Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event April 2024

This week the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event for 2024 Release Wave 1 was held. A launch event marks the start of the roll out of a new wave. New features are presented in demos and customer stories are showcased. I watched it late evening here in Sweden, after it was sent (happy to be able to do so). In case you missed it, you can watch it on-demand now as well.

Personally, I always find it interesting to see how the different products and services are presented at the official events. Overall you get a feeling for what’s ahead and what main areas Microsoft are investing in. Surprisingly not, copilot was in the center of attention at this event (as well).

Copilots in the center of attention

There were lots of demos highlighting how copilots can be utilized in different ways. In order to see that, watch the event on-demand. Using Copilot Studio to build your own copilot from describing what you want it to do and what sources to get information from was an interesting demo.

Of course everything looks super easy to build and get up and running. In real life, it might take a while to figure out the needs and requirements and do the setup including healthy ALM. Also, what we see at these events most often are in preview, meaning we can do POCs (proof of concepts) in isolated environments, safely separated from our normal environments used in our ALM processes. We can try it out and give our feedback to Microsoft. We can start thinking about how we can utilize all new features in the future. But we should not yet use preview features in production.

It was also interesting to see how copilots were presented. Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service and Copilot form Finance presented as Role-based extensions.

It was also mentioned how copilot follows the user where they to their work. Presented a bit like one copilot, but in different contexts. Another overview picture was this one, which illustrates how we have different Copilot experiences across the platform. Again, presented a bit like one copilot, in different contexts.

It was described how Microsoft internally uses copilot. Their own support organization with 45 000 technical support agents use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service every day. I’ve noticed this when registering Microsoft tickets lately and I’ve also talked with the support technicians about it. How they use copilot to gather information from past cases and internal tools in order to get tips about how to solve a case. Interesting to see in the future how it might help us getting support faster.

What I have not seen at launch events in the past (I might have missed it of course) was to have additional videos along with the launch event. This launch event came with three additional videos with special topics. 1. A new era of AI in Dynamics 365 Business Central, 2. The next evolution of generative AI: small language models, 3. Redefine how business is done in the new era of generative AI. The last one being all about Project Sophia.

There’s also a launch event dedicated blog post, 2024 release wave 1 kicks off with hundreds of AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Other events

There are several official Microsoft events throughout the year. Two of my favorite events are Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite. Most likely because those are targeted more to developers, or rather basically anyone who utilizes the products and services from Microsoft to build their own solutions, not just with pro code. Those events usually come with many new announcements as well.

Next up is Microsoft Build, May 21-23, why not register already today?

(All pictures in this post are from the event page and event presentations).