AI transforms the way people work, the way every function operates, and the way businesses drive competition and growth. It’s also transforming the business application landscape as customers adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot as the UI for AI and agents for every business process. Nowhere is that more true than in sales. The combination of Copilot, agents, and human ambition can free time to focus on closing deals, help teams build a stronger pipeline, and drive new levels of profitability. That matters because in sales, time is money.

We’re announcing a new program—Microsoft AI Accelerator for Sales—to help more customers rapidly transform their sales organization with Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents, as well as two new agents—Sales Agent and Sales Chat—to help scale the team’s ability to nurture and close deals.

Read on for more information on each of these announcements.

AI Accelerator for Sales

We’re announcing AI Accelerator for Sales, an exclusive program designed to help more customers experience a new way of working with Copilot and agents, help transform your sales organization, and migrate off legacy CRM system vendors. This program includes:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower every salesperson with an AI assistant.
• Prebuilt agents to accelerate time to value for common sales processes, including the Sales Research Agent, new to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, that uses deep research to help drive strategic decisions.
• Custom agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio to automate bespoke sales processes.
• Model fine-tuning by Microsoft AI experts, further tailoring AI models and agents to your unique business needs.
• Dynamics 365 Sales to manage customer accounts and drive sales from lead to close.
• White-glove engagement, working hand in hand with Microsoft’s AI experts.

This program will be available for eligible customers on April 1, 2025. Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more.

Customers are making the change

Customers are already realizing the transformative impact of Microsoft’s platform within their sales organization. Lenovo, a global powerhouse in technology solutions, has experienced a streamlined and shortened sales cycle and improved customer service and responsiveness, boosting productivity—and profitability.

 “We’re seeing the benefit of having one standardized system and a global view to all geographies’ activities. This is the foundation for Lenovo’s sales digital transformation—enabling better connections and an increase in sales productivity and actionable insights.”  

—Wei Bi, Business Strategy Senior Manager, Lenovo

Lexmark, a global leader in innovative, cloud-enabled printing, imaging, and Internet of Things (IoT) products, software, solutions and services set out for a sweeping transformation, looking to replace their legacy Salesforce system. With Lexmark’s migration to Microsoft’s platform, the company now has a unified, omnichannel platform that centered the customer experience, standardized service delivery systems, offered user-friendly interfaces, streamlined sales and account management and reporting, and increased efficiency.  

“There is magic in a single source of truth with standardized data. Data analytics, coupled with operational excellence, provides the level of service that only Lexmark can offer to customers, allowing real-time access to actionable data and insights to increase revenue generation and customer satisfaction.”  
—Billy G. Spears, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Delivery Officer, Lexmark 

New sales agents to help close more deals, faster

We’re also announcing two new agents that can free sellers’ time to focus on higher-value activities and help close deals.   

Sales Agent can research and prioritize leads, set up meetings, and reach out to customers. Sales reps can focus time on closing the biggest deals while the agent ensures that no lead is left behind. Sales Chat provides actionable takeaways from CRM system data, pitch decks, meetings, emails, and the web—so sales reps can spend less time digging and more time selling.

Both of these agents, which will be in public preview in May 2025, work with first-party and select third-party CRM systems and integrate with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Learn more about the capabilities of these agents on the Microsoft 365 blog.

In addition, Customer Intent, Customer Knowledge Management, Case Management, Scheduling Operations, and Sales Order agents for Microsoft Dynamics 365 will be available in March 2025. Please note that use of these agents during public preview will require Copilot Studio capacity packs.

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Personalized customer engagement is no longer just an advantage; it’s an expectation. Sales teams are increasingly tasked with delivering real-time, tailored interactions across multiple touchpoints, all while managing a growing number of prospects and customers. The challenge is maintaining that high level of personalization without overwhelming the team or losing the quality of engagement. 

We see that many businesses encounter significant challenges when attempting to scale personalized interactions to meet the needs of a diverse and growing customer base. Traditional methods that worked well with smaller datasets and pipelines simply can’t keep up with the demands of a modern, fast-paced sales environment. Companies are looking for better ways to manage and orchestrate customer journeys to deliver relevant, personalized experiences at every stage. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Elevate your customer experiences by personalizing them at scale. 

