The Latest in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
This summer, Microsoft released its plans for the second wave of 2024 releases for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. These plans include new capabilities that will be launched between October 2024 and March 2025.
This release introduces many new features to enhance customer understanding and user experience. It focuses on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and Microsoft Copilot to improve productivity and optimize operations. These improvements include smart automation, AI-driven insights, and immersive experiences to break down barriers between data, insights, and individuals.
New Features in Dynamics 365
Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales, the CRM (customer relationship management) solution, helps organizations improve their sales processes and increase the productivity of their sales teams. The 2024 enhancements will focus on adding a natural language Copilot to summarize information and highlight tasks. There will also be a new full-screen Copilot home page that includes curated information and specific actions designed for salespeople and managers. Additionally, AI will be used to identify and prioritize high-quality leads and provide detailed sales data.
Copilot for Sales continues to enhance advanced generative AI capabilities for salespeople. Key improvements in the second 2024 release will include sales potential insights, AI-powered lead identification, and a better meeting experience for sellers. For more information, click on this link.
Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service, a cloud solution that helps businesses deliver fast, personalized, and consistent service across multiple channels, will include new Copilot capabilities in 2024 to empower agents and improve efficiency. Key features of this release will include:
- Proactive suggestions.
- Secure access to external data with add-ins.
- Email enhancements.
- AI-driven case routing.
Copilot for Service, which integrates generative AI into CRM and contact centers, is already available with new capabilities to improve user experiences. These features will be integrated into Outlook, Teams, M365 Chat, and third-party CRM Copilot.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a cloud contact center that enhances customer experience and intelligence across every CRM channel, will focus on enabling agent capabilities in the second release. These will include gathering insights from conversational data, dynamic self-service intent assistance, and AI-driven conversation routing. Additionally, proactive outbound omnichannel engagement will be enhanced, and extensibility for out-of-the-box integrations with ServiceNow and Zendesk will improve.
Finance and Supply Chain
Dynamics 365 Finance, the comprehensive financial management application, continues to lead in autonomous finance by using AI to transform end-to-end financial processes. New features for this second release include:
- Copilot capabilities within the application.
- Immersive user experiences.
- Expansion to more countries.
- Enhanced e-invoicing.
- Improved performance analytics and planning.
- Automatic transaction comparison and verification.
Microsoft Copilot for Finance, the AI-driven financial management solution, is expanding its capabilities in the second wave of updates. New features include data reconciliation in Excel, deviation analysis, improved collaboration, and integration with Teams.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing supply chains, is moving toward an autonomous supply chain by integrating AI, automation, and analytics. This enhances user productivity and organizational adaptability. This update includes improvements in order promises for manufacturers, incorporating external signals in demand planning, and Copilot’s integration of analytics into workflows to identify trends and anomalies. Traceability Copilot tracks products in production and compiles a comprehensive historical record of related activities. For more information, click on this link.
Operations and Human Resources
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resources, project management, and finance teams to win more contracts, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability. The 2024 update will focus on improving usability, performance, and scalability in project planning, billing, time entry, and transaction processing.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources helps organizations manage HR operations. The 2024 update will continue to build AI, automation, and analytics around the hiring process, boosting productivity and empowering business agility.
Commerce
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce enables retailers to offer integrated, personalized shopping experiences across physical, digital, and call center channels. The 2024 update will focus on improving usability, performance, and scalability in project planning, billing, time entry, and transaction processing. New features include using Copilot to streamline merchandising activities and store operations, as well as implementing multifaceted pricing strategies and optimized payment flows.
SMB
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft’s ERP solution for small and medium-sized businesses, will focus on maintaining performance and security standards in service reliability in the 2024 update. It will enhance productivity by optimizing core processes with Copilot and expand to over 170 countries.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist allows technicians to collaborate with remote experts in real-time using mixed reality. The 2024 update will focus on improving the quality of mixed reality annotations in mobile Teams. Enhancements for iOS and Android users will include greater precision in annotations on irregular and complex surfaces, facilitating collaboration between experts and technicians.
Customer Insights
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Data unifies customer profiles from various data sources. The 2024 update focuses on streamlining data integration using Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric. It includes attaching data in OneLake to Customer Insights and accelerating time to insight with Data Lake format data. The update also increases control when attaching data in Dataverse and generates marketing insights seamlessly.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys combines customer experience, generative AI, and marketing automation. The 2024 update focuses on optimizing workflows and generating campaigns with generative AI and Copilot. It aims to improve customer interaction with new event management and communication features. Additionally, it unifies sales and marketing to enhance data collection and lead scoring.
Microsoft Power Platform Updates
Power Apps
Power Apps allows users to create custom apps with little or no code, making it easier to digitize business processes. The second-wave 2024 update focuses on transforming app experiences with integrated intelligence, improving productivity through Copilot to work with data, gain insights, and enhance apps.
Power Pages
Power Pages, the low-code website development platform, allows developers and content creators to build smart and engaging websites. The second-wave 2024 update focuses on accelerating website creation, enabling developers and content creators to interact more efficiently with employees, customers, and partners.
Power Automate
Power Automate enables users to automate workflows between apps and services to sync files, receive notifications, and collect data. The second-wave 2024 update focuses on simplifying flow creation using natural language and multimodal generative AI capabilities in cloud and desktop flows, troubleshooting, and managing automation with an integrated view. Process mining capabilities will also be improved for initiating automation creation via Microsoft 365 integration, along with continuous scalability enhancements.
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio integrates generative AI to help developers create and enhance apps and workflows. It will improve Copilot capabilities and IVR support with Dynamics Customer Service, expanding to the UAE and Germany. Software lifecycle management, governance, and administration features will also be enhanced.
AI Builder
AI Builder, a tool that allows users to add AI to apps and workflows without advanced AI knowledge, will focus on investing in Prompt Builder to create and deploy GPT prompts with business data, improving flows, apps, data tables, and copilots in the second-wave 2024 update. Enhancements will also include intelligent document processing with a new validation station in Power Automate, ALM support, and pre-built AI models for translation, classification, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection. AI governance will also be improved through capacity management, data policies, and the inclusion of AI Builder in Power Apps developer plans.
Dataverse
Microsoft Dataverse, the low-code data platform for building scalable and interconnected apps with Copilot capabilities, will focus on improving productivity in app creation with Copilot, ensuring smooth connectivity to external data and knowledge sources in the second-wave 2024 update.
Governance and Administration
This release will focus on advancing Copilot adoption governance and securing low-code assets. These improvements will help companies adopt Power Platform solutions while keeping their digital environment secure.
Conclusion
The second wave of 2024 releases for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform will bring innovations that improve user experience and operational efficiency for businesses. With the integration of AI and Microsoft Copilot, these updates will allow organizations to optimize processes, enhance productivity, and deliver smarter, more personalized solutions. From sales and customer service improvements to advances in finance, HR, and commerce, these capabilities are designed to drive digital transformation.
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Nicolás García – Business Applications Manager