What’s new in the Dynamics 365 CRM 2025 release wave 1

The 2025 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 CRM, also known as Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, brings exciting updates and enhancements across its suite of applications. With a strong focus on increasing productivity, leveraging AI-driven automation, and enhancing user experience, these updates empower teams to deliver faster, more personalized customer service. In this blog, we will take a deep dive into the key updates and enhancements for each of the core applications in the Dynamics 365 CRM suite:

• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Dynamics 365 Field Service
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations

The 2025 release wave 1 improves the Sales Qualification Agent in Dynamics 365 Sales, transforming the way sales teams qualify leads. By leveraging data from both CRM and public web sources, this agent autonomously recommends whether to qualify a lead and generates personalized emails to engage prospects effectively. With a new user interface that guides sellers across lead and opportunity grids, this update ensures that time is spent on high-value activities, ultimately boosting the qualified pipeline.

The sales qualification agent combines the power of three agents that work together to help sellers build a qualified pipeline:

• Research agent: Analyzes lead data from CRM and public sources to generate recommendations and create a 360-degree view of the lead. It also identifies key contacts within the lead’s organization and ensures email validity.
• Prioritization agent: Assesses lead strength based on factors like authority and budget, automatically identifying which leads to prioritize for the highest likelihood of conversion.
• Engagement agent: Automatically generates a personalized email for each lead, based on the insights gathered, to maximize response rates and initiate engagement.

To further enhance lead qualification, the 2025 release wave 1 enables deeper integration with external data sources, empowering sales teams to refine the qualification process with industry-specific and company-specific insights. While CRM data provides foundational insights, external data can offer valuable context, such as financial data, market trends, or customer behaviors, enabling more tailored and accurate decision-making. 

By customizing the Sales Qualification Agent to pull from external resources—such as public web data, proprietary tools, or internal databases—sales teams can leverage insights that are most relevant to their target customers. For example, financial services teams may prioritize prospects based on total assets under management, while technology companies might assess leads based on subscription usage.

Key updates:

• Access to open web resources: Customize the agent to retrieve insights from publicly available data sources, such as government websites, to assess company finances and business priorities.
• Integration with first-party data: Effortlessly integrate with internal data sources like Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL, and Oracle, using Microsoft Copilot Studio’s tools for easy configuration.
• Support for third-party platforms: Enable the agent to access insights from third-party platforms, including case history from ServiceNow, keyword data from 6Sense, and order history from SAP.
• Customizable qualification criteria: Define qualification and prioritization rules in simple language to guide the agent in making more informed decisions.

The 2025 release wave 1 enhances Dynamics 365 Sales by enabling sellers to identify new leads from existing customers based on their service interactions. The Sales Qualification Agent now aggregates customer service case histories to uncover cross-sell and upsell opportunities that may have previously gone unnoticed. For instance, a customer reaching out for a product upgrade or frequently inquiring about premium features signals potential purchasing intent. By integrating service data into the sales workflow, this update empowers sellers to act on high-value opportunities, boosting pipeline growth and strengthening customer relationships.

• Pipeline expansion: Automatically analyze customer service interactions to uncover cross-sell and upsell opportunities that may have been missed previously.
• Complete customer view: Gain insights into customers’ service engagement histories, enabling personalized outreach based on their specific interactions, and ensuring that the timing of follow-ups is optimized for the best results.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several additional features in Dynamics 365 Sales that enhance efficiency and improve customer engagement. These updates focus on streamlining communication, automating follow-ups, and improving pipeline quality.

Key updates:

• Personalized tone of voice in emails: Sellers can now create and apply their own tone of voice to email communications, ensuring more authentic, personalized outreach that leads to better engagement and response rates.
• Automated follow-up communications: The Sales Qualification Agent automates follow-up emails, dynamically adjusting the content and cadence based on lead responses, and managing out-of-office replies to increase engagement.
• Intent-to-buy analysis: Sellers can automate the classification of responses based on purchase intent, quickly identifying high-quality leads, disqualifying uninterested ones, and routing support inquiries to the appropriate teams.
• Server-side synchronization for Exchange integration: The update shifts Exchange integration to server-side synchronization, providing more control over email sync settings and improving reliability for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium features.