Learn more

The complexity of personalizing at scale 

Using outdated CRM systems or doing things manually often means sales teams have to send out generic messages that don’t really connect with individual customers. This makes the engagement feel off, and opportunities slip through the cracks. 

The main issue here is that most systems don’t provide real-time insights into what customers are doing. Without up-to-date data, sales teams end up reacting to customer actions instead of anticipating them. As the number of leads grows, it’s nearly impossible to maintain the kind of deep engagement needed to really connect with customers at every stage. 

Orchestrating seamless customer journeys with Microsoft AI-driven insights 

AI helps companies take a proactive approach to personalizing customer journeys. By analyzing customer behaviors in real-time and delivering actionable recommendations, AI gives sales teams the insights they need to anticipate customer needs and offer solutions before prospects even ask for them. 

Beyond insights, AI orchestrates the entire customer journey, helping to ensure that interactions across channels are cohesive and relevant. Whether a prospect first interacts with a brand through email, social media, or a sales meeting, AI helps to ensure that their journey is connected, personalized, and moves them further down the funnel. 

Dynamics 365 optimizes every step of the customer journey 

Let’s explore how AI-powered insights optimize key stages of the sales journey, enabling sales teams to focus on high-value tasks while still delivering tailored customer experiences.

Enhancing customer interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Effective customer interactions are built on understanding the customer’s history, preferences, and current pain points. However, gathering that information can be tedious and fragmented when done manually, leading to inconsistent and incomplete preparation. 

With AI-generated opportunity summaries, sales teams can walk into every meeting fully prepared. Real-time insights about the customer’s journey—including previous interactions, product interests, and engagement history—help to ensure that each interaction is tailored to the customer’s needs. Instead of scrambling to piece together information, sales teams can focus on building relationships and delivering value from the outset. 

Investec is a great example here. By using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, they have been able to improve their client relationships while saving about 200 hours a year. This allows them to redirect efforts from routine tasks towards providing a personalized customer experience. 

Streamlining post-sale engagement and follow-ups 

Maintaining customer satisfaction post-sale is critical for retention, but many organizations struggle with post-sale engagement. Inconsistent follow-ups or delayed CRM system updates lead to disengaged customers and missed upsell opportunities. 

AI-powered systems automate the process, ensuring timely follow-ups and engagement reminders. For example, sales reps can receive real-time notifications when a customer interaction is needed—whether it’s a check-in call, a product recommendation, or a renewal reminder. This automation helps to ensure that no opportunity falls through the cracks, supporting teams to strengthen customer relationships and increase long-term value. 

Just look at the work that Lynk & Co is doing to transform car usage by offering flexible options for customers to buy, borrow, or subscribe to vehicles. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 customizable tools, they were able to quickly build an infrastructure that could create unique processes and drive highly personalized experiences. 

Creating a cohesive, multi-channel experience 

We know that customers engage across multiple channels—email, phone, social media, webinars, and more. Managing these touchpoints individually often results in a fragmented customer journey. Customers can feel disconnected from the brand if interactions on different platforms don’t align. 

AI-powered tools help orchestrate seamless interactions across channels, ensuring that customers receive consistent messaging regardless of how they choose to engage. Whether it’s a follow-up after a demo, a personalized offer via SMS, or an email post-webinar, AI helps to ensure that the message is both relevant and timely. Sales teams can manage more channels without sacrificing personalization, improving the customer experience and keeping prospects engaged. 

An interesting story here is Zurich Insurance Group. To optimize processes and handle increasing customer data, they chose Microsoft solutions, including Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, to help them find new ways to reach customers and shape customer journeys. As a result, they’ve been able to increase their lead quality by over 40%. 

AI’s role in optimizing customer journeys 

By continuously analyzing real-time customer behavior, AI provides sales teams with recommendations on what to do next—whether that’s sending a follow-up email, scheduling a demo, or offering a personalized discount. 

For sales leaders, this means moving beyond surface-level engagement to deep, data-driven interactions that anticipate customer needs. Rather than reacting to each customer interaction as it happens, AI supports proactive strategies that keep prospects moving smoothly through the sales funnel. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot: Delivering personalization at scale 

The challenges of scaling personalization can be daunting, but solutions like Dynamics 365 and Copilot allow businesses to turn customer data into actionable strategies, delivering relevant, personalized interactions from the first touchpoint to post-sale follow-up.  

