Microsoft 2024 Wave 1 Release announcement

Empowering Organizations with Data and Intelligence: Dynamics 365 Sales is designed to help organizations sell more effectively by understanding their customers and their purchasing preferences, leveraging data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences.

Integration with Microsoft Copilot: The 2024 release wave 1 enhances the generative AI capabilities of Microsoft Copilot for Sales. This includes enriching Copilot in Microsoft 365 with sales-specific skills, data, and actions, and assisting sellers on the go within the Outlook and Teams mobile apps.

Streamlined Lead Qualification: Dynamics 365 Sales introduces streamlined lead qualification to fine-tune the qualification process, aligning it precisely with an organization’s unique needs and sales criteria. This includes insightful Copilot lead summaries, the ability to create multiple opportunities from a single lead, and enhanced collaboration among team members.

Sales Engagement and Automation: The sales engagement capabilities, formerly known as Sales accelerator, enable sellers to engage with their customers in the most effective way possible through AI-driven insights about customer relationships and conversations, along with tools to accelerate and standardize the selling process.

Enhanced Sales Execution and Force Automation: The release focuses on enhancing sales execution and sales force automation capabilities. This includes initiating campaigns, generating leads, managing accounts and contacts, and managing all activities around leads and opportunities until deal closure.

Improved User Experience: The 2024 release wave 1 aims to improve the user experience for sales professionals by providing capabilities to manage customer data, monitor deal progress, facilitate team collaboration, and deliver timely value to expedite deal closures.

Real-Time Insights and Natural Language Chat Functionality: With the new Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales home experience, sales professionals can efficiently manage sales activities, nurture customer relationships, and drive sales success. This includes real-time insights and natural language chat with AI-powered Copilot.

Generative AI Integration: The service uses generative AI across the service journey to deliver fast, personalized, and consistent service across multiple channels.

Advanced Routing and Case Management: These features, along with knowledge management, Copilot, and embedded Microsoft Teams capabilities, are designed to maximize agent productivity.

Omnichannel Capabilities: It enables organizations to provide an omnichannel experience to their customers with chat, voice, social, and business messaging channels.

Key Focus Areas: The 2024 release wave 1 focuses on infusing generative AI into customer, agent, and supervisor experiences, enhancing voice, messaging, and email channels, and extending Copilot capabilities.

Agent Experience: Dynamics 365 Customer Service aims to enhance agent confidence and satisfaction, providing a powerful agent desktop with infused generative AI, collaboration capabilities, and productivity tools.

Field Service Management Application: This application helps companies transform their service operations with processes and experiences for managing, scheduling, and performing services.

Capabilities: It includes work order management, resource scheduling, asset management capabilities, and frontline worker tools.

Proactive and Predictive Service: The aim is to move from paper-based reactive service to proactive and predictive world-class service, supporting digital transformation and innovative business models.

Integration with Microsoft Teams and Outlook: The new work order experiences for service managers and frontline workers are integrated into Microsoft Teams and Outlook using AI with Copilot.

Vendor Management and Finance Operations Integration: The 2024 release includes enhancements in vendor management and integration with finance and operations.

Subcontractor Management: The service is evolving to improve collaboration with subcontractors, streamlining operations, and managing vendor organizations and capacity.

Autonomous Finance: Focuses on building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process to enhance user productivity and business agility.

Enhanced Features: Includes improving business performance planning and analytics, AI-powered experiences, easier setup of financial dimension defaulting with AI rules guidance, and increased automation in bank reconciliation and netting.

Global Expansion: Expanding out-of-the-box country coverage, particularly in LATAM, and automating complex tax scenarios and e-invoicing requirements for more countries.

Real-Time Insights and Natural Language Chat Functionality: With the new Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales home experience, sales professionals can efficiently manage sales activities, nurture customer relationships, and drive sales success. This includes real-time insights and natural language chat with AI-powered Copilot.

