2026 Release Wave 1: Overview for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot Studio

The 2026 Release Wave 1 introduces a new level of intelligence and automation across Microsoft Dynamics 365, with a strong emphasis on AI-powered, agentic experiences spanning sales, service, finance, supply chain, commerce, HR, projects, sustainability, and ERP. At the core of these updates is deeper integration with Microsoft Copilot, enabling intelligent automation, unified customer and operational data, and enhanced cross-application capabilities that help companies improve efficiency, elevate both customer and employee experiences, and operate with greater agility and confidence.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales is evolving CRM from a passive system of record into an active system of action. By embedding Copilot, AI, and autonomous agents directly into the sales workflow, it actively helps sellers complete their most important tasks. The platform continuously enriches data, analyzes signals, and highlights the most critical actions to take at the right time.

Operating continuously in the background, Dynamics 365 Sales strengthens the pipeline, enhances data quality, and prioritizes deals, allowing sellers to focus on high-impact activities. This leads to improved productivity, greater job satisfaction, and increased revenue per seller. AI-powered research journeys also extend value to sales leaders by unifying data across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Graph, creating a powerful and connected data foundation.

Built on a secure and unified data platform, and extendable through Power Platform and Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365 Sales represents the next generation of agentic business applications. In this model, Copilot and AI agents enhance the traditional user experience by delivering AI-driven insights and recommended actions directly within the flow of work.

Therefore, the key area of innovation is AI-driven business processes, particularly in Dynamics 365 Sales, where AI supports sellers in building pipelines, enriching opportunities, and accelerating deal closure. Copilot experiences leverage data across CRM and Microsoft 365, including emails and meeting summaries, to deliver actionable insights and recommend high-impact next steps.

Business research

Business research in Dynamics 365 introduces research agents that help business leaders create detailed research journeys and solve complex questions through interactive conversations with their data. One key feature, the Sales Research Agent, enables users automatically and is expected to be generally available in April 2026.

Sales engagement and execution with Copilot and AI innovation 

Sales engagement and execution provide tools to support interactions with prospects throughout the sales cycle.

One of the key upcoming features is the in-flow email template picker in Sequences, designed to reduce friction for sellers and streamline communication. It is expected to be generally available in April 2026.

Copilot and AI innovation aim to enhance sales productivity by integrating data, workflows, insights, and advanced AI capabilities further empowered by AI-powered agents that support different stages of the sales process:

• Planning a sales portfolio, gaining sales operations insights through, and exploring and analyzing data using the Sales Search Agent

The Sales Search Agent transforms how sales teams interact with data. Instead of navigating multiple tools or manually compiling reports, users can access and analyze insights from Dynamics 365, Fabric data, and even local files within a single interface. It allows users to ask questions in natural language, explore results interactively, and clearly see how insights are derived.

• Structuring and improving lead qualification with the Sales Qualification Agent

The Sales Qualification Agent adds consistency and structure to the lead qualification process, often one of the most variable areas in sales. Teams can define outreach objectives, messaging style, tone, and calls-to-action using natural language, ensuring a more standardized and effective approach.

• Scaling outreach and engagement with the Sales Development Agent

The Sales Development Agent acts as a scalable extension of the Sales Development team. It can be trained on your internal materials, engage with new leads across multiple channels and languages, automatically update records in Dynamics 365, and generate personalized follow-ups.

• Driving deal progression and closing opportunities with the Sales Close Agent

The Sales Close Agent is designed to support deal closure, this agent delivers real-time insights, identifies potential risks, and recommends next best actions based on current deal data and historical trends.

• Lead researching and next best actions in Sales Home

Besides, seller experiences continue to improve with more integrated, AI-assisted tools in the Sales Hub. The main updates include expanded inbound and outbound calling capabilities via the Sales Hub dialer, with tighter integration into the sales workflow and activity tracking.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (Marketing)

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys enables agent-driven, end-to-end customer experiences by orchestrating and delivering personalized journeys across marketing, sales, and service that continuously adapt to customer behavior. With the support of Copilot and AI agents, organizations can anticipate customer needs, design dynamic journeys, and deliver connected, personalized interactions at every touchpoint, leading to stronger relationships, improved efficiency, and increased revenue.

In this release, the focus is on three main areas:

Agents and Copilot

Customer Insights – Journeys combines Copilot and AI agents to transform how personalized experiences are created, optimized, and delivered. By simplifying complex processes, these capabilities allow individual marketers to achieve results comparable to an entire team. With easy-to-use AI assistance, sales, marketing, and service teams can quickly launch tailored, high-impact campaigns and engagements without requiring deep technical expertise, driving clear business outcomes.

Elevating customer experiences

Enhanced orchestration capabilities allow teams to deliver interactions at the most relevant moments while managing and scaling customer journeys across complex organizational environments. Features such as automatic email content updates, message expiration for timely communication, and branded content links help ensure relevance and consistency, enabling organizations to engage customers effectively and build long-term loyalty.

