2024 Release Wave 2 Plans For Microsoft Dynamics 365 And Power Platform
On July 16, 2024, Microsoft published the 2024 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of the new capabilities planned to be released between October 2024 to March 2025. This release introduces a wealth of new features designed to enhance customer understanding and improve overall user experience, showcasing Microsoft’s dedication to driving digital transformation for their customers and partners.
The new wave is focused on improving user productivity and streamlining processes across various business applications by employing Microsoft Copilot and cutting-edge AI technologies. These enhancements include intelligent automation, AI-powered insights, and immersive user experiences and aim to remove boundaries between data, insights, and individuals.
Discover the newest features that enable organisations to run more effectively and adaptably.
The new capabilities allow businesses to take proactive measures to address challenges and capitalise on opportunities. Examples of these include predictive analytics in supply chain management, autonomous financial processes, AI-driven sales insights and customer service enhancements.
Early Access Period
Starting July 29, 2024, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by October 2024.
We have briefly described numerous of the features from the second release wave in this blog post’s contents.
Wave Highlights for Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to enhance customer understanding and boost sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences.
In this release, Microsoft are focused on including natural language copilot for summarizing information, creating a new full-screen Copilot Home with curated insights and role-specific actions, and using AI-powered insights to find leads.
Microsoft Copilot for Sales
Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales-specific workflows, data, and actions.
Microsoft will focus on using AI-powered insights to create leads, deepen the integration into Copilot in Microsoft 365, and use natural language capabilities to allow sellers to ask data-related questions of their CRM.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through new copilot capabilities such as proactive prompting, ability to access data from external systems securely with plugins, email enhancements, and AI-infused routing.
Microsoft Copilot for Service
Microsoft Copilot for Service is now generally available, bringing new capabilities to enhance user experiences. These features will be integrated across Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Chat, and Copilot embedded in third-party CRMs.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables a shift from reactive to proactive and predictive service, empowering digital transformation and innovative business models.
Using Copilot, frontline workers will be able to retrieve critical information and initiate mixed-reality remote assist calls within Teams through Copilot.
Managers will be able to create, update, and manage work orders effortlessly across web, Outlook, and Teams interfaces.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues its journey of leading in autonomous finance, using AI to transform common end-to-end financial processes.
This release focuses on in-app copilot capabilities, immersive persona-based user experiences, expanding country coverage, electronic invoicing enhancements, business performance analytics and planning enhancements, and autonomous reconciliation capabilities.
Microsoft Copilot for Finance
Microsoft Copilot for Finance is expanding data reconciliation capabilities in Excel with assisted data sanitization and preparation routines. Extending variance analysis capabilities with support from additional data sources and enabling collaboration on findings with stakeholders will also be a focus in the upcoming wave.
Additionally, the Teams integration will facilitate collections calls with suggested scripts and automated recording of action items in the financial system.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is advancing along the path of an autonomous supply chain by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics into every facet of business procedures, thereby improving user productivity and enhancing organizational adaptability.
In this update, the spotlight is on improving order-promising capabilities for manufacturers. Demand planning is upgraded to incorporate forecasting with external signals, and the inclusion of Copilot weaves insights and analyses directly into workflows, identifying trends and irregularities, while also allowing for specific data inquiries at the cell level.
Additionally, Traceability Copilot keeps track of actual products in production and compiles a comprehensive historical record of related activities.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing.
The spotlight is on AI-assisted core functionality improvements in estimation, proposal generation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities and scale improvements to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale.
Finance and Operations Cross-app Capabilities
Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities will continue to invest in capabilities applying to Finance, Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and Project Operations.
Microsoft is infusing copilot experiences across applications, including natural language chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for copilot scenarios.
Microsoft will also bring more value and insights to finance and operations apps data and enhancements to ensure continued enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to build intelligence, develop automation and analytics around the hire-to-separate process, increase user productivity, and empower business agility.
Microsoft is enhancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and offers management, improving experiences for employees and HR business partners in benefits and performance management, and advancing analytics, insights, and planning through business performance planning and analytics capabilities.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to empower retailers to streamline their operations and drive increased customer loyalty and conversions. With Copilot, retail managers, sales associates, and merchandisers will gain new AI-powered insights into customer buying patterns and preferences, recommendations for positioning and selling products, and business intelligence on store performance.
Improvements to the self-checkout POS make customer checkouts more efficient, and user experience updates to Store Commerce app streamline daily tasks for faster, more efficient sales and service.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is focused on maintaining service reliability performance and security standards. Microsoft will continue enhancing productivity by optimizing core processes with Copilot, expanding to cover more than 170 countries, and offering enhanced reporting with more than 80 Microsoft Power BI reports.
Additionally, integration with Field Service will be expanded, along with new financial management features. Microsoft will also enhance development tools and governance, along with improved data privacy and compliance management.
Wave Highlights for Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Power Apps
Microsoft Power Apps will continue to transform app experiences with infused intelligence, enabling users to be more productive by using Copilot to work with data, get insights, and improve their apps.
Makers will continue to benefit from AI-assisted development, enabling rich and complex applications to be built with monitoring, control, and unmatched governance for admins, ensuring organizations can adopt low-code and AI transformation at scale.
Microsoft Power Pages
Microsoft Power Pages will expedite site building for a low-code maker or pro developer to build intelligent sites that reimagine the way you interact with your employees, customers, and partners.
Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate will continue to make it easier to build flows by using natural language and multi-modal generative AI capabilities across cloud flows and desktop flows, troubleshooting runs, and managing your automation estate with an end-to-end view.
This, along with improvements in process mining to jumpstart creation of automation through Microsoft 365 integration and ongoing improvements to scaling, means it’ll be easier than ever for new users to get started and scale.
Microsoft Copilot Studio
Microsoft Copilot Studio is advancing copilot capabilities and IVR support with Customer Service and will expand geographically to the United Arab Emirates and Germany.
Additionally, the team is improving software lifecycle management capabilities with topic-level import/export and role-based access control (RBAC), as well as enhancing governance and administration functionalities.
Key Dates for the 2024 Release Wave 2
You can access additional information regarding the key dates for the 2024 release wave 2 here.
If your goals are to improve and optimize your business processes, ensure data security in the cloud, make application usage simpler in the long term and seek assistance in upgrading your Dynamics 365 versions to newer versions, we are excited about the possibility for potential collaboration. Reach out to us here.