Business Model Expansion and Agility: Providing organizations with the ability to expand and adapt their business models efficiently.

Business Process Optimization: Continues to improve and optimize business processes for agility and resilience in a complex business environment.

Enhanced Sales and Procurement Processes: Focuses on providing greater flexibility for manufacturers and improving warehouse processes related to counting, customer returns, and product receipts.

Generative AI-Based Contextual Help: Empowers users to rapidly unlock the full potential of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Inventory and Logistics: Investments in inventory and logistics capabilities focus on gaining more visibility, efficiency, and resiliency in supply chain operations.

Planning Optimization: Offers significantly improved performance and scalability, transforming the forecast process.

Warehouse Management: Investments in warehouse management aim to drive efficiencies through optimization and automation of key processes.

Improving Recruiting Experiences: The updates aim to improve the recruiting experiences by integrating functionality with external job portals and talent pools.

Expansion of HCM Ecosystem: The Human Capital Management (HCM) ecosystem is being expanded to include additional payroll partners and learning management system integration through public APIs leveraging Dataverse.

Optimization of HR Operations: Enhancements for optimizing human resource operations across various areas such as personnel management, compensation, benefits, performance management, skills and competency management, and succession management.

AI and Automation Investments: Copilot in Dynamics 365 Human Resources introduces AI and automation investments to empower employees, HR managers, administrators, and recruiting agents with intelligent, natural-language interactions.

Core Employee Experiences: Focuses on improvements in core employee experiences around leave and absence, learning, and training management.

Omnichannel Commerce Solution: Dynamics 365 Commerce is an omnichannel commerce solution that delivers end-to-end retail scenarios across all channels, combining sales, mobility, intelligence, and productivity into a single platform.

Enhancements in Mobile Point of Sale (MPOS): Advancements in mobile point of sale experiences like Tap to Pay for iOS and offline capabilities for Store Commerce on Android.

B2B Buying Experience: Enhancements in the B2B buying experience with new capabilities and streamlined order management solutions for buyers working across multiple organizations.

Digital Commerce Investments: Focus on streamlining site management and design, adding key features and capabilities for digital sales channels.

Intelligent Order Management: Built on a modern, open platform, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management provides flexibility to capture orders from any source.

Unified Customer Profiles: It unifies customer profiles from various data sources and enriches them with Microsoft’s unique data assets to create powerful AI-driven predictions, segments, and measures.

Insightful Analysis and Intelligent Actions: The tool enables a deep understanding of every customer by providing a holistic, up-to-date view with quick insights. It allows the activation of this data across channels, departments, and devices to deliver personalized customer experiences.

Real-Time Data Ingestion: There is a focus on making it easier and faster to ingest and manage data, with AI enabling quick insights and democratized access to analytics.

Generative AI and Copilot: Revolutionizing data exploration with generative AI and Copilot in Customer Insights, allowing businesses to achieve new heights of success by revealing key insights and identifying potential audiences within seconds.

Intelligent Order Management: Built on a modern, open platform, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management provides flexibility to capture orders from any source.

End-to-End Personalized Journeys: Journeys bring the power of AI to revolutionize how marketers work, enabling businesses to optimize every interaction with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels.

Strengthening Relationships and Earning Loyalty: It empowers businesses to orchestrate personalized journeys across all touchpoints, thereby strengthening relationships and earning customer loyalty.

Moments that Matter: Focuses on understanding customers’ expectations and identifying the most effective channels and touchpoints for successful customer engagement in crucial moments.

Unifying Sales and Marketing: Aims to bring sales and marketing teams closer to eliminate execution gaps and remove redundancies, driving more revenue together.

Early Access: Starting February 5, 2024, users will be able to test and validate new features and capabilities that would be part of the 2024 release wave 1, before they are enabled automatically for all customers.

General Availability: The production deployment for the 2024 release wave 1 begins on April 1, 2024.