Twice a year, Microsoft deliver new features across their products, allowing users to benefit from value-adding functionality and innovation.
We’ve already seen 2024’s first wave release back in March, which brought advanced Copilot features across Microsoft platforms. As the end of the year fast approaches, Microsoft have now announced the enhancements coming for this year’s second wave release. Spoiler alert: there’s even more Copilot capability coming!
Our Chief Innovation Officer, Tristan Shortland, has rounded up all the notable features coming into two of Microsoft’s core business platforms: Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
Keep reading to find out more, or watch our handy explainer video below:
Adopting Microsoft’s new features
Across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, there are plenty of new functions that drive performance for businesses using the platform.
This latest wave release will run from this October until March 2025. So, remember to make note of preview and general availability dates for these features to know when you can start using them.
How you adopt the changes may vary between features. Each feature comes with a label telling you whether it will be enabled by default or whether you need an administrator to turn it on. Check if you need to turn any on manually, so you don’t miss out on valuable features.
Dynamics 365 2024 wave release 2
Copilot capabilities for sales and customer service
One of the new features to highlight within Dynamics 365 is the ability to get a 360-degree view of an account with an AI-generated summary. There’s already some of this functionality in Copilot, but it will be taken to the next level.
Using AI, you can summarise opportunities by status, lead updates, open cases and internal changes. This is all placed into a simple summary on the right-hand side of the Copilot pane, giving you immediate context. This is particularly useful for sellers and service agents to see what’s going on with a particular account.
Staying in the realms of Dynamics 365 Sales, you will soon be able to use AI-powered action suggestions. There’s already the ability to create predefined sequences of actions that you want sellers to take, but this improves decision-making. It shows sellers what they should do next, appropriate times to follow-up, guidance on when to engage with new opportunities and more, generated by AI.
Next up, you’ll soon be able to create a follow-up email from the meeting summary. If you already use Copilot to record and transcribe meetings, you will already be able to get a summary with action points for a meeting. This can be then turned into an AI-drafted email, which you can refine and share with the customer for quick follow-ups.
Similarly, you can create opportunities from a sales meeting summary. The system can help you automatically create opportunities based on what was discussed in the meetings, while also setting things like the topic, estimate close day and estimated value. This means sales teams can update pipelines faster.
Another Copilot feature for sales teams is the ability to manage customer objections in real time. If the customer mentions a competitor, Copilot can generate analysis with some suggestions on how to counter any objections. This is similar kind of flow. It will also give us response templates based on sentiment so you can keep control of the conversation.
You can also schedule a meeting based on email context within Outlook. If you’re working through many emails, there are automatic prompts to schedule a meeting which helps user know when a follow-up meeting might be needed to progress a task.
These features are all coming in October 2024.
Aggregated analysis
Another sought-after feature coming in October is the ability to analyse opportunities by grouping and aggregation. When looking at your pipeline, you can group opportunities by account, seller or closing date.
If you’ve got several open opportunities for the same account, you can then see what the total potential value of those are. You can then work through those together, allowing you to better understand the larger opportunity and refine your approach accordingly.
Automate Contact Centre actions
Recently, some of the terminology around the Microsoft Contact Centre offering has changed. There have also been some changes in the licence structure, which our expert team can discuss with you.
And more Contact Centre changes are coming in October under this wave release. It includes the ability to search for a contact or account in the outbound dialler experience. From there, you can call the contact, open the customer record and view call history.
There’s also the ability to use SLA-based automated actions. Based on your configured SLAs, you can auto reply to a customer if they’ve been unresponsive for a certain period and close conversations after a set amount of idle time.
You can also send follow-up messages to remind the customer that we need a response to move the ticket forward. This reduces the amount of time an agent spends on manual work and increases the efficiency within the contact centre.
Remote Assist improvements for Dynamics 365 Field Service
New functionality coming to Dynamics 365 Field Service includes the ability to initiate a Remote Assist in Teams call from the Field Service mobile app. This makes it easier to hold augmented reality calls to improve fix rates.
