Microsoft’s 2026 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio is not defined by a single headline feature. Instead, it reflects a continued and deliberate shift in how Microsoft positions business applications: core systems are no longer just systems of record, but systems that actively support decision-making, guide execution, and increasingly automate work.
Rolling out between April and September 2026, this release strengthens ERP and CRM as the operational backbone, while embedding AI, automation, and agent-based capabilities directly into day-to-day workflows. The emphasis is less on novelty and more on maturity — making existing platforms work better together, at scale.
Below, we outline the key areas impacted by Release Wave 1, starting with Business Central and CRM, and pair Microsoft’s roadmap with Inspired Insights drawn from hands-on implementation experience.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central receives significant investment in Release Wave 1, particularly across Copilot capabilities, embedded AI agents, and financial and operational automation.
Microsoft is expanding autonomous agents in areas such as payables processing, approvals, task management, and content review, helping reduce repetitive manual effort.
Additional improvements span governance, reporting, compliance, and regional localisations, ensuring Business Central can scale with organisational growth while remaining compliant. Deeper integration with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform further positions Business Central as an intelligent operational hub.
Inspired Insights
These updates strengthen Business Central’s position in a competitive ERP market. The consistent investment in AI, extensibility, and integration ensures the platform can compete more confidently while retaining the usability and clarity that make it attractive to growing organisations.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales continues its evolution toward AI-assisted selling. Copilot draws on CRM data alongside Microsoft 365 signals such as emails, meetings, and activity patterns to surface pipeline risks, opportunity insights, and recommended actions directly within seller workflows. The goal is to reduce manual reporting, improve forecasting accuracy, and help sellers focus attention where it can have the greatest impact.
Inspired Insights
This reinforces a move toward signal-driven selling. When data is reasonably well maintained, teams spend less time interpreting dashboards and more time acting on what actually needs attention.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Customer Service enhancements focus on agentic AI across case management, email handling, customer intent detection, quality evaluation, and knowledge management. AI-infused experiences support agents, supervisors, and administrators with improved visibility, faster onboarding, and more consistent service orchestration across the full case lifecycle.
Inspired Insights
The value here is consistency at scale. These changes help teams deliver more even service outcomes while preserving the human judgement that remains essential to good customer support.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center
Dynamics 365 Contact Center continues to mature as a unified, AI-powered contact centre platform. Release Wave 1 introduces deeper automation, stronger self-service, faster assisted service, support for emerging channels, and enhanced supervisor insights, all connected to the wider Dynamics 365 ecosystem.
Inspired Insights
When channels, customer context, and service processes are managed together, improving containment and experience quality becomes far easier to sustain over time.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Project Operations receives functional improvements across project planning, resource management, budgeting, contracting, expense management, and billing. Enhancements include better change order handling, what-if scenario modelling, improved resource visibility, subscription billing support, and continued migration to the modern Project Operations architecture.
Inspired Insights
Earlier visibility into delivery and financial performance shortens the gap between commercial commitments and operational reality, giving organisations more time to respond to emerging risks.
Dynamics 365 Field Service
Field Service investments focus on technician productivity, intelligent scheduling, and mobile execution. Enhancements improve scheduling accuracy through AI-assisted planning, strengthen mobile reliability, and support end-to-end service execution across assets, projects, and financial operations.
Inspired Insights
Better planning intelligence gives well-run service operations more flexibility to adapt without relying on constant manual intervention.
Power Apps
Power Apps introduces further modernisation of model-driven and canvas app experiences, including improved search, offline capabilities, generative pages, and embedded Copilot experiences. These updates accelerate app development and make it easier to build intelligent applications directly on Dataverse.
Inspired Insights
Power Apps remains one of the most effective ways to address operational gaps quickly while keeping core ERP and CRM systems stable.
Power Automate
Power Automate expands intelligent automation across cloud flows, desktop flows, and process mining. Release Wave 1 introduces AI-assisted authoring, self-healing desktop flows, improved orchestration, and stronger governance and reporting capabilities.
Inspired Insights
The focus is shifting toward automation that is resilient and dependable, capable of handling real-world variation rather than only ideal process paths.
Power Pages
Power Pages continues to evolve as a secure platform for building external-facing websites connected directly to Dataverse. Enhancements focus on security insights, AI integration, and improved tooling for both low-code makers and professional developers.
Inspired Insights
Keeping data close to its source reduces duplication, simplifies governance, and makes external-facing solutions easier to maintain as requirements evolve.
Dataverse
Microsoft Dataverse underpins the entire Dynamics 365 and Power Platform ecosystem, providing a shared data model, consistent security, and reliable data grounding for AI. Release Wave 1 continues to strengthen governance, recovery, search, and platform administration capabilities.
Inspired Insights
A strong data foundation may not be visible day to day, but it is what makes everything else easier to adopt and scale over time.
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio enables organisations to build, extend, and govern role-based AI agents that operate across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365. Enhancements focus on lifecycle management, extensibility, orchestration, and enterprise governance.
Inspired Insights
This marks a clear shift from AI experimentation to operational use, where ownership, testing, and governance become just as important as capability.
Key Dates
| Milestone | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Release plans available | March 18, 2026 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2026 release wave 1 (April 2026 – September 2026) across Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and role-based Copilot offerings. |
| General availability | April 1, 2026 | Production deployment for the 2026 release wave 1 begins. Regional deployments will start on April 1, 2026. |
| Release plans available in additional languages | April 3, 2026 | The Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and role-based Copilot offerings release plans are published in 11 additional languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
Our Thoughts
The 2026 Release Wave 1 shows Microsoft moving decisively from AI as an experiment to AI as a standard way of operating.
Across sales, service, finance, and operations, the direction is clear: remove friction, automate the ordinary, and help people focus on decisions that matter.
For organisations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, this wave is an opportunity to simplify how work gets done — not by adding complexity, but by letting systems take on more of the routine load.
Exigy is a Microsoft Gold Partner, comprised of industry experts that have been implementing digital transformation projects for over 20 years.
Reach out today to start transforming your business operations with the latest Dynamics 365 features, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