With Dynamics 365 and Copilot, organizations are experiencing the following benefits: ¹ 

• 15% increase in revenue per customer journey. 
• 75% time savings on customer journey development.
• 50% reduction in physical marketing spend.

Here’s how Dynamics 365 addresses the key challenges of scaling personalized engagement: 

• Natural language data exploration. Sales teams can instantly access customer insights by asking questions in simple language, such as “Which customers are nearing their renewal date?”. This streamlines data access and empowers quick, targeted action.¹ 
• Segment creation with Query Assist. Easily create customer segments by describing desired traits, helping sales teams target high-value groups with precision.² 
• AI-assisted journey creation. Define customer journey goals in plain language, and Copilot builds personalized journeys across channels, boosting engagement and conversions.³ 
• Content generation and refinement. Quickly draft messages or emails with Copilot, using tone and key point inputs to tailor content. This speeds up customer response and helps to ensure alignment with brand goals.⁴ 

AI can scale personalized customer engagement  

When talking to customers, it is recommended that businesses consider personalizing engagement across their large pipelines. This can indeed be a major challenge, but with AI-powered tools like Dynamics 365 and Copilot, sales teams can effortlessly maintain meaningful, personalized interactions at every stage of the customer journey. By turning data into actionable insights, AI empowers companies to create proactive and tailored experiences that drive both loyalty and growth. Using AI allows you to scale engagement without sacrificing the personal touch, making it a valuable investment for enhancing customer relationships.  

Access the resources below to get started on your AI journey today. You can also stay connected on LinkedIn with more information about innovation and AI transformation. 

Sources:

¹ “Dialog with Data.” Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Documentation. Microsoft, Inc., 2024.  

² “Copilot Overview.” Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Documentation. Microsoft, Inc., 2024. 

³ “Use Copilot to Create a Journey.” Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Documentation. Microsoft, Inc., 2024. 

⁴ “Content Rewrite.” Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Documentation. Microsoft, Inc., 2024. 

The post AI-powered sales journeys: Personalization at scale for exceptional customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, leaders must stay ahead of ever-shifting demands while contending with fragmented data, manual reconciliations, and reactive reporting processes. Traditional analytics tools often reside outside core systems, forcing organizations to juggle multiple data sources and spreadsheets. This approach delays timely decisions and makes it nearly impossible to pivot quickly when market conditions change.

Business performance analytics (built into ERP solutions within Microsoft Dynamics 365) tackles these challenges by bringing together financial, operational, and organizational data within a single, governed foundation. Rather than dealing with siloed systems and batch updates, you gain real-time insights that are directly process-aware—eliminating delays, data harmonization overhead, and disconnected reporting. Even more exciting, Dynamics 365 extends analytics beyond dashboards, enabling AI capabilities that can proactively recommend or even execute business actions on your behalf.

Below, we explore how Business performance analytics unifies your data estate, drives smarter decisions through Copilot and agents, and sets you on a path to fully integrated and autonomous business processes.

Bringing data together: A single, context-aware model

Most organizations rely on disparate tools and manual processes to piece together financial statements, operational dashboards, and performance metrics. Unfortunately, these patchwork efforts waste time and often produce errors or duplications. This causes even more challenges as leaders increasingly look to generative AI to automate repetitive tasks and support predictive decision making. AI’s effectiveness depends on the quality and timeliness of the underlying data. For AI Agents to deliver real value, they need to operate on a data estate that is continuously updated, context-aware, and governed.

Business performance analytics unifies data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and third-party sources—preserving the context of your processes in a single, dimensional model. This approach delivers an analytics strategy that is:

• Process-aware out of the box. Because it’s built into Dynamics 365, Business performance analytics inherently understands cost centers, product categories, HR structures, project operations, and more. This means no manual mapping or external reconciliation is needed to see how a product delay affects supply chain costs or how shifting budgets impact workforce allocations.
• Always up to date. Unlike traditional, standalone analytics that require nightly data loads, Business performance analytics refreshes data frequently. Finance, HR, supply chain and operations leaders see critical changes as they happen—giving you the agility to react to rising demand, fluctuations in resource utilization, or unexpected expenses.
• Context-rich. Business performance analytics provide dimensional analysis across financial, operational, and organizational data. Need to compare revenue by region or analyze cost variances by project? Simply slice and dice the data without wrestling with manual exports or complicated transformations.
• Governed and protected. With role-based security, data encryption, and centralized governance, your teams—and your agents—access only authorized data. This instills confidence that shared insights won’t compromise sensitive information.

