Dynamics 365 2026 Release Wave 1: Everything You Need to Know
Microsoft has released its 2026 Release Wave 1 plan for Dynamics 365, covering hundreds of new features rolling out between April and September 2026. It’s a substantial update and if you’re running any part of your business on the Microsoft stack, there’s likely something in here that’s relevant to how you work.
Rather than wade through the full documentation yourself, we’ve pulled out the most significant changes across each product area.
Key Takeaways
- The central theme of 2026 Wave 1 is agentic AI — AI that acts and completes tasks autonomously
- Every major Dynamics 365 product is receiving AI agent investment in this wave
- Dynamics 365 Sales is shifting from a system of record to a system of action, with agents working in the background to enrich data and prioritise deals
- Customer Service gets four expanded AI agents covering case management, intent, quality, and knowledge
- Finance adds intelligent journal automation, rental asset management, and deeper global compliance capability
- Business Central introduces autonomous agents for accounts payable and financial operations — included in existing licences
- A new Immersive Home experience across finance and operations apps brings an AI-driven, personalised workspace to daily users
- Most features are enabled automatically but some require admin configuration before users can access them
What “Agentic AI” Actually Means
Before diving into product specifics, it’s worth understanding the phrase that appears throughout this release plan: Agentic AI.
Previous AI releases focused on assistance. Copilot would summarise a record, draft an email, or suggest a next step. You still had to act on the recommendation.
Agentic AI goes further. These are AI agents that can complete tasks end to end. Reading an invoice, matching it to a vendor, coding it correctly, and queuing it for approval, without someone manually working through each step. Humans remain in control and retain oversight, but the routine work happens automatically.
This shift is the backbone of 2026 Wave 1. Every product area has received investment in agents that do work, not just suggest it.
Dynamics 365 Sales: From System of Record to System of Action
The big idea in Sales this wave is that Dynamics 365 should be doing work in the background, not just storing data that sellers must act on themselves.
AI Agents Working While You Sleep
Two named agents are doing most of the heavy lifting in Sales this wave.
The Sales Qualification Agent investigates leads, pulls context from emails, meeting notes, CRM history, and external sources, and surfaces a complete picture of a prospect before a seller is involved. It also scores leads against your ideal customer profile and automatically disqualifies low-intent ones, keeping pipelines clean without manual triage. Outreach emails generated by the agent can be personalised before sending, improving response rates without adding back manual work.
The Sales Close Agent focuses on the deals already in motion. It tracks each opportunity stage by stage, surfaces what’s changed since you last looked (delta-first guidance), and uses historical deal patterns to sharpen its recommendations over time. Sellers can query it conversationally, asking questions about deal health and getting answers grounded in live data, and it triggers updated guidance automatically when new signals come in.
What this looks like in practice: A sales rep starts their Monday morning with a list of opportunities. Instead of spending the first two hours reviewing notes and pulling together background information, the Sales Qualification Agent has already surfaced the three leads worth acting on today and drafted personalised outreach for each. For active deals, the Sales Close Agent flags that one opportunity has gone quiet since last week’s meeting and suggests a specific next step based on how similar deals have progressed. The administrative morning is gone, and the guidance is better than a manual review would have produced.
Smarter Opportunity Management
Copilot now pulls data across both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Graph, meaning it can factor in email threads, Teams meeting recaps, and calendar activity when assessing deal health. This gives sales leaders a more complete picture without asking sellers to update records manually.
Unified Copilot Across M365 and Dynamics
Insights and recommendations are now consistent whether a seller is working in Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 itself. You don’t get a different summary depending on where you look, it’s one connected view of the customer.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Four Agents, Now Stronger
Customer Service reached general availability for four AI agents in October 2025. This wave significantly expands all four.
The Four Agents and What They Do
Case Management Agent handles the creation, routing, and progression of cases. Rather than an agent manually logging a case, reading the history, and deciding where to send it, this agent does the intake and routing automatically based on context and urgency.
Customer Intent Agent identifies what a customer needs from their interaction, even when they haven’t articulated it clearly. This is particularly useful in written channels like email or chat, where customers often describe symptoms rather than problems.
Quality Evaluation Agent reviews service interactions against defined standards and flags where responses didn’t meet the mark. Instead of supervisors manually auditing a sample of interactions each week, the agent does continuous quality monitoring across all interactions.
Customer Knowledge Management Agent identifies gaps in the knowledge base based on what cases are being raised and what answers agents are struggling to find. It can suggest and draft new knowledge articles, keeping the knowledge base current without a manual content review process.