The 2025 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights introduces several AI and Copilot enhancements that streamline workflows and improve customer engagement. These features empower users to create personalized journeys, access critical customer insights effortlessly, and leverage autonomous agents to boost decision-making across marketing, sales, and service teams.

Key updates:

• Create journeys with Copilot: Use natural language to describe your desired customer journeys, and let Copilot automatically generate them. This feature saves time, fosters collaboration, and helps bring customer experience ideas to market faster.
• Access unified customer insights in real-time: Sales reps, service agents, and chatbots can now seamlessly access key customer data like propensity to buy and recent activity through Copilot, enhancing engagement and improving decision-making.
• Enhance autonomous agents with Customer Insights: Integrate customer data into Microsoft Copilot Studio to improve autonomous agents’ understanding and actions. This allows teams to access tailored insights from Dataverse to make more informed decisions and boost efficiency.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several powerful updates in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, offering greater control over customer engagement, ensuring compliance with regulations, and enhancing the flexibility of journey management. These features allow marketers to tailor journeys more effectively to customer behaviors and external factors, ensuring a more personalized and responsive experience.

• Wait for segment membership: Journeys can now wait for a customer to become a member of a segment before progressing to the next step. This allows for more personalized engagement based on segment membership, such as waiting for a customer to activate their credit card before sending a welcome email.
• Respect quiet times based on location and time zones: Ensure compliance with regional regulations and respect customer preferences by aligning quiet times with customers’ time zones. This prevents outreach during inappropriate hours and enhances the effectiveness of communications.
• Pause and resume journeys for unplanned events: Journeys can now be paused and resumed in response to unforeseen events, such as natural disasters, to protect brand reputation and maintain customer trust during sensitive situations.
• Allow reentry to one-time dynamic segment journeys: Customers can now reenter a one-time journey if they qualify for a dynamic segment again, allowing them to repeat lifecycle-specific stages, such as going through a purchasing journey every time they make a new purchase.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces enhanced automation for seamless handoffs between marketing and sales teams within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys. These updates ensure that leads receive timely and personalized attention at the right stage of their journey, empowering sales teams to act quickly and effectively. By automatically generating sales activities and records directly from customer journeys, this update streamlines the transition from marketing to sales and helps drive higher conversion rates.

Key updates:

• Create sales activities directly from journeys: Generate sales activities such as tasks and phone calls directly within customer journeys, ensuring leads receive timely and individualized attention.
• Create lead or opportunity records: Automatically create lead or opportunity records based on customer interactions with marketing campaigns, ensuring the sales team has the right context to engage effectively.
• Route leads directly to sales agents: Quickly route qualified leads to sales agents, ensuring that they act on high-priority prospects at the right time in the journey.

The 2025 release wave 1 brings significant updates to event management in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys, empowering organizations to maximize event attendance, streamline communications, and provide a seamless event experience. These features enable efficient event setup, registration management, and post-event engagement, all while enhancing customer interaction and event planning.

• Maximize event capacity with waitlist registrations: Automatically place prospective attendees on a waitlist when events reach capacity. When a spot opens up, the system will automatically register the next person on the waitlist, ensuring events are filled to capacity.
• Pre- and post-event communications: Use pre-built journeys to target the right audience, send personalized messages, and collect feedback via surveys, ensuring effective communication before, during, and after events.
• Create event portals with Power Pages: Quickly create an event portal using Power Pages, where attendees can access event details, session schedules, and register for events. The portal can be customized to align with your brand and easily deployed.
• Create an event portal on your Website: Embed a comprehensive event portal directly on your website using a prebuilt web application or public API. This portal allows customers to view upcoming events, session details, and register directly from your site.