By bringing data into a single, governed model, your entire organization can speak the same language. Finance, supply chain, field service, and HR no longer work in silos. Instead, they share a unified foundation that streamlines analytics and AI investments to expedite decision making.

Agents: From insight to autonomous action

Many analytics solutions connect data to provide insight, but few connect directly to your ERP system to suggest or even execute next steps. By harnessing AI capabilities within Dynamics 365, you can move from reactive reporting to proactive, autonomous processes.

• Autonomous monitoring and alerts. Agents can be created to continuously watch financial performance, supply chain metrics, and workforce signals. Once an anomaly is detected—like unexpected spending spikes or inventory shortfalls—they can alert the right managers in Microsoft Teams or email.
• Proactive decision assistance. Instead of diving into massive spreadsheets, managers receive scenario-based recommendations built on historical and real-time data. Agents might suggest renegotiating a vendor contract or reprioritizing marketing spend to optimize ROI.
• Automated execution. Imagine your system adjusting procurement orders based on forecasted demand or automatically recommending reallocation of budgets across cost centers. When data reveals that immediate action is needed, Agents can trigger or schedule tasks in Dynamics 365.

By connecting data from disparate sources and mapping directly into ERP, Business performance analytics provides the “brains” for Agents to continuously optimize operations.

Accelerate analytics with Microsoft Fabric

Business performance analytics works seamlessly with Fabric to provide organizations with a scalable, AI-powered data foundation that extends well beyond traditional ERP analytics solutions. This integration addresses a key challenge for many organizations as they look to reconcile data between ERP systems and external analytics platforms. Fabric removes this friction by unifying data storage, analysis, and governance:

• OneLake architecture. Easily combine data from Business performance analytics with additional structured or unstructured data—like Internet of Things (IoT) signals or historical archives. With a consistent governance layer, your analytics remain secure and compliant.
• Direct Lake mode. Traditional analytics pipelines rely on batch processing, introducing delays. With Direct Lake, you can query data instantly. Finance teams can analyze transactions that landed minutes ago, while supply chain managers gain immediate insights into inventory fluctuations.
• Microsoft Copilot Studio and advanced AI. Fabric extends beyond data storage. Integrate with Copilot Studio to rapidly build AI models that utilize a broader data context. This synergy helps you predict everything from late shipments to demand spikes—well before they become actual bottlenecks.

Ultimately, the Fabric integration with Business performance analytics means you can broaden your analytics scope without leaving the governed environment of Dynamics 365.

Business performance analytics

Unify data across your enterprise, and deliver near real-time insights.

Learn more

Planning for the future: Integrated business planning and analytics

While Business performance analytics delivers immediate insights, organizations often need more robust forecasting, budgeting, and scenario modeling. By connecting to integrated business planning solutions in Dynamics 365—such as Business performance planning or Supply chain planning—you unite daily insights with forward-looking strategies:

1. Unified budgets and forecasts. Finance teams can build rolling forecasts that pull live data from operations, so you’re never basing budgets on stale assumptions.
2. Closing the loop with operations. Demand shifts can be identified by agents to automatically adjust your supply chain forecast, helping to ensure inventory and workforce capacities align.
3. Streamlined scenarios. Business performance analytics lays the real-time foundation. Planning tools let you run what-if analyses to see how changes in demand, staffing, or market conditions might affect revenue and expenses.

By linking operational reporting and strategic planning under a single data model, you can achieve continuous planning—a major shift from the static, siloed budgeting processes of the past. Below provides an overview of planning and analytics within the ERP solutions of Dynamics 365 and how they work alongside Business performance analytics:

With this approach to integrated business planning, leadership can align corporate strategy, budgeting, demand forecasting, and production capacity without juggling multiple data sets or tools. This comprehensive approach helps to ensure every team—from finance and supply chain to sales and human resources—draws on a consistent, reliable data foundation for strategic decisions and execution.

