What’s New in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform: 2025 Release Wave 1 Highlights

Jessica Sheridan, Marketing Manager

January 29th, 2025

8 min read

Twice a year, Microsoft releases the Wave Release Plans, showcasing the new features and updates coming to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform over the coming months. The 2025 Release Wave 1 brings exciting innovations, with a focus on expanding AI capabilities and agents to automate routine tasks, enhancing user experiences, streamlining workflows, and more.

With hundreds of new features included, navigating the release plans can feel overwhelming. To make this easier, we’ve organised our key highlights into key areas tailored to specific roles, such as salespeople, customer service representatives, app creators, etc. Read on to discover the updates most relevant to you!

Firstly, when do these features roll out?

The new capabilities are planned to be released between April 2025 and September 2025, with early access available from 3rd February 2025 (this is for customers and partners to validate the latest features in a non-production environment).

Features to help sales teams (Dynamics 365 Sales)

The Sales Qualification Agent in the new Dynamics 365 Sales update is a robust AI-driven tool designed to streamline the process of managing leads and building a qualified sales pipeline.

Some highlights include:

  • Research agent: This feature autonomously researches information about every lead, from CRM data and public web sources. It provides a detailed view of each lead, including account summaries, emails, and associated information.
  • Prioritisation agent: This agent evaluates leads based on predefined criteria such as authority, budget, or other key metrics, helping to identify those with the highest propensity to close. Priority actions are then shown in a new user interface that follows users across leads and opportunities. Leveraging the research, the agent can generate a personalised email for a prospect with talking points, to help initiate a conversation. It can also send follow-up emails, nudge if there is no response, detect out-of-office responses, or set up a meeting when positive intent is detected.

Features to help customer service representatives (Dynamics 365 Customer Service)

The Case Management Agent is designed to automate and streamline the process of case resolution. New in this wave release, the agent can automatically create a case off the back of a live chat with a customer service rep or incoming emails, and fill in the required information. As the live conversation progresses or more emails are received, the agent will continue to update case fields, ensuring the information is up to date. It can also identify the right expert for further support, provide concise summaries, track cases needing attention, or send follow-up emails based on SLA criteria.

 

The Customer Knowledge Management Agent automatically analyses cases, conversations, and emails to draft a knowledge article that fills knowledge gaps and helps you respond quickly to similar cases.

 

Copilot email assist: Enhanced copilot recommendations help reduce response times by suggesting relevant email templates, based on previous email content, search context and thread intent. Customer service representatives can also enter a custom prompt in the inline email assist card, which is then matched with email templates by Copilot.

 

Features to help marketers (D365 Customer Insights – Data & Journeys)

Pause and resume journeys: Due to unforeseen circumstances, you may need to pause certain marketing campaigns, as they may be inappropriate for that given time. Additionally, business challenges might arise that also mean you need to put a hold on a campaign, such as if you’re experiencing an outage or you need to update email content. You can now pause a journey manually to prevent new customers from entering, resume a journey, or stop it altogether.

 

Create an event portal on your website: You can now create a centralised location on your website, where customers can access event details, see future events, speaker schedules, and register directly from the portal. This can be seamlessly integrated in your CMS using a Javascript code snippet or the new event API.

 

Features to help field technicians (Dynamics 365 Field Service)

The Scheduling Operations Agent helps organisations easily schedule technicians, based on live changes throughout the day. Copilot can address issues such as traffic delays, double bookings, or last-minute cancellations that often result in conflicts, gaps, or idle time in a technician’s schedule. It can intelligently choose among existing bookings and new unfulfilled work orders based on factors like skillset match, territories, and customer promise windows.

 

Features to help app creators (Power Apps)

Creating effective business solutions goes beyond just developing an app. Successful solutions consist of various components within the Power Platform that store data, provide user-friendly apps, and automate workflows. From the start, it’s essential to define your solution architecture to support different roles, requirements, and scenarios.

Copilot simplifies this process by helping create user roles, defining role-specific requirements, and suggesting data schemas, apps, and other components needed to address the business problem. Users can collaborate with Copilot to refine these elements and ensure the final solution aligns perfectly with business needs. This approach enables the creation of comprehensive solutions based on a well-thought-out architecture.

Key Features:

  • Scenario and Requirement Definition: Describe your problem, upload context (like diagrams or screenshots), and Copilot drafts user roles and requirements.
  • Data Modelling: Copilot proposes a data model, allowing you to explore and update it visually.
  • Solution Architecture: Based on your needs, Copilot suggests apps and automation tools like canvas apps, model-driven apps, and cloud flows in Power Automate.

 

Power Automate Features

Build Desktop Flows with Record with Copilot in Power Automate

Imagine explaining your automation task as if you were describing it to a person, and having the flow created right in front of you. Record with Copilot in Power Automate does exactly this.

With this feature, you can:

  • Share your screen with Copilot: Display the task you want to automate.
  • Describe the Task: Talk through your process, whether it’s clicking buttons, typing text, or navigating menus.
  • Capture Inputs: Copilot records your voice, mouse, and keyboard actions.
  • Convert to Desktop Flow: Copilot processes these inputs and translates them into an automated desktop flow.

All that remains is for you to review, edit, and save the flow before running it.

 

Copilot Studio Features

Analyse action usage for agents

Gain deeper insights into your Copilot Studio agents’ performance and usage patterns. Enhanced visibility into how actions are utilised helps you identify areas for improvement and optimize overall performance.

Metrics provided will include answer rate, action usage rate, and error rate. Additionally, a detailed error breakdown allows you to pinpoint specific issues and address them effectively, ensuring continuous improvement and better performance.

Analyse knowledge source usage for custom agents

This feature brings analytics specific to knowledge curation in Copilot Studio. This simplifies the understanding of how effective a knowledge source is and by providing contextual usage and analytics within the knowledge configuration process. This allows you to easily iterate, refine, update, and provide agents to users more conveniently.

Feature Details:

  • Knowledge Source Usage: Shows how often each knowledge source is used, helping you identify the most effective ones.
  • Answer Rate: Indicates the percentage of queries successfully answered, giving insight into accuracy and reliability.
  • Error Rate: Tracks errors encountered, helping to identify and address issues.

 

Need help navigating these updates?

These updates in the 2025 Wave 1 Release bring exciting opportunities for businesses to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and leverage AI-driven capabilities.

If you’re looking to make the most of these updates or need guidance on how Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform can benefit your organisation, get in touch with our team at Pragmatiq. We’re here to help you navigate these changes and ensure you’re getting the most out of your Microsoft solutions. Drop us an email us at info@pragmatiq.co.uk, or call us on 01908 038110.

 

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