The 2025 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights introduces several new capabilities to enhance customer segmentation, data management, and reporting. These features provide more control, flexibility, and integration options, enabling businesses to optimize their customer insights and engagement strategies.

• Target the right audience based on engagement signals: Leverage marketing engagement data to create more accurate segments, such as loyal customers or high purchase intent leads, without the need for complex data pipelines. This enables more personalized and effective retargeting strategies.
• Collect extra customer info without updating your data model: Easily capture additional customer information, like meal preferences or contest answers, using custom form fields, without altering your data model, keeping your data clean and relevant.
• Export data for custom reporting: Export engagement and interaction data from Customer Insights – Journeys directly to your preferred storage, enabling custom reporting and analysis that integrates seamlessly with your existing systems.
• Sync customer data directly to Fabric OneLake: Automatically sync unified profiles, segments, and insights to Microsoft Fabric OneLake, streamlining analytics and improving collaboration across business units by centralizing customer data.
• Integrate insights faster by choosing tables and data format to sync: Gain greater control over which customer data is synced to your private data lake by selecting specific tables and formats, speeding up integration and reducing storage costs.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several AI and Copilot-powered enhancements in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, improving efficiency, response quality, and customer satisfaction. These updates leverage generative AI and intelligent automation to streamline case management, email communication, and feedback processes, helping service teams deliver faster and more personalized support.

Key updates:

• Use Copilot-powered email template recommendations: Copilot now suggests the most relevant email templates based on email content, search context, and thread intent. This AI-driven feature reduces the need for manual template searching, accelerating case resolution, and ensuring consistent, accurate communications.
• Use Copilot Studio agents for customer surveys: Copilot Studio bots automate and personalize customer feedback collection across various channels. This unified process speeds up feedback management and provides actionable insights to supervisors, enabling timely improvements and enhancing the customer experience.
• View customer sentiment indicators on email: Agents can now see sentiment indicators for incoming emails, helping them gauge customer mood and manage escalations effectively. Sentiment scores are also available for administrators and supervisors through Email Analytics.
• Insert Copilot prompts in email templates: With this feature, Copilot automatically fills email templates with content from predefined prompts, reducing manual work for agents and ensuring quick, consistent, and accurate responses. Administrators can configure prompts as part of email templates to enhance productivity.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces the Customer Knowledge Management Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, leveraging AI and Copilot to automate real-time knowledge creation and updating. This agent analyzes case data, including emails, case notes, and conversations, to generate actionable knowledge articles that help your contact center respond to emerging issues quickly. By using AI to identify knowledge gaps and Copilot to ensure articles are published and accessible, the feature reduces the reliance on lengthy knowledge lifecycles and ensures that agents have up-to-date information at their fingertips, improving response times and operational efficiency.

Key features:

• Real-time knowledge creation: As agents close cases, the Customer Knowledge Management Agent analyzes case data and drafts new knowledge articles, addressing knowledge gaps and helping the organization respond faster.
• Historical knowledge article creation: The agent can process historical case data, converting past cases and conversations into ready-to-use knowledge articles to enhance your knowledge base.
• Knowledge article compliance and duplication prevention: Automatically scrubs sensitive data and ensures content isn’t duplicated, maintaining compliance and the integrity of your knowledge base.
• Automated publishing and accessibility: Articles can be automatically published and made accessible to support representatives, Copilot, or self-service portals based on your configuration.
• Supervisor insights and control: Supervisors can monitor the creation, usage, and quality of knowledge articles, making real-time edits and improvements to ensure accurate Copilot guidance and enhanced customer service.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces the Case Management Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, designed to automate key tasks throughout the case lifecycle. By reducing manual administrative tasks, such as filling in case details, sending follow-up emails, and resolving cases, the Case Management Agent enhances service representative efficiency and satisfaction. It also enables seamless collaboration by identifying experts and facilitating direct communication through Teams, while automatically summarizing case context for faster resolution. These updates streamline case handling, reduce wrap-up time, and improve overall service quality.

