As we embark on the first part of Microsoft’s biannual updates to their business solutions, the Release Wave 1 updates are set to roll out from April to September 2025.
These updates promise to bring a huge selection of new features and enhancements, setting the stage for even more improvements in Release Wave 2 later in the year.
This period of innovation is an exciting time for businesses looking to leverage the latest technology to stay ahead of the curve.
What applications make up Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is a robust platform designed to meet diverse business needs.
While the primary application providing Sales and CRM functionality is Dynamics 365 Sales, the platform includes a suite of additional applications that seamlessly integrate with Sales.
These applications work together to create a comprehensive solution tailored to fit specific business requirements.
Dynamics 365 CRM applications include:
Now let’s take a look at all the exciting upcoming changes for Dynamics 365 CRM applications.
In each release wave plan, Microsoft organises the updates for each application into specific investment areas, making it easier to understand the focus and enhancements in each category.
Upcoming changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
AI-Powered Business Research
This investment area focuses on empowering business leaders to build comprehensive research journeys through research agents that facilitate a dialog with their data, helping to solve complex business questions. One of the key updates within this area is the transformation of decision-making processes with the sales research agent, which aims to enhance the ability of sales teams to make informed decisions based on rich data insights.
Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot and AI innovation updates aim to supercharge sales productivity by leveraging integrated data, enrichment, workflows, insights, and next-generation AI capabilities.
This area includes updates designed to boost sales success by enabling teams to focus on the most relevant leads and stay updated with action items from customer conversations.
Lead Management
Lead management focuses on enabling sellers to effectively manage leads to generate a qualified pipeline.
This includes updates such as auto-generated email drafts with relevant answers from knowledge sources, boosting the qualified pipeline with a sales qualification agent, and improving lead conversion by incorporating a customer success story in outreach emails.
Sales management and operations
Updates for sales management and operations focuses on optimising sales operations through enhanced management and enablement capabilities.
This includes tailoring the sales qualification agent to fit specific industry and business needs, enriching research insights using public web sources, transforming data quality by deduplicating records, enhancing lead prioritisation with marketing interactions, and integrating with Exchange using server-side synchronisation.
Upcoming changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (Marketing)
With the deprecation of the Dynamics 365 Marketing application and its merger with the legacy Customer Insights application into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, we will explore how Microsoft is empowering marketing teams to better understand their customers and deliver more engaging campaigns.
Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
Copilot and AI Innovation
The focus on Copilot for this release wave aims to transform how marketers work and what they can achieve by leveraging Copilot, agents, and AI innovation.
This includes the ability to create journeys simply by describing them to Copilot, streamlining the process and enhancing marketing personalisation.
Moments that matter
The Moments that Matter investment area focuses on responding to customers’ expectations in real time to engage them effectively.
This includes scaling your business with confidence through a maximum of 300 million monthly interactions, exporting data to your own storage for custom reporting, and streamlining form filling and event registration with form prefill.
Additionally, it involves waiting on segment membership to trigger the next step in a journey, orchestrating journeys using any marketing interaction, respecting quiet times and engaging based on location and time zones, pausing and resuming journeys to handle unplanned events, allowing individuals to re-enter a one-time dynamic segment journey, and gaining insights on email engagement with heatmap analytics.
Unify sales and marketing
With this release wave, updates are being made to accelerate revenue and increase lifetime value by creating seamless experiences that unify sales and marketing efforts.
This includes maximising event capacity with waitlist registrations, setting up and executing pre and post-event communications, collecting extra customer information without updating your data model, and creating event portals with event and registration details using Power Pages.
Additionally, it involves automating seamless handoffs between sales and marketing, and creating an event portal on your own website.
Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data
Copilot and AI innovation
For Customer Insights – Data, the investment into Copilot and AI innovation aims to coordinate customer insights for sales, service representatives, and autonomous agents — enabling them to personalise every customer touchpoint.
This includes features such as getting responses grounded in customer insights when chatting with Copilot and increasing the accuracy of autonomous agents by grounding them in relevant data.
Faster time to insights
The Faster Time to Insights investment area focuses on enabling quicker, more informed decision-making, real-time responses to customer needs, and delivering personalised experiences at critical moments.
This includes connecting to firewalled storage accounts using Azure Managed Identities, filtering rows from source data for better processing, and using Microsoft OneLake as a data source.
Additionally, it involves accelerating time to insights with data in Delta Lake format, synchronising customer data and insights directly to Fabric OneLake, and integrating insights faster by choosing tables and data formats to sync.
Personalised customer experiences
Updates to improve personalised customer experiences aim to grow customer loyalty and eliminate tone-deaf interactions by ensuring every engagement is informed by the customer’s entire journey across marketing and sales.
