Key takeaways_

• AI runs the business, not just assists it: Agentic AI now executes workflows across Dynamics, Business Central and Power Platform.
• Smarter ERP and CRM by default: Finance, sales, service and fulfilment become faster, more automated and data‑driven.
• Faster innovation, less disruption: Smaller, more frequent updates replace big, infrequent releases.

Microsoft’s first release wave of 2026 has landed, bringing new updates from March to September. And this year’s update makes one thing crystal clear: AI isn’t just embedded into Microsoft’s business apps anymore. It is the operating model. For organisations using Dynamics 365, Business Central, Power Platform or Microsoft 365 Copilot, this wave marks the beginning of truly agentic, intelligent operations.

Microsoft’s official update highlights major leaps in Dynamics 365, Power Platform and role‑based Copilot agents, with deep innovation across data, automation and business applications.

Below, we break down what you should care about most as new features begin to roll out, and the impact they can have on your processes and performance.

You can also hear the key takeaways explained by our Chief Technology Officer, Tristan, in the video below:

1. AI moves from assistant to operator_

Microsoft’s Wave 1 release pushes AI into full operator mode, with Dynamics 365, Business Central and Power Platform all gaining agentic, action‑oriented AI that can run processes end‑to‑end.

Instead of simply generating suggestions, Copilot experiences now tap into unified operational and customer data and trigger actions across sales, service, finance and supply chain functions. This marks a shift toward AI that behaves like a digital operations worker: interpreting context, initiating workflows and coordinating tasks across multiple applications.

Practically, this includes AI agents that monitor business conditions, detect emerging patterns and execute tasks automatically — such as streamlining fulfilment steps in Business Central, accelerating customer follow‑ups in Dynamics CE, or orchestrating multi‑step automation in Power Platform. These agents are tightly connected across the ecosystem, with Microsoft confirming deeper cross‑app intelligence and automation spanning Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Power Platform.

For business leaders, the impact is significant: AI shifts from a helpful add‑on to an always-on operational engine. You get faster execution, fewer manual steps and better decisions driven by real-time data signals. This reduces organisational bottlenecks and free teams to focus on higher‑value work. It also marks the beginning of truly autonomous business operations, where systems anticipate needs, coordinate work and continuously optimise processes without waiting for human prompts.

2. Dynamics 365 CE: higher productivity through smarter data and automation_

Dynamics 365 CE continues to be a key beneficiary of Microsoft’s AI-first approach. The 2026 updates introduce enhanced Copilot capabilities and deeper cross-app intelligence across Sales, Customer Insights and Service.

In practice, this means:

• Sales teams get more intelligent, contextual insights — moving from summarising data to interpreting it and recommending actions.
• Customer Service sees more agentic automation, helping reduce case resolution times and surfacing insights from unified data sources.
• Customer Insights becomes more powerful, with cleaner unification and automation that uses AI to anticipate behaviour and shape better customer journeys.

These updates translate into higher team productivity, stronger forecasting, better CX personalisation and reduced operational overhead. If you’ve struggled with siloed CRM data or slow insight generation, this wave removes several barriers.

3. Business Central enters the AI agent era_

Business Central receives some of the wave’s most transformative updates. With this release, Microsoft positions BC as an intelligent, autonomous ERP: a major shift from traditional transaction-driven systems.

The standout development is AI-powered agents that proactively manage finance, operations and fulfilment. Microsoft is expanding first-party copilots like:

• Expense Management Agent: Automatically categorises, validates and routes expenses using contextual understanding of past transactions and business rules.
• Fulfilment Agent: Monitors orders and stock levels to proactively trigger fulfilment actions and prevent bottlenecks across the supply chain.
• Payables Agent enhancements: Now automatically monitors shared mailboxes for PDF invoices and clearly tags processed emails with a “Processed by Payables Agent” category in Outlook, making AP workflows faster and reducing duplicate handling.