Key features:

• Automated case creation and updates: The Case Management Agent automatically creates cases during live chats and incoming emails, filling in required details and updating case fields as the conversation progresses.
• Efficient collaboration: The agent identifies relevant experts and provides intelligent prompts for one-click collaboration via Teams, allowing service reps to resolve cases faster and more effectively.
• Case summary integration: Automatically generates concise case summaries for experts, ensuring they can quickly get up to speed and enhancing future collaboration processes.
• SLA-driven follow-ups and resolution: Tracks cases requiring attention, sends follow-up emails based on SLA criteria, and automatically resolves cases or notifies service representatives when customer responses are received.
• Improved case handling efficiency: By automating administrative tasks and summarizing collaboration, the agent reduces case handling time, enabling faster resolution and better service delivery.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several enhancements aimed at improving the productivity and efficiency of customer service representatives. These updates provide more flexibility in managing workflows, session configurations, and customer interactions, ultimately enhancing the overall user experience.

Key updates:

• Configure session limits for multisession apps: Administrators can now configure a maximum of up to nine concurrent sessions in D365 Customer Service workspace, helping businesses enforce best practices for managing multiple customer interactions based on their specific needs.
• Create personalized case views in the inbox: Service representatives can now create and customize their own case views in the inbox, improving organization and efficiency by tailoring the workspace to their preferences.
• Automatically restore sessions after a browser refresh: The new functionality automatically restores previously opened sessions and tabs when the browser is refreshed, saving time and reducing the need for manual reloading of cases, calls, and chats.
• Inbox view is on by default for service reps: The inbox view is now enabled by default for all out-of-the-box and newly created service representative profiles, allowing representatives to access all their work items in a single, consolidated location.
• Configure timeout rules override in SLA-based automatic actions: Service representatives and administrators can now configure timeout rule overrides, allowing flexibility in response times and workflow adjustments, especially when dealing with vacations or handoffs between queues.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces the AI-powered Scheduling Operations Agent in Dynamics 365 Field Service, enabling dispatchers to quickly and efficiently optimize technician schedules in real-time. By leveraging Copilot, dispatchers can address issues like traffic delays, cancellations, and scheduling conflicts, all while considering key business objectives such as technician utilization, work order priority, and skillset match. This update significantly reduces the time dispatchers spend manually adjusting schedules, improving overall productivity and service delivery.

Key features:

• Real-time schedule optimization: Dispatchers can ask Copilot to optimize technician schedules when conditions change, such as cancellations, delays, or last-minute adjustments.
• Business goal alignment: Copilot can be directed to optimize for specific goals, like maximizing technician utilization or prioritizing high-value work orders, while considering factors like skillset, territories, and promised time windows.
• Intelligent scheduling adjustments: Copilot intelligently chooses among existing bookings and unfulfilled work orders, ensuring an optimal schedule based on available resources and business priorities.
• Quick and easy schedule updates: Within seconds, Copilot provides suggested schedule adjustments for dispatchers to review and apply, saving time and improving decision-making.
• Access from the Copilot side pane: The scheduling optimization feature is available anywhere within the Dynamics 365 Field Service application, making it easily accessible for dispatchers on the go.

The 2025 release wave 1 brings significant improvements to the schedule board in Dynamics 365 Field Service, enhancing both usability and performance. The new architecture shift from extJS to React results in a more responsive, intuitive user interface, allowing technicians and dispatchers to manage schedules more efficiently. These updates improve load times, interaction responsiveness, and introduce several key usability features, all contributing to a more seamless and productive scheduling experience.