This includes targeting the right audience based on signals from earlier campaigns, allowing for more tailored and effective customer engagements.
Upcoming changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Administrator Experiences
Updates to the Administrator Experience are designed to streamline the setup and usage of Dynamics 365 Customer Service through an intuitive and modern administration interface.
This includes the introduction of data sensitivity labels for email, ensuring that sensitive information is handled and protected appropriately.
Copilot and AI Innovation
Investments into Copilot and AI capabilities introduce various generative AI capabilities designed to expedite the resolution of customer issues and enhance customer satisfaction.
This includes using Copilot-powered email template recommendations, utilising Copilot Studio agents for customer surveys, viewing customer sentiment indicators on emails, inserting Copilot prompts in email templates, and using Copilot to generate contextual partial email content.
Service representative experiences
The Service Representative Experiences investment area aims to enhance the ability of service representatives to manage multiple interactions, switch between sessions without losing context, and utilise productivity tools to improve workflows.
This includes the modernisation and refresh of the Customer Service workspace app, creating personalised case views in the inbox, automatically restoring sessions after a browser refresh, having the inbox view on by default for service reps, and configuring timeout rules override in SLA-based automatic actions.
Unified Routing
This investment area leverages intelligent work item classification and omnichannel routing capabilities to provide flexible and automated AI-enabled workflows.
This includes the ability to maintain routing rules in bulk, streamlining the management of routing configurations and enhancing operational efficiency.
Upcoming changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service
Boost technician productivity
Empowering frontline workers with new features to enhance productivity and mobile experiences, this investment area includes the ability to access online data with an offline-first application and the option to select table columns to include in mobile offline sync.
These updates ensure technicians have the necessary data at their fingertips, even without a constant internet connection.
Optimise resource scheduling
This investment area includes key updates such as improving schedule board usability and performance, and enhancing schedule assistant matching across locations.
These features aim to optimise the efficiency and effectiveness of resource allocation.
Upcoming changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Copilot in Project Operations
Copilot capabilities are being introduced to optimise processes, focusing on agent-led time, expense, and approvals.
These enhancements aim to streamline operations and improve efficiency, making project management more effective and responsive.
Optimise Project Operations
Microsoft have invested heavily into optimising project operations in this release wave, bringing a huge number of enhancements to help users improve project execution from ideation and sales to invoicing and accounting.
These include using general journals against projects for resource nonstocked scenarios, improving the project contract experience, and adding time zone-agnostic fields for projects and project tasks. It also covers posting project costs for the procurement category upon product receipt, enabling flexibility in determining financial dimension defaults, and simplifying expense management with new enhancements.
Additional updates involve using time zone-agnostic fields in project planning and resource planning, making milestone dates time zone independent, and introducing a new user experience for copying projects.
Customising the task details view, adding support for WBS and project templates, increasing work breakdown structure limits, and using integration troubleshooting for modern projects are also updates in this area. Furthermore, it includes using what-if analysis on estimates, syncing the global address book with Project Operations, and improving subcontract information for one vendor in one place.
Financial tags for project sales orders and journals, support for line discounts and fees in resource-based deployments, and calculating revenue recognition based on contract line value are also featured. Simplifying the editing of project invoices, using the new Time Entry mobile app, and the new Calendar interface for time entry are included.
Additionally, enabling time phasing of quote and contract lines, enhancing the quote experience, simplifying the Approvals page, and using modern architecture for existing legal entities are part of the updates.
The area also covers using stocked products in resource-based deployments, importing projects in MPP files into existing projects, copying externally scheduled projects, and adding calendar control to the work hour template entity.
Finally, it includes enabling expense delegates to create cash advance requests, enabling number sequences in expense management, editing per diem transaction dates and exchange rates in expense management, and posting expenses on the expense report posting date.
Join our Webinar
That concludes our overview of the exciting upcoming changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM applications.
There’s a lot to look forward to! To dive deeper into these updates, join us for a live webinar where we’ll showcase a selection of these new features and demonstrate how they can enhance your workflow. We are hosting three webinars for different Dynamics 365 solutions:
- Business Central (16th April | 11:00 AM BST ): https://www.mercuriusit.com/webinar-dynamics-365-business-central-2025-release-wave-1/
- CRM (23rd April | 11:00 AM BST): https://www.mercuriusit.com/webinar-dynamics-365-crm-2025-release-wave-1/
- Finance & Supply Chain Management (7th May | 11:00 AM BST): https://www.mercuriusit.com/webinar-dynamics-365-fscm-2025-release-wave-1/
If you’re considering implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 in your organisation, let us help you maximise its potential. With years of experience across various industries, we can guide you in leveraging the full benefits of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Contact us today to discuss your requirements and schedule a demo of the solution.
