The 2026 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 is live, and for organisations running the Customer Engagement suite, it is one of the more substantial updates in recent memory. Features roll out progressively between April and September 2026, and the scope touches Sales, Customer Service, Customer Insights, Field Service and the Contact Center.
The overarching theme is a move from AI that assists to AI that acts. Previous waves introduced Copilot as a productivity tool sitting alongside users. This release goes further, bringing autonomous agents that carry out multi-step business processes with limited manual involvement. For sales teams, service teams and marketers, the practical implications are significant.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Sales is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this wave. Microsoft has invested heavily in AI-driven selling workflows, with two new agents at the centre of the update.
The Sales Development Agent is designed to support pipeline creation and lead qualification. It helps reduce the manual data entry involved in building out a pipeline and accelerates the point at which a lead is ready to hand to a seller for a meaningful conversation. For teams where SDR capacity is a bottleneck, this is worth paying close attention to.
The Sales Research Agent enriches opportunities with contextual insight, drawing on data from across the CRM and Microsoft Graph to surface relevant information before a seller walks into a call or meeting. Time spent manually researching accounts and contacts is substantially reduced.
Beyond the agents themselves, Copilot becomes more proactive in this release. Rather than waiting to be asked, it monitors deals and engagement activity in real time, surfacing risks and recommending next-best actions before a seller might spot them independently. These signals draw on data spanning CRM records, email activity and meeting history, giving recommendations a more complete picture of where each relationship stands.
The Enhanced Sales Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot also receives attention, bringing CRM data, communications and AI suggestions together in a single workspace for sellers who live primarily in Teams and Outlook.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Customer Service continues its shift toward an AI-first operating model, with four built-in agents now working in concert to handle the end-to-end support journey.
The Case Management Agent takes on routine case handling, reducing the volume of work that needs to reach a human agent. The Customer Intent Agent identifies what a customer is actually trying to resolve, even when their initial query is vague or incomplete, and routes accordingly. The Quality Evaluation Agent assesses interactions against defined criteria and feeds into supervisor reporting. The Customer Knowledge Management Agent surfaces contextually relevant knowledge at the right moment in a conversation, reducing the time agents spend hunting for answers.
For supervisors, this release also brings improved sampling controls for quality evaluation, including percentage-based and absolute-count options for limiting review volume, and the ability to flag critical questions that automatically fail an evaluation when not met. These are practical tools for teams running quality programmes at scale.
AI-infused admin and supervisor experiences sit across all of these changes, with the stated aim of reducing time-to-value and improving transparency around what the AI is doing and why.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center
The Contact Center receives its own set of updates in this wave, with a focus on higher automation, better containment rates and faster assisted service across voice and digital channels.
Microsoft is expanding into emerging channels in this release, and building out supervisor insight tools so that managers have clearer visibility across the full contact centre operation. Extensibility improvements allow organisations to connect the Contact Center more tightly with their existing systems and workflows.
For businesses running omnichannel customer service at volume, the direction here is toward a model where a greater proportion of interactions are resolved without reaching a human agent, with escalations handled more smoothly when they do occur.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Customer Insights covers two distinct but connected products, and both receive meaningful updates.
Customer Insights Data is evolving into the grounding layer for AI agents across the Dynamics 365 suite. The focus in this wave is on real-time, unified customer profiles that give agents accurate context at the point of action, rather than working from data that may be hours or days out of date. Enriched data, faster processing and deeper connections to Dataverse and external APIs all contribute to a more reliable foundation for the AI-driven experiences being built across the platform.
Customer Insights Journeys takes a more agentic approach to customer engagement in this wave. Businesses can configure journeys that react to customer behaviour in real time, with Copilot and AI agents adjusting channel sequencing, timing and content based on what a customer is actually doing rather than following a fixed schedule. For marketing teams running campaigns across email, SMS and other channels, the ability to adapt in-flight based on engagement signals is a meaningful step forward.
The connection between Journeys and the broader Dynamics 365 ecosystem is also strengthened, with shared data and consistent intelligence across sales, marketing and service interactions reducing the gaps that emerge when these functions work from separate data sources.
Dynamics 365 Field Service
Field Service updates in this wave centre on intelligent scheduling, technician productivity and the connection between planning and execution.
The Scheduling Operations Agent uses AI to build and adjust technician schedules based on urgency, skillset and geography, reducing the manual coordination that typically sits with dispatchers. Mobile experience improvements support more complex workflows for technicians in the field, and predictive work order intelligence identifies potential delays or complications before they arise.
For organisations managing a large field workforce, these changes address some of the most time-consuming operational challenges: matching the right person to the right job, keeping schedules accurate as conditions change, and giving technicians the information they need before they arrive on site.
Cross-Application Improvements
Several updates in this wave apply across the Customer Engagement suite rather than to individual applications.
Immersive Home reaches general availability in this release. It is a reimagined, AI-driven experience designed to help users stay focused on what matters most at any given moment, surfacing priority tasks and relevant information without requiring users to navigate between multiple areas of the system.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) server improvements strengthen the foundation for AI experiences across Dynamics 365, making it easier to connect agents and copilots to the data and systems they need to operate effectively.
Microsoft 365 Copilot integration is deepened across the suite, bringing intelligent assistance into Teams, Outlook and other daily tools so that sellers and service teams can act on CRM insights without switching applications.
What This Means for Advantage Clients
The Customer Engagement wave is a significant one, and the benefits will be most visible to organisations that are already using Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service or Customer Insights in a meaningful way. Adding autonomous agents on top of a well-configured CRM produces genuinely different outcomes to adding them to a system that is not being used as intended.
For clients currently on the Customer Engagement suite, most features will become available through the standard April to September rollout. Some AI and agent capabilities require specific licensing or configuration, so it is worth reviewing what is included in your current agreement before assuming features will appear automatically.
If you want to understand which of these updates will have the most impact for your teams, or if you are considering Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for the first time, we are happy to walk you through the options.
Talk to Advantage About Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement
Call us on 020 3004 4600, email hello@advantage.co.uk, or request a conversation with our team.
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