Driving pipeline growth

New tools help accelerate pipeline growth by simplifying lead generation and engagement. Teams can create leads and other records directly from customer journeys, use behavioral and predictive signals from previous campaigns, and connect insights across Customer Insights – Data and Journeys. These capabilities make it easier to attract, qualify, and convert high-quality opportunities, expand outreach, and turn customer interest into measurable business results.

Overall, the goal is to equip customer-facing teams to deliver seamless and consistent experiences across all touchpoints, strengthening engagement, deepening relationships, and supporting overall business success.

 Dynamics 365 Customer Service

In parallel, Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to expand its agentic capabilities, enhancing case management, customer intent recognition, email handling, and knowledge management. AI-powered tools for administrators and supervisors provide greater transparency and faster time-to-value, while enabling more autonomous, end-to-end service orchestration. These advancements extend into intelligent customer experience scenarios.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is transforming into a modern, AI-first platform built to help companies deliver quicker, more personalized, and consistent customer experiences. Powered by the Microsoft cloud and deeply integrated with generative AI, it enables service teams to resolve issues more efficiently, accurately, and empathetically, while also lowering operational costs.

The solution includes capabilities such as unified case management, intelligent routing, advanced email and knowledge tools, and built-in Microsoft Teams collaboration. Together, these features help organizations meet growing customer expectations by delivering intuitive, proactive, and empathetic service, both now and as agentic innovation continues to evolve.

With the 2026 release wave 1, this vision is further advanced through stronger agentic capabilities, tighter Copilot integration, and improved tools for supervisors. These enhancements support end-to-end service orchestration, from understanding customer intent to enabling autonomous workflows that improve service quality and responsiveness.

This release also expands the capabilities of four AI agents that became generally available in October 2025:

The Case Management Agent reduces handling time and improves consistency in customer support operations. It helps manage cases across their full lifecycle, from intake to resolution, reducing manual intervention, integrates more deeply with CRM, ticketing systems, and knowledge bases to gather context automatically, uses improved intent and sentiment signals to assign cases more accurately and escalate critical issues faster, and generates contextual, step-by-step recommendations for agents or can resolve simple cases autonomously.

The Customer Intent Agent focuses on understanding why a customer is reaching out, across channels. It enables more personalized, faster, and context-aware customer interactions. It interprets intent from chat, email, voice, and even structured inputs, continuously refines intent as conversations evolve, incorporates customer history, prior interactions, and behavioral signals, and suggests next-best actions, offers, or knowledge articles based on inferred intent.

The Quality Evaluation Agent strengthens automated oversight of customer interactions and improves service quality, ensures compliance, and supports continuous agent training. It evaluates interactions across voice and digital channels using customizable criteria, detects policy violations, risky language, or missed required steps, provides actionable feedback for agents, including specific improvement suggestions, and identifies systemic issues across teams, channels, or time periods.

The Customer Knowledge Management Agent enhances how knowledge is created, maintained, and used, keeping knowledge bases fresh, reducing duplication, and increasing self-service success rates. It converts resolved cases and conversations into structured knowledge content, rewrites and updates articles for clarity, accuracy, and relevance, identifies missing or outdated knowledge based on recurring issues, and delivers the most relevant knowledge to agents and customers in real time.

Each of these agents now includes enhanced features, improved telemetry, and deeper Copilot integration.

As a result, companies can benefit from both semi-autonomous and fully autonomous workflows, more accurate intent detection and quality evaluation, and faster, more context-aware knowledge delivery for both customers and service teams.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Dynamics 365 Contact Center evolves into a more agentic, AI-powered platform that improves both self-service and assisted support, introduces new communication channels, and delivers deeper supervisor insights.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a Copilot-first, cloud-native solution that delivers agentic intelligence, automation, and high-quality customer experiences across all engagement channels, while integrating seamlessly with existing CRM systems.

It enables companies to engage customers across any channel through a unified omnichannel experience, improve issue resolution rates with generative AI-powered self-service, and enhance human-assisted service through embedded Copilot and agent-driven workflows. In addition, it supports operational excellence by providing real-time insights, proactive recommendations, and advanced supervisor tools that improve overall performance.

In 2026 release wave 1, building on progress made in 2025, the platform introduces further advancements across four key areas. These include expanding agentic automation across both self-service and assisted service to increase resolution rates, enhancing omnichannel intelligence for voice and messaging across new and emerging channels, reimagining the supervisor experience with richer real-time AI-driven insights, and improving extensibility to support enterprise-scale customization.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

At the same time, Dynamics 365 Field Service enhances service execution through improved technician productivity, intelligent scheduling via AI-driven agents, and optimized work order management. Investments in mobile usability and end-to-end process integration ensure consistent and reliable service delivery across complex operations.

Dynamics 365 Field Service is a leading field service management solution that enables organizations to plan, deliver, and manage service operations across people, assets, and processes. It offers capabilities such as work order management, resource scheduling, asset tracking, and mobile tools tailored for frontline workers. With Field Service, companies move from manual, reactive approaches to connected, data-driven operations that enhance service reliability, minimize downtime, and support scalable service delivery.

In this release, Field Service continues to evolve as a core operational platform with a focus on improving technician productivity, resource scheduling, end-to-end work order management, and Copilot functionality. Ongoing investments in performance, reliability, and quality further ensure consistent and dependable execution as service operations become more complex and scale up.

