- Across the 2025 and 2026 waves Copilot drafts answers, generates case summaries, and drives AI routing inside the rep's day.
- The 2026 wave pushes into agentic capabilities like detecting customer intent and automating routine case handling.
- The AI is only as good as the knowledge it reads, so a thin or stale knowledge base produces thin, stale drafts.
- These capabilities carry their own licensing and depend on adoption; a Copilot reps do not use is just cost.
The last two years of Dynamics 365 Customer Service updates point in one direction: Microsoft is putting AI between your customers' questions and your support team's keyboards. For anyone running a support desk, the 2025 and 2026 release waves are worth translating from feature lists into what they change.
The theme: Copilot does the first draft
The center of gravity in these releases is Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, working inside the support rep's day. Across the 2025 and 2026 waves, the capabilities that matter most for a support team are:
- Drafting contextual answers in email and chat by gathering from your internal knowledge base and approved external sources.
- Generating case and conversation summaries in a single step, so handoffs stop requiring someone to re-read a long thread.
- AI-driven routing that gets an incoming issue to the right person or queue.
The 2026 wave pushes further into agentic capabilities: detecting customer intent, automating routine case handling, and giving supervisors AI help to evaluate quality and spot problems sooner.
What it means for a support team
The shift is from "a person reads and answers everything" to "the system drafts, summarizes, and routes, and a person handles the judgment calls." For a small team, that's the difference between drowning in routine tickets and spending your hours on the issues that genuinely need a human.
The practical wins are concrete: faster first replies because the draft is already written, less time lost to handoffs because every case carries a summary, and fewer misrouted tickets because routing isn't a person eyeballing a queue.
The catch
Two things decide whether any of this pays off. First, the AI is only as good as the knowledge it reads. If your knowledge base is thin or out of date, Copilot drafts thin, out-of-date answers. Building and maintaining good knowledge articles is the unglamorous work that makes the AI useful. Second, these capabilities carry their own licensing and depend on adoption; a Copilot your reps don't trust or use is just cost.
What to do about it
Start with the knowledge base, then the AI. Pick your highest-volume question types, make sure the knowledge articles behind them are good, and turn on Copilot drafting for those first. Measure whether reps use the drafts and whether first-reply times drop. Expand from what works.
If you run support on Dynamics, or you're considering it, and want a grounded read on which of these AI features are worth turning on, we're glad to think it through. Let's talk it through.