What this looks like in practice: A customer contacts a financial services organisation via email saying they’re “having trouble with their account and need help urgently.” The Intent Agent recognises this as a potential hardship or dispute flag, not just a general enquiry. The Case Management Agent creates a case, prioritises it appropriately, and routes it to the right team. The agent handling it receives a Copilot summary of the customer’s history and a suggested response. After resolution, the Quality Agent reviews the interaction. The whole process is faster, more consistent, and fully logged, without the supervisor having to touch it.
Better Supervisor Tooling
Supervisors also get expanded reporting and real-time operational visibility this wave. When customer sentiment turns negative mid-interaction, supervisors receive alerts and can step in. Staffing recommendations based on live queue data help with intraday management without manual analysis.
Dynamics 365 Contact Centre: Higher Containment, More Channels
The Contact Centre product is getting deeper automation, expanded channels, and stronger compliance tooling in this wave.
Proactive SMS outreach goes live in April — contact centre teams can now initiate SMS conversations with customers, not just respond to inbound. For collections, renewals, or appointment reminders, this opens a new outbound channel that doesn’t require a voice call.
Consent-based call recording is also arriving in April, allowing voice calls to be recorded with consent captured within the interaction flow. For regulated industries, this matters. Consent is documented automatically rather than relying on agents to log it separately.
Split speaker recordings mean that when a call recording is reviewed in the closed conversation view, the agent and customer voices are separated. This makes quality evaluation and compliance auditing significantly faster.
Enhanced customer authentication strengthens identity verification within the contact centre workflow, reducing fraud risk without adding friction for legitimate customers.
Supervisor insights are also expanding, giving contact centre leaders a clearer view of agent performance, queue health, and customer sentiment in one place.
What this looks like in practice: A customer calls about a billing query outside business hours. Rather than reaching a voicemail or waiting for a callback, they interact with an AI agent that can access their account, identify the issue, and resolve it. Or, if it’s genuinely complex, log a detailed case so that when a human agent calls back the next morning, they have everything they need in front of them.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights — Journeys: Smarter Engagement, Closed Loops with Sales
Customer Insights — Journeys gets some of the most practically useful updates in this wave, particularly for teams trying to close the gap between marketing activity and sales outcomes.
Conversational SMS with Copilot
Until now, SMS in customer journeys has been one-directional. You send a message, the customer receives it. From April 2026, Copilot can power two-way conversational text message exchanges as part of a journey. A customer can respond to an SMS and receive an intelligent, contextual reply without a human agent involved.
Emails That Update Themselves
Active journeys can now automatically update email content when the underlying content changes, without rebuilding or redeploying the journey. Combined with message expiration (which suppresses messages that are no longer timely before they send), this means customers are far less likely to receive outdated or irrelevant communications.
Marketing Journeys That Create Sales Records
Journeys can now directly create leads and other CRM records, meaning a customer who engages with a campaign at the right level of intent can automatically generate a qualified lead in Dynamics 365 Sales, with full context attached. No manual handoff, no data re-entry, no leads falling through the gap between systems.
Dynamics 365 Finance: Smarter Automation and New Business Models
Intelligent Journal Processing
Financial journals, the mechanism through which organisations record transactions, are getting continued automation investment. The aim is to reduce the manual work involved in period-end close and complex multi-entity reconciliation.
What this looks like in practice: A finance team that currently spends two days at month end manually reconciling intercompany transactions across entities can instead have agents handle the matching and flagging, with humans reviewing exceptions rather than working through the entire ledger.
Financial Support for Rentals
New in this wave: Dynamics 365 Finance now supports rental-based business models natively. Organisations can track, account for, and manage rental assets, revenue recognition, and related financial processes within the platform.
This matters for asset-heavy organisations, equipment leasing companies, property managers, and financial services providers with rental portfolios, who previously needed workarounds or third-party tools to handle these scenarios correctly.
Globalization Studio: Compliance in 210+ Countries
Regulatory compliance updates continue to roll out across more than 210 countries and regions through Globalization Studio. This wave focuses on unifying tax determination, e-invoicing mandates, and automated regulatory reporting, reducing the operational burden on finance and IT teams managing multi-jurisdiction compliance.
Immersive Home: A New AI-Driven Workspace
Reaching general availability in this wave, Immersive Home is a redesigned experience for finance and operations users. It’s an AI-driven personal workspace that surfaces the most relevant tasks, alerts, and insights for each user when they log in, replacing the generic dashboard with something that adapts to how an individual works.
What this looks like in practice: A finance manager logs in on a Tuesday morning and sees the three journal postings that need approval, a flagged variance in last week’s reporting, and a reminder that the quarterly close checklist has two outstanding items. No navigating to different modules. No building a custom dashboard. It’s already there.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Smarter Planning and Warehousing
Price-Demand Correlation and CTP Date Protection
Supply chain planners can now factor price changes into demand forecasting, recognising that demand doesn’t exist in isolation from pricing. Capable-to-Promise (CTP) date protection means promised delivery dates are protected even as planning changes occur downstream.
