Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot for business functions: 2024 release wave 2 plan
The Dynamics 365 and Microsoft release plan for the 2024 release wave 2 announces the latest updates to customers as features are prepared for release. You can browse the release plan online (updated throughout the month), view it in the Release planner, or download the information as a PDF file, which is updated with every publish. The plan for 2024 release wave 2 covers new features for Dynamics 365 releasing from October 2024 through March 2025.
Download the 2024 release wave 2 PDF for Dynamics 365 or select the option at the bottom of the table of contents.
The Microsoft Power Platform features coming in the 2024 release wave 2 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.
The Microsoft Cloud for Industry features coming in the 2024 release wave 2 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.
2024 release wave 2 overview
The 2024 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Sales, Customer Service, Contact Center, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, Finance and operations cross-app capabilities, Human Resources, Commerce, Business Central, Customer Insights - Data, and Customer Insights - Journeys, as well as Copilot for business features in Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance.
Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales continues to enhance customer understanding and boost sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. In this release, we 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 continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching Copilot in M365 capabilities with sales specific workflows, data, and actions. We will focus on using AI-powered insights to create leads, deepen the integration into Copilot for Microsoft 365, and use natural language capabilities to allow sellers to ask data-related questions of their CRM.
Service
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 is now generally available, bringing new capabilities to enhance user experiences. These features will be integrated across Outlook, Teams, M365 Chat, and Copilot embedded in third-party CRMs.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center will add new features for voice, messaging, Copilot, AI-infused routing, and contact center operations including out of box support for additional CRMs.
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.
Finance and Supply Chain
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 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.
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.
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 will continue to invest in capabilities applying to Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, Human Resources, and Project Operations. We are infusing Copilot experiences across applications, including natural language chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for Copilot scenarios. We 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.
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. We are enhancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and offer 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.
Commerce
Dynamics 365 Commerce is leveraging 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, efficient sales and service.
SMB
Dynamics 365 Business Central is focused on maintaining service reliability performance and security standards. We’ll continue enhancing productivity by optimizing core processes with Copilot, expand to cover over 170 countries and offer enhanced reporting with 80+ Power BI reports. Additionally, integration with Dynamics 365 Field Service will be expanded, along with new financial management features. We will also enhance development tools and governance, along with improved data privacy and compliance management.
Customer Insights
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, leveraging it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. This release enables you to streamline data integration by using Dataverse and Fabric, attach your data in OneLake to Customer Insights, accelerate time to insights with data in Data Lake format, increase control when attaching to data in Dataverse, and seamlessly generate insights from marketing interaction data.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys brings the power of AI to redefine the workflow for marketers, enabling them to be more productive than ever before. Businesses can optimize every interaction with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release you will have more flexibility and control when it comes to journeys, managing your web forms and tailoring Copilot for your business.
Key dates for the 2024 release wave 2
These release plans describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).
Here are the key dates for the 2024 release wave 2.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Release plans available | July 16, 2024 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2024 release wave 2 (October 2024 - March 2025) across Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry. |
| Early access available | August 12, 2024 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be part of 2024 release wave 2, coming in October, before they are enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 2 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in additional languages | August 2, 2024 | The Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry release plans are published in 11 additional languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | October 1, 2024 | Production deployment for the 2024 release wave 2 begins. Regional deployments will start on October 1, 2024. |
Just like the previous release waves, we continue to call out how each feature will be enabled in your environment:
- Users, automatically: These features include changes to the user experience for users and are enabled automatically.
- Admins, makers, or analysts, automatically: These features are meant to be used by administrators, makers, or business analysts and are enabled automatically.
- Users by admins, makers, or analysts: These features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users.
You can get ready with confidence knowing which features will be enabled automatically.
We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. We’re looking forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig in to the 2024 release wave 2 plans.
Let us know your thoughts. Share your feedback in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 community forums. We will use your feedback to make improvements.