You will also be able to use Remote Assist mixed reality annotations within Teams, meaning frontline workers can get remote assistance via video call with 3D spatial annotations, using their Teams mobile app. This prevents engineers having to switch apps and will come first to iOS in October, and then Android later.
The next feature, coming in November, is the ability to summarise work orders with Copilot in Outlook. The Field Service for Outlook add-in enables Copilot to create a summary of a work order that captures all the information required for both service management and frontline workers to understand the context.
The summary will include the booking information, the activity details, any products and services that have been used, tasks that have been completed and any asset information.
Improved reporting and reconciliation in Business Central
Next up, some new Business Central features are coming!
One of the core features, backed by Copilot, allows for faster bank account reconciliation, using AI-powered transaction matching, AI-powered GL account suggestions and built-in demo data to try it out. With AI suggestions and matching, users can save considerable time.
Another update is the ability to use embedded Power BI reports out-of-the-box. Business Central already comes with lots of options for reporting and data analysis, but with Power BI users will gain another 14 finance reports, 12 sales reports, 13 purchasing reports and so on. All of these can be easily embedded and accessed across your Business Central system.
Both improvements land for general availability in October.
Improve marketing intelligence
Next, let’s dive into new marketing features coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journeys in October.
Within Customer Insights – Data, we can generate insights based on marketing interactions. Things like email opens or clicks can be fed into the platform and allow us to enhance the personalisation of activities.
An example would be to take the average number of days people take to open links after starting a campaign to find the optimal lead time for that campaign. You can then start to use that data to drive a more intelligent marketing strategy.
In Customer Insights – Journey, you can create journeys by using Copilot to describe them. If you describe in natural language the journey you want to create, it will build it as prompted.
For example, you could create a journey that starts when someone abandons their cart, with reminder sent to the customer to complete the purchase. If they do or don’t complete a purchase, you just need to describe the next actions and let Copilot built it. This makes it faster to execute new journeys.
This wave release also lets customers find and sign up for events more easily. You can gain a portal where you can manage event details and registration. This can either be embedded on an existing website or created as a Power Page.
Something else that’s been reintroduced is the option to get insights on email engagements with a heatmap. You can see a picture of the email and a heatmap of clicks across it. This can refine and optimise your email templates.
Another update is better lead scoring and qualifying criteria. There’s been lead scoring capability and lead qualification settings in the platform for a while, but this levels it up. You can now mark things as sales-ready, update lead status, set qualifying criteria and use groups within scoring models.
Power Platform 2024 wave release 2
Canvas app co-authoring
One of the new updates coming to Power Platform is the ability for people work together on Canvas apps. This delivers a co-authoring experience where multiple editors work on a Power App at the same time. Everyone can see what each other is doing, allowing people to work as a team even in distributed environments.
This feature releases in December.
AI flows
Another new feature is using generative AI to achieve a process in AI flows, coming in February 2025. AI flows use generative AI to reason over unstructured content. You can then determine what steps and sequences are needed to achieve an outcome, based on the instructions that you’ve provided in natural language.
Using your prompts, you can then refine the plans generated to adjust the inputs and outputs. This allows you to review how the AI flow is achieving the outcome prior to moving that flow into production.
Power Automate and Excel integration
From December, you can work with Power Automate and Excel for Desktop to provides access to pre-built templates that allows users to build and automate workflows quickly.
An example could be monitoring incoming emails to an alias in an Excel worksheet, which will then keep track of customer feedback within Excel, allowing for a more integrated experience.
Track Copilot performance
Next comes something our clients have been asking for: the ability to get insights into how your Copilots are performing.
Since Copilot Studio launched, people have started to their own Copilot bots. Now, they want a deeper level of analytics. Within Copilot Studio, you will be able to look at performance, including themes of questions being asked, insights on satisfaction and the breakdown of the behaviours that drive satisfaction. You can also monitor result statuses. This also you to refine the bots you build and make them more targeted for your users.
This update will be generally available from November.
What else is new in wave release 2?
While we’ve pulled out our highlights from Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, 2024’s second wave release is full of new functionality across Microsoft’s core products.
If you would like to learn more, please read the full documentation or check dates within the Release Planner. We’re also happy to take you through the updates, so just give us a call!