To enhance technician productivity, this release introduces improvements to the Field Service Mobile app, making it more user-friendly and strengthening offline capabilities. These updates enable technicians to work more efficiently in the field and maintain consistent service delivery.

Resource scheduling is also being refined through continued development of the Scheduling Operations Agent and enhancements to the dispatcher experience on the scheduling board. These changes help organizations better match resources with demand and manage operational complexity more effectively.

At the same time, work order management is being streamlined by improving end-to-end processes across Field Service, Finance and Supply Chain Management, and Project Operations. Enhancements in asset management, maintenance planning, and asset location provide better asset visibility and support more proactive planning and coordination between field teams and back-office operations. 

Overall, these improvements reinforce Dynamics 365 Field Service as a connected and scalable platform for managing complex service operations and delivering reliable service outcomes.

The 2026 Release Wave 1 delivers a major evolution for Microsoft Power Platform, bringing modernized app experiences, AI-powered automation, and enhanced governance across Power Apps, Power Pages, and Power Automate. These updates are designed to help companies build, scale, and manage intelligent solutions with confidence, leveraging improved Dataverse intelligence, expanded programmability, and strengthened security and cost management capabilities.

The core update is that users can now download their custom-branded app binaries (APK, IPA, or AAB) directly from Dataverse, eliminating the need for Azure Blob Storage.

Power Apps

In Power Apps, this wave introduces a refreshed model-driven UI, enhanced mobile and offline functionality, streamlined search, and expanded AI features. Standardized modern theming is now available for all users, real-time Dataverse access supports offline-first canvas apps, search capabilities in grids and lookups are improved, and generative page functionality is broader and more extensible, enabling teams to create intelligent apps faster and more efficiently.

What is more, “Generative pages” is available globally when a developer or business representative describes business logic. Power Apps then generates screens, flows, and app logic. 

Power Apps moves from low-code to code apps and “AI-native apps". After this update, you will be able to build applications with React, Vue, and other technologies directly in Power Apps with full integration. 

The new “Card control” allows users to increase the responsiveness of UI blocks during design and development. 

It also provides deep integration with AI agents thanks to multi-agent orchestration across Power Platform and AI-driven workflows.

Power Pages

Power Pages continues to empower both pro developers and low-code makers to build sophisticated business portals for employees, customers, citizens, and partners, with tighter integration to leading AI tools. Enhanced security features also provide actionable insights and controls for makers, developers, and administrators, helping ensure portals remain secure while scaling effectively.

It offers improvements to customer self-service portals (enhanced case submission capabilities, knowledge base access for all users, and ticket tracking for support specialists), and to partner portals (better document exchange with more supported formats and easier deal registration with tighter CRM integration).

Power Automate

Power Automate advances automation across cloud and desktop flows with AI agent authoring, self-healing desktop flows, and Copilot Studio-powered actions in cloud flows. Enhanced collaboration and maker tools, along with the general availability of object-centric process mining and consolidated governance reporting, provide deeper insights, improved efficiency, and easier management of automation initiatives. Together with previous AI enhancements, like embedded Copilot in apps, self-healing automation, and improved fusion development, these innovations enable faster app development, lower operational overhead, and the democratization of AI, allowing a wider range of users to design, deploy, and maintain intelligent solutions at scale.

Microsoft Copilot Studio 

Another key improvement is the expansion of Copilot AI apps, where AI-driven chat and assistance are embedded directly into business applications built with Power Apps, allowing users to interact with data and processes in a more intuitive, conversational way.

At the same time, Microsoft continues to invest in the fusion of low-code and pro-code development, delivering enhanced tools and experiences that enable professional developers and citizen developers to collaborate more effectively. This includes improved development environments, better extensibility, and more robust capabilities for building enterprise-grade solutions. 

Microsoft Copilot Studio continues to evolve, making it easier and more powerful to create agents and agentic workflows. Users can now further customize agents built with the Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot and enhance automation using high-value AI actions. Improved governance, multi-agent orchestration, and evaluation tools support scaling across complex scenarios. By leveraging connections to Microsoft Foundry and Work IQ, agents can operate using the latest AI capabilities while seamlessly integrating with organizational data to deliver smarter, context-aware outcomes.

The business impact of these innovations is substantial. Companies can achieve faster application development by leveraging AI-assisted tools and reusable components, while reducing operational overhead through more resilient and self-maintaining automation. Additionally, these advancements contribute to the democratization of AI development, empowering a broader range of users, not just technical specialists, to design, build, and deploy intelligent solutions that drive real business value.

Microsoft Dataverse

Microsoft Dataverse continues to advance as an enterprise-ready, agentic, and low-code data platform, with a strong focus on integrating Work IQ and Copilot to enable organization-specific decision-making, adaptive learning, and full auditability. Enhancements to agent programmability include expanded capabilities through Dataverse APIs, MCP servers, and the Python SDK, while new storage management tools support enterprise-grade compliance and scalability, ensuring companies can manage data securely and efficiently at scale.