What this looks like in practice: A wholesaler runs a promotion and drops prices on a product category. Rather than manually adjusting demand forecasts to account for the expected volume spike, the system models the price-demand relationship and updates the plan automatically, reducing the risk of stockouts or overcommitting on delivery dates.
AI-Powered Warehousing
Warehouse operations get AI-driven picking recommendations, inventory rebalancing across locations, and hands-free scanning capability. These updates reduce the manual coordination burden on warehouse supervisors and improve fulfilment accuracy.
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Intelligent ERP for Growing Businesses
Business Central’s 2026 Wave 1 is centred on bringing autonomous agents to smaller and mid-sized organisations, capabilities that were previously the domain of enterprise-level deployments.
The Payables Agent: Accounts Payable, Mostly Handled
The Payables Agent automates accounts payable end to end. It reads incoming invoices, matches them to vendors and purchase orders, codes them to the correct accounts, and queues them for human approval. Finance staff review and approve rather than process.
What this looks like in practice: A growing professional services firm receives 200 supplier invoices a month. Currently, a finance officer spends roughly a day a week manually processing them. With the Payables Agent, that work happens automatically. The finance officer reviews a queue of exceptions and approvals, an hour’s work rather than a day’s. And importantly, this capability is included in the existing Business Central licence at no extra cost.
Sustainability Built In
Business Central now includes a comprehensive sustainability management capability, emissions tracking, water and waste monitoring, CSRD-aligned reporting, and carbon footprint data on product invoices. For businesses facing ESG reporting requirements or wanting to demonstrate sustainability credentials to customers, this is now native to the platform rather than requiring a third-party solution.
Stronger Developer and Admin Capabilities
For the technical teams managing Business Central environments, this wave brings meaningful improvements: better profile extensibility, faster app validation, improved multi-environment management, and customer-managed encryption keys for organisations with elevated data security requirements.
Key Dates
Production deployment for Wave 1 begins on April 1, 2026. Here are a few practical points worth noting.
Some features turn on automatically. Changes to the user experience may appear for users without any admin action. It’s worth reviewing the change list for each product you’re running so your teams aren’t surprised by interface changes.
Some features need admin enablement. Several of the more significant capabilities, particularly AI agents, require configuration by an administrator before users can access them. These won’t just appear on day one.
You can find the full release information from Microsoft here.
Thinking About What’s Right for Your Organisation
The breadth of 2026 Wave 1 means there’s something meaningful in it for most Dynamics 365 users. But not every feature is equally relevant to every organisation, and getting value from this wave isn’t just about knowing what’s available, it’s about knowing what to prioritise, what to enable first, and what change management is needed to make it stick.
If you’d like help working through what this wave means for your specific environment, or you want support planning a rollout, we’re happy to have that conversation.
Find out more about our Dynamics 365 services.
FAQs
When does 2026 Release Wave 1 go live? Production deployment begins on April 1, 2026. Features will roll out regionally from that date through to September 2026.
Do I need to do anything to receive these updates? Some features will be automatically applied to your environment. Others require configuration by an administrator. We recommend reviewing the release plan for each Dynamics 365 product you use and identifying which features need action before they’re available.
Are the AI agents included in existing licences? For Business Central, yes. Copilot and agent capabilities are included in the existing licence. For other Dynamics 365 products, licensing varies by feature. It’s worth checking the licensing documentation for your specific products or speaking with your Microsoft partner.
What is Immersive Home and do I need to set it up? Immersive Home is a new AI-driven workspace experience for finance and operations users that becomes generally available in this wave. It’s designed to surface personalised, relevant information when users log in. Your administrator will need to enable it before it appears for users.
We’re on Business Central, is the Payables Agent available to us? Yes. The Payables Agent is part of the Business Central Copilot and agents investment and is available to Business Central online customers. It doesn’t require a separate licence.
How do I stay up to date as the wave progresses? The Microsoft release plan is updated weekly at learn.microsoft.com. You can also subscribe to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 community forums for product-specific updates.
We’re not currently using Dynamics 365. Is this the right time to consider it? The 2026 Wave 1 is a strong point to evaluate the platform, particularly if you’re looking at AI-powered operations, integrated ERP, or moving away from fragmented tools. The investment Microsoft is making in agentic AI across the suite is significant, and the value compounds when you’re using more of the ecosystem.
Get in touch and we can walk you through what would be relevant for your business.