We need to talk about... Dynamics 365 Sales... Release Wave 1 for 2026

Next in my blog, I will launch a series on the changes we can expect to see as part of Release Wave 1 for 2026.

If you've been following my blog, you'll know this is something of a tradition. Every time Microsoft drops a new Release Wave for Dynamics 365 Sales, I take a look at some of the key features we can expect to see.

First up in the series is Dynamics 365 Sales and part of the release wave 1 for 2026 Microsoft has once again doubled down on AI, but unlike other release waves, this is now actually tangible use cases for AI. It's less about gimmicks and more about giving users back some actual time, helping managers make smarter decisions, and making the CRM actually work harder so the people using it don't have to.

Business Research

This release wave introduces the Sales Research Agent, which lets you have a genuine conversation with your sales data in plain language. You can ask complex questions, "which deals over £100k are at risk this quarter and why?" and instead of a static spreadsheet, you get rich visualisations, narrative explanations, and a clear picture of what's happening and why.

What makes this genuinely impressive is the depth behind it. It can pull from your Dynamics 365 CRM data, Microsoft Fabric data lakes, and even local files such as Excel spreadsheets or PDFs.

You can also research journeys, drill into specific findings, and save your workspace so you can refresh it with new data as the quarter progresses.

For example, a sales director wants to understand revenue attainment by region versus target. Rather than waiting for the BI team to produce a report, they open the Research Agent, type their question, and within moments have an interactive view of the data.

Lead Management

Sellers often start their day staring at a list of leads with no real sense of where to begin, and need answers to the following questions

• Which one is genuinely interested?

• Which one submitted a form three weeks ago but has gone quiet?

• Which one is ready to talk?

The Sales Qualification Agent has been doing clever background work on this for a while now, so it is already researching leads, scoring intent, and categorising them as hot, warm, or cold.

This release provides functionality so that those insights and recommended next steps now surface directly on your leads grid, right there in your day-to-day view of Dynamics 365 Sales.

So essentially users will see and high-intent leads highlighted at the top, with a short summary of why they've been flagged and what topic they've expressed interest in. From there, you can jump straight into the agent's research and even see pre-generated email suggestions ready to send. No digging, no switching between views - the right leads, right in front of you.

Sales Research Agent

When you have an AI agent reaching out to prospects on your behalf, how do you make sure those emails sound like you - and not like a robot? Generic, impersonal outreach drives low response rates, which undermines the whole point.

This wave gives administrators real control over how the Sales Qualification Agent communicates. You can define the purpose of the outreach, specify the tone and voice that reflects your brand, set the call-to-action, and even configure language guardrails - approved phrases, words to avoid, and message length targets.

Think of it like briefing a new member of the team on how your company communicates. Once those guidelines are set, the agent generates emails that feel genuinely on-brand, consistent across every interaction, and personalised to the individual lead based on their research profile.

Opportunity Acceleration

Opportunities can now be accelerated by using AI-powered data enrichment that comes from your recent email conversations with customers and automatically identifies gaps or outdated information in your opportunity records. It then suggests updates - with the reasoning behind each one so you can understand why the change is being recommended.

Administrators can configure whether updates are applied automatically or go through a manual review process, giving teams flexibility based on how much control they want to retain. Sellers see the suggested changes, understand the context, and can accept or reject them.

Sales Close Agent

One of the most time-consuming parts of managing a pipeline is staying on top of what's happening across multiple deals simultaneously. Conditions shift - stakeholders change roles, competitors make moves, budget conversations stall - and keeping up with all of it is exhausting.

The Sales Close Agent has been providing deal briefings for a while. This wave makes those briefings dramatically more useful with "delta-first" guidance. Rather than presenting you with a full briefing every time you open an opportunity, it leads with what has changed since you last reviewed it - what's new, why it matters at this specific stage of the sales process, and what you should do next.

The guidance is aligned to your actual deal stage - Qualify, Develop, Propose, or Close, so the advice is relevant to where you are in the process, not generic. Critical risks that need immediate attention remain visible even if they're not specific to the current stage.

Real-world example: A seller revisits an opportunity they reviewed on Tuesday. Rather than re-reading a full briefing, they immediately see that since their last review, the prospect's procurement lead has changed and there's a new risk around budget sign-off timing. The agent surfaces exactly these two points and recommends next steps accordingly.

Seller Experiences

The Seller experience has been given a bit of an overhaul because sellers spend a huge proportion of their day on calls with prospects and customers. Yet historically, the calling experience in Dynamics 365 required third-party integrations, switching between applications, and manual logging of call activity. It was clunky, and things fell through the cracks.

The new Sales Hub Dialer brings a fully integrated calling experience directly into Dynamics 365 Sales. Make and receive calls without leaving the app. Customer history and context appear right away when a call comes in. Take notes mid-call. And when the call ends, it's automatically logged as an activity - no manual entry required.

Beyond the basics, there's some genuinely impressive AI in the background here. The dialer itself includes real-time conversation intelligence, post-call summaries, sentiment analysis, action item detection, and call recording with speaker separation. Managers can review calls, identify coaching moments, and track themes across conversations.

Summary

The 2026 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales is a considerable step forward as it takes the AI capabilities that arrived in earlier waves and makes them genuinely more useful, features such as smarter lead prioritisation, richer research, better deal guidance, and a calling experience that actually fits into how sellers work.

Every one of these features is about removing something that slows sellers down. So the manual data updates, the time spent triaging leads, the app-switching, and the re-reading of old briefings. The AI is working in the background, so the seller doesn't have to.

Hope you all enjoyed this post on the Dynamics 365 Sales Release Wave 2 for 2025. I will continue this series with some additional content specifically related to Dynamics 365 Customer Service for Release Wave 2 for 2025. Take Care, Speak Soon!