• Enhanced user experience: The transition to React architecture provides a more responsive and intuitive schedule board, improving usability for both technicians and dispatchers.
• Improved performance: A more efficient diffing algorithm and virtual DOM result in faster load times and instant reactions to user interactions, even during peak loads.
• Future-proof technology: The new architecture is aligned with modern web technologies, ensuring better maintenance and future scalability.
• Usability and modernization improvements: New features include a working days-of-the-week selector, week numbers, customizable tab ordering, improved day line visibility, and accessibility enhancements, addressing highly requested customer needs.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces enhancements to the schedule assistant in Dynamics 365 Field Service, enabling businesses to match resources with requirements more efficiently across different locations and time zones. By supporting time zone-agnostic and day-based matching, this update ensures that organizations can staff projects worldwide with the best available resources, improving project delivery and customer satisfaction.

• Time zone-agnostic matching: Resources and requirements can now be matched based on relative availability, regardless of their respective time zones. This enables smoother scheduling for teams and projects in different locations.
• Day-based matching: Resources can be matched with requirements based on work hours within the same calendar day, even if the exact hours don’t perfectly align, increasing flexibility and efficiency in staffing.
• Improved resource management across geolocations: These features help overcome challenges related to staffing across different time zones and locations, ensuring projects are staffed with the best available resources to meet customer needs.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces new features in Dynamics 365 Field Service that empower frontline workers by improving their productivity and mobile experiences. These updates make it easier for technicians to work offline with more flexible data access, enabling them to stay productive even in remote areas with variable connectivity.

Key updates:

• Select table columns to include in mobile offline sync: Makers can now select specific columns from Dataverse tables to be downloaded for offline use, optimizing data download times and ensuring that technicians have access to only the most relevant information when working without connectivity.
• Access online data with your offline-first application: Frontline workers can now switch between offline and online modes, allowing them to access full Dataverse data when network connectivity is available. This ensures they can still work effectively even when network conditions are unpredictable.
• Sync mode indicators for mobile applications: A sync icon in the application lets technicians easily see whether they are in offline-first or online mode, helping them manage their data access and stay on track with their tasks.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces Copilot and agentic automation to Dynamics 365 Project Operations, streamlining time entry, expense reporting, and approval processes. By automatically detecting work from Outlook and Teams, this update reduces administrative burdens, improves invoice accuracy, and accelerates invoicing, leading to greater efficiency and satisfaction for project managers, consultants, and invoice administrators.

Key features include:

• Automated time entry and expense report creation: Copilot automatically detects work from Microsoft Outlook calendars and Teams meetings, simplifying time entry and eliminating the need for manual alerts and reminders.
• Expense report submission and policy validation: Automates the creation, submission, and policy validation of expense reports using email and receipt scans, reducing errors and ensuring compliance with company policies.
• Automatic approvals and review flags: Project managers can upload documents containing approval rules, allowing for automatic approvals or flagging of items that require review, streamlining the approval process.
• Faster invoicing and fewer errors: By automating time, expense, and approval processes, this update reduces invoice inaccuracies and minimizes corrections, leading to faster, more accurate invoicing for project-based businesses.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several key enhancements to the expense management functionality in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, aimed at improving accuracy, streamlining processes, and enhancing user experience. These updates allow for more flexibility and control over expense entries, approvals, and reporting.

Key updates:

• Edit per diem transaction date and exchange rate: Users can now manually edit the transaction date and exchange rate for per-diem expenses, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and improving the accuracy of expense reporting and calculations.
• Enable expense delegates to create cash advance requests: Expense delegates can now create and submit cash advance requests on behalf of others, streamlining the delegation process and improving overall efficiency in managing both expenses and cash advances.
• Post expenses on the expense report posting date: Businesses can now post expense transactions based on a specific posting date, rather than the expense report date, improving G/L management and ensuring more accurate financial reporting.
• Simplify expense management using new enhancements: New enhancements in the “Expense Reports Re-Imagined” feature offer a more streamlined and intuitive expense creation and submission process, including workflow history, quick matching of receipts, and the ability to add interim and final approvers.
• Enable number sequences in expense management: A new, user-friendly interface within the expense management module allows users to configure and manage number sequences directly, reducing operational overhead and minimizing configuration issues.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces a range of enhancements to project planning and management in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, aimed at improving usability, boosting performance, and streamlining workflows. These updates enhance contract management, work breakdown structures, subcontract management, and project templates, helping project managers and teams operate more efficiently and with greater flexibility.