These agents interpret context, predict needs and trigger actions with minimal human involvement, going beyond automation in ERP. This means faster, more accurate financial operations and reduced manual processing. Organisations should start seeing real-world productivity gains and measurable time savings.

4. A more powerful Power Platform for data, automation and governance_

Wave 1 delivers major upgrades across Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Dataverse and Copilot Studio, with Microsoft focusing on making the Power Platform more scalable, AI‑ready and enterprise‑secure.

Power Apps gets a modernised experience with improved mobile performance, offline reliability and faster, AI‑assisted search, while Power Automate introduces AI agent authoring and self-healing capabilities that can automatically diagnose and fix broken flows.

Power Pages continues to evolve with deeper AI integrations and enhanced security agent features designed to help pro-developers and low‑code makers build safer, more intelligent portals.

Meanwhile, Copilot Studio becomes more extensible, allowing teams to build richer agentic workflows at scale and deploy AI-powered copilots that operate across business systems.

Dataverse rounds out these changes with stronger governance, organisation-wide insights and improved admin controls – essential for organisations scaling AI across multiple departments.

For business leaders, these improvements mean it’s now easier to build apps that scale, automate end‑to‑end processes and maintain strong governance as AI usage grows. The platform does more of the heavy lifting, turning data into meaningful operational insights and reducing the friction between innovation, control and compliance.

5. Role-based Copilot Agents become daily operational command centres_

Microsoft 365 Copilot continues its shift from a general productivity assistant to a role‑aware, data‑connected operational companion. In this wave release, these agents gain richer contextual understanding, deeper integration with enterprise data and workflows and more intelligent reasoning capabilities across roles such as sales, service, finance and operations. The goal is clear: to give every user a personalised agent that anticipates their needs, surfaces insights and coordinates work across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics applications.

These role‑based agents now behave more like intelligent work coordinators, pulling data from multiple systems to organise tasks, highlight priorities and streamline cross‑team processes. They also function as personalised decision engines, offering data‑grounded recommendations based on real operational signals.

And because they connect across Microsoft 365, they effectively become interactive operational dashboards that users can query conversationally — reducing the time spent navigating apps or hunting for information.

As a result, teams gain faster, more informed decision‑making supported by unified organisational data, administrative load drops as agents handle routine coordination and productivity becomes more consistent across roles. These improvements help align teams around shared insights and reduce friction across collaborative workflows, making operational execution smoother and more data‑driven.

6. More frequent updates_

Ironically, this wave release also announced a change from Microsoft’s typical twice-yearly release format. Instead, it is moving toward lighter, more frequent updates supported by expert‑led briefings and ongoing feature rollouts. This new cadence means customers get improvements sooner, release plans stay more current and organisations avoid large, disruptive change windows.

This makes staying up to date significantly easier: new capabilities land faster, testing cycles are shorter and the Microsoft ecosystem becomes more responsive to real‑world needs. It’s a move toward continuous innovation, reducing operational friction while keeping organisations closer to the cutting edge.

The bottom line: a release wave that changes the shape of work_

Microsoft’s 2026 release wave 1 marks a decisive shift in how organisations will use business applications: AI is now embedded at the core of Dynamics 365, Business Central and the Power Platform. With deeper automation, richer intelligence and tighter cross‑app integration across the ecosystem, users of Dynamics CE and Business Central will feel meaningful, day‑to‑day improvements in how work gets done. Power Platform and Copilot Studio extend this even further by making it easier to build, deploy and scale intelligent agents across the organisation.

For leaders focused on modernisation, operational efficiency or getting more value from organisational data, this wave delivers real, tangible benefits: faster processes, fewer manual touchpoints and smarter decision‑making built directly into the tools your teams already use. It’s a release that sets a new standard for AI‑driven business operations and a strong signal of where enterprise technology is heading next.

Look out for these updates landing in your platforms from March onwards. You can find further details and dates here.

Want to discuss the latest wave release in more detail or understand how to apply them in your business for results? Our experts are happy to talk you through everything – just get in touch.