Key Product Updates from Microsoft: An Overview of Plans for April–October 2024

Most businesses have always been united by a common goal: to provide customers with quality products and services on time and in full. New capabilities in most Microsoft products are aimed at helping specialists from different business roles solve problems together, optimize workflows, and focus on what matters most – the key factors for qualitatively transforming customer experience and business efficiency.

The first wave of 2024 releases for Microsoft product lines contains hundreds of new features for Dynamics 365 platform solutions, Power Platform, and Copilot AI assistant. We have studied the detailed update plan and offer an overview of the most significant changes in the solutions.

What’s New in Dynamics 365 Platform Solutions

Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales has long established itself as a leading application for sales managers, which helps to better understand customers and increase sales using data, analytics, and a convenient user interface. The first series of updates in 2024 focus on providing sales reps with timely customer information faster and easier, closing deals faster with insights, improving productivity, and empowering businesses with free, flexible configuration and leadership in generative AI. The new proposal summary feature captures the key details in long customer proposals for a specific contact, deal, prospect, or account. The summary informs reps of the budget, role (decision maker), needs, and timeframe derived from the proposal or deal documents, and recommends the best next steps.

New lead qualification tools allow reps to assign deals to managers, review lead qualification status summaries, and create multiple deals from a single lead.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales also continues to refine and advance the industry-leading generative AI capabilities for sales reps by enriching its capabilities with sales-related skills, data, and actions. Moving forward, the Microsoft engineering and analytics team will focus on enhancing the Outlook and Teams mobile apps to help managers work from anywhere and stay connected to their customers.

Service and Maintenance

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to be more productive with Copilot’s AI-powered ticket filtering, diagnostic tools for admins and agents, and enhancements to the multi-session experience. Voice channel enhancements are also planned, as well as increased accuracy and prioritization of assignments in the unified routing system.

Agents can now get a quick overview of the latest and most important updates related to any entry in the Dynamics 365 event timeline, and quickly catch up with just one click. Copilot generates a streamlined timeline of key events across activities such as emails, notes, and conversations, increasing agent productivity by minimizing unnecessary clicks and time-consuming scrolling. This helps them to communicate with customers faster and more clearly to meet their high expectations.

Additionally, agents can also use Copilot directly in the email editor, in addition to the sidebar, to create contextual response drafts. Managers can also refine existing drafts with custom tooltips and one-click help, without having to refer to help articles. Together, these enhancements make the workspace more flexible to navigate and streamline the email creation process.

In addition to already supported knowledge sources – such as Microsoft SharePoint – Copilot can now be extended to access customer, product, or case data in the Microsoft Dataverse, thanks to seamless plugin support. Agents can get unified experience with these plugins, as they no longer need to switch to other tabs and tools to connect to Microsoft Dataverse information.

Dynamics 365 Field Service is a field service management system that enables companies to transform their service operations with processes and experiences to manage, plan, and execute work. The first wave of updates in 2024 will enhance the solution with new AI capabilities in Copilot, modern tools, integration with Microsoft 365, vendor management, and integration with Microsoft Finance & Operations.

Marketing

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data helps any organization unify and enrich customer data to drive insights and informed marketing actions. The current release simplifies and accelerates the process of acquiring and managing customer data. Powered by artificial intelligence, users get fast insights and easy access to reports. Real-time data ingest, create, and update is even more effective at optimizing customer interactions at critical moments.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys harnesses the power of AI to revolutionize the way marketers work, enabling companies to optimize every customer interaction with seamless journeys across departments and channels. The new release enables marketers to understand customers more deeply, create new experiences in minutes, engage customers with more activities, and continuously optimize results. Through thorough lead qualification, synergies between sales and marketing are enhanced to drive better business results.

What’s New in Power Platform Solutions

Microsoft Power Platform enables users and organizations to analyze, act, and automate data to digitally transform their businesses. Today, Microsoft Power Platform consists of five products: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. The platform also includes the AI ​​Builder app. The first wave of the 2024 release will contain hundreds of new features across all low-code/no-code platform apps.

Power BI and data integration tools have been migrated to Microsoft Fabric. Power BI is now working to empower all levels of the organization to make confident decisions based on insights at scale, while also improving the collaborative experience and continuing to invest in customer satisfaction. The data integration module, now Data Factory, will focus on expanding connectivity and enriching the library of transformations, enabling real-time data replication for analytics in the data warehouse.

In Power Apps, the focus is on integrating Copilot to accelerate app development using AI and natural language, deepen user intelligence, and analyze data in custom apps. The Microsoft team also makes it easier to build powerful apps with modern controls, responsive layouts, and collaboration features. It also makes it easier to build at enterprise scale, allowing developers and administrators to extend apps across the organization with enhanced security and quality assurance tools.

Interactive Copilot in Power Pages now accompanies every step of website creation – design, page layouts, content editing, sharing, training, chatbot creation, accessibility, and site security. The OOB control library lets you connect to data from any device and ensure website security while giving users more information to understand what it is about.

Copilot capabilities in Power Automate now extend to cloud flows, desktop flows, and process mining. This will enable users to use natural language to find optimization opportunities, build automation mechanisms, quickly troubleshoot problems, and provide a comfortable management of systems.

AI Builder is investing in three key components: Prompt Builder for GPT prompts, intelligent document processing with new features and models, and improvements to the AI ​​Governance system, including improved resource management and data processing policy. These initiatives aim to empower users with advanced generative AI, optimize document processing, and strengthen governance of all AI models in Power Apps.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to invest in empowering developers by increasing productivity in app creation through the Copilot experience, seamless connectivity to external data sources, and the introduction of AI-powered Enterprise Copilot in Microsoft 365.

So, we look forward to the implementation of new functionality from Microsoft! Ready to innovate? As a leading Microsoft partner, we are here to consult you and find the best solution for your unique business needs. Submit your request to sales@smart-it.com.

Leave a request