Key update:

• Use the improved project contract experience: The contract creation and management process is streamlined with a more user-friendly interface, nested grids, simplified detail creation, and better visibility of key contract information, improving productivity and decision-making.
• Increase work breakdown structure limits: Project Operations now supports higher limits for tasks and assignments within work breakdown structures (WBS), enhancing performance and addressing customer needs for larger projects in phase 1, with further performance improvements in phase 2.
• Use improved subcontract info for one vendor in one place: Project managers can now manage all subcontracts associated with a single vendor across multiple projects more efficiently, reducing navigation complexity and enhancing subcontract tracking, billing, and usage monitoring.
• Add support for WBS and project templates: Users can now import tasks from existing projects into new ones, improving reusability and eliminating the need for manual task creation, saving time and effort.
• Copy externally scheduled projects: A new feature allows customers using external scheduling to copy projects, just like those using the default scheduling engine, expanding flexibility in project management.
• New user experience for copy project: The new Copy Project V4 API introduces a user-friendly interface that enables users to copy projects, including team members and their mappings, with customizable options for selecting source and target projects and handling team member mappings.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several updates to time entry in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, designed to enhance the user experience for consultants and team members on the go. These updates improve mobile and web experiences, making it easier to log time, track progress, and stay on top of project tasks efficiently.

Key updates:

• Introducing the new Time Entry mobile app: A new mobile app based on Microsoft Power Apps allows project team members to view, create, and submit time entries on the go. The app integrates with Outlook and to-do items for easy time logging, provides visibility into current project tasks, and enables real-time updates synced with the web app.
• Use the new Calendar interface for time entry: The web interface for time entry has been enhanced with a new calendar view, allowing users to track, create, and modify time entries with ease. New features include the ability to track time across different timelines, better integration with work breakdown structures, and improved benchmarking and visualizations for tracking project progress.

The 2025 release wave 1 introduces several updates to the invoicing and financials functionality in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, aimed at improving efficiency, enhancing financial tracking, and ensuring compliance with accounting standards. These updates streamline invoice editing, enhance financial reporting, and support better revenue recognition and journal management for project-based businesses.

Key updates

• Simplify editing of project invoices: Enhancements to invoice editing allow for faster corrections and updates, including reduced clicks for editing individual or multiple invoice line details. An improved invoice summary provides key insights for quicker decision-making, ensuring smooth billing processes.
• Use financial tags for project sales orders and journals: Financial tags enable organizations to track user-defined fields on accounting entries, eliminating the need for unique financial dimensions. Tags can be used for reporting purposes and flow through to project journals and sales orders, making financial tracking more flexible.
• Calculate revenue recognition based on contract line value: This feature separates contract value from billing milestones, allowing revenue recognition to be calculated based on the contract line value, aligning with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 requirements. It helps organizations manage revenue recognition more accurately for fixed-price projects.
• Use general journals against projects for resource nonstocked scenarios: General journals can now be created in Dynamics 365 Finance for resource and non-stocked projects, with the ability to select projects as the source or offset for journal entries. These journals will integrate with Dataverse, allowing actuals to be created against the project in a more seamless manner.

The 2025 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 CRM offers significant updates across the entire suite of applications, enhancing functionality, streamlining workflows, and enabling organizations to better engage with customers. These innovations, from AI-powered sales tools to improved project management and financial processes, help businesses stay ahead of the curve and deliver outstanding service.

Ready to start using the new features from the 2025 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 CRM? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.