring that content isn’t duplicated.
- Email Sentiment. Support agents can view sentiment indicators in the inbox and email editor view and respond appropriately.
- Automatically restore sessions after a browser refresh. Currently, when a user refreshes their browser when using the Customer Service Workspace app, any sessions left open are lost and have to be reopened manually. With the new functionality, sessions are automatically restored, along with any previously-open conversations.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- New Power BI Apps. Six new Power BI apps are available for finance, sales, inventory, purchase, projects, and manufacturing. An additional Power BI App can also be used to get insights into your fixed assets and subscription billing.
- Copilot enhancements. Copilot can now be used to:
– assist with the matching of vendor invoices to purchase orders
– a new ‘Summarize’ feature displays AI-generated summaries on card and document pages, displaying the top three most impactful insights, with more available on demand. - Sales Order Agent. This new Agent can automate the whole order-taking process:
– Receive requests from customer in a shared company mailbox.
– Identify the customer in Business Central.
– Draft a sales quote with the requested items.
– Verify the availability of the requested items.
– Send the quote to the customer for approval.
– Receive confirmation, convert the quote into a sales order, and send the order to the customer via email.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data
- Insights within Copilot Chat. Access rich insights about a lead or contact, like predicted lifetime value, propensity to buy, recent transactions, and interactions. Sellers can simply ask Copilot for information about specific customers directly in the flow of their work.
- Improved data synchronisation options. Organisations will now be able to choose which tables to synchronise with their lake storage, saving on storage costs and generating insights more efficiently. An option to sync with Fabric OneLake will also become available.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
- Pause and resume Journeys. When an unplanned event occurs, you may want to pause marketing efforts, and with the Wave 1 release, this will now be possible. A Journey can now be paused, resumed or a paused Journey stopped altogether.
- Create Sales activities from Journeys. When a lead has been sufficiently nurtured, it will be possible to create activities such as tasks and phone calls against them directly from a Journey, ensuring a seamless handover between your Marketing and Sales teams.
- Create an Event Portal on your own website. Have your customers access event details, session specifics, and speaker schedules, and conveniently register using the event registration form all without leaving your website.
Power Platform Key Changes
Power Apps
- Copilot-generated Charts. With a click of a button, turn your model-driven data view into a visual, easily creating customised charts with drill-drown options that can then be copied to your clipboard for use elsewhere.
- AI Summaries. Create a record summary prompt for any table via the guided prompt builder experience, including just the fields relevant to your needs. The summary is then available to all users.
Power Automate
- Copilot Expression assistance. By using natural language, describe to Copilot what the end result should be, and it will suggest the appropriate expression formula to use.
- Copilot Flow troubleshooting. When encountering issues in your Cloud Flows, Copilot can now offer advice on what can be done to correct problems.
Copilot Studio
- Enhanced analytics. See how your Copilot Agents are performing, including the actions they took and how their knowledge sources are performing, making it easier to see where improvements can be made.
- Manage omnichannel rules via Power Apps. By connecting Agents to your Dataverse tables, you can create custom data stores for your business-specific data, and by making changes to this data, Agents are kept up to date without the need to customise the Agent itself.
AI Builder
- Copilot Document Management. By attaching a file in the prompt builder dialog, text can be extracted via optical character recognition and included as part of the prompt instruction.
- ‘Draft With Copilot’. Allows you to write or re-write your prompts using Copilot. Copilot can turn an intent into an effective, sophisticated prompt that follows prompt engineering best practices.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Enhance data quality. With this feature, data can be easily summarised and responses can be prioritised based on urgency, categorised and pertinent info can be extracted. Replies can then be generated by using Microsoft Dataverse Copilot generative AI functions.
Role-Based Copilots
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales
- Salesforce record types. Copilot for Sales will consider record type configurations defined by administrators in Salesforce.
- Meeting Digests. Choose whether you want to receive a recap notification for each meeting individually or instead receive a daily or weekly digest that provides an aggregate view of recent meetings. Digests include a brief summary of each meeting, a link to the recap and recording, shortcuts to creating follow-up actions and highlighting meetings that you missed where you were mentioned by name.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service
- Case Summary customisations. Allows admins to customise case summaries so that they include only the relevant fields from their third-party CRM systems.
- Knowledge Hub integrations. By using the Knowledge Hub in Copilot for Service, admins can now configure external knowledge sources for Copilot embedded in third-party CRM systems such as Salesforce or ServiceNow.
Summary
The 2025 Wave 1 release continues Microsoft’s aim to infuse their Copilot AI technology into more and more products and features. We look forward to seeing and testing the new functionality when the preview and general releases are launched and will report on them further as required. As a reminder, these are the upcoming Wave 1 dates to be aware of:
- February 3rd, 2025 – Early Access available
- April 1st, 2025 – General availability
Existing Strategy 365 customers who would like to discuss any of the above changes or need assistance with enabling the Wave 2 preview, please get in touch.