Tailored for every industry

Whether your organization is in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, or professional services, Business performance analytics adapts to your unique processes:

• Product-centric companies. Manage production schedules, inventory levels, and logistics based on real-time demand signals, eliminating overstock or missed sales.
• Service-centric organizations. Track resource utilization, billable hours, and project profitability in one model, reducing the risk of revenue leakage or unbilled work.
• Asset-intensive sectors. Optimize maintenance schedules and capital investments by forecasting the impact on operating budgets and asset lifecycles.

Because Business performance analytics is built into Dynamics 365, you can seamlessly extend it for industry-specific scenarios—without the heavy lifting of third-party integrations.

A future-ready approach: From static reporting to autonomous execution

Typical analytics solutions stop at reports and dashboards. Business performance analytics in Dynamics 365 goes further by providing an end-to-end continuum: from real-time insights, to AI recommendations, to automated actions. As we look toward the future, we aim to ensure:

• Integrated data, not data dumps. No external data lakes or manual extracts will be required. Your data stays within a governed, process-aware model.
• Seamless AI. Agents will be able to shift your organization away from after-the-fact reporting to proactive decision making, drastically cutting response times.
• Governed, scalable architecture. You can tie to Fabric for more extensive analytics, advanced AI, and the flexibility to handle multiple data sources at once.

In a rapidly evolving market, the ability to act swiftly is critical. Business performance analytics helps ensure you have the right data at the right time, with embedded intelligence and the option for autonomous execution—helping you adapt, innovate, and grow, no matter the challenges ahead.

Ready to empower your teams with better business visibility?

• Eliminate silos. Unify visibility across your business with process-aware analytics, like record to report, procure to pay, order to cash, and hire to retire in a single, governed framework.
• Accelerate decisions. Combine near real-time data and agents to detect anomalies and recommend the next best action—before issues escalate.
• Scale securely. Expand seamlessly via Fabric, helping to ensure your analytics remain fast, governed, and AI-ready, no matter how large your data grows.

By adopting Business performance analytics within Dynamics 365, you lay the groundwork for an agile, insight-driven organization—one that doesn’t just track performance but actively shapes it.

Learn more about business performance analytics, contact us today.

The post Unlock insights with Business performance analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center provides out-of-the-box analytics that monitor key operations metrics in a contact center. Customers can leverage data model customization and extend these analytics to fit their organizational needs. When customizing real-time analytics, there is a potential that the reports are slow and don’t meet the performance goals your organization expects. One way to improve the performance and latency of real-time analytics is to update the connection limits.

The importance of connection limits 

At its core, Power BI’s connection limit determines how many simultaneous connections you can make to a data source. By default, this limit is 10, which suffices for simpler or smaller datasets. However, for more intricate and voluminous datasets, this constraint becomes a bottleneck, hindering the performance and responsiveness of reports. 

Why should you increase the limit to more than 300 connections? 

Increasing the maximum connections beyond 300 provides several notable advantages: 

• Enhanced Performance: More connections enable faster data retrieval and processing, leading to quicker report generation and smoother interactions. 
• Scalability: As your datasets and usage grow, the ability to handle more connections ensures that performance remains robust and scalable. 
• Optimized Custom Reports: Customized reports often involve complex queries and calculations. More connections allow these operations to be executed more efficiently, improving the overall user experience. 

Situations that require customized reports can vary greatly. One reason you might want to create a highly customized report is to show detailed information about the performance of product-based brands in a retail organization. Out-of-the-box reports can show overall conversation metrics across channels in a contact center. But with custom reports, admins can create individual reports about each brand according to the organization’s taxonomy. When managers want to review these reports regularly, it’s important to be able to optimize the speed of report generation, especially as the number of products grows and the goals of the organization change.

How to update the connection limit 

Updating the maximum connections in Power BI is a straightforward process. Here’s how to update the published data model in Power BI.  

1. Download the Dynamics_365_Omnichannel_Realtime_analytics schematic model from the Power BI portal.

2. Open the schematic model using Power BI desktop.

3. Click Options and settings and then Options.

4. Under DirectQuery, change the Maximum connections field to a number greater than 300.

5. Click OK.
6. Save and publish the schematic data model to the same workspace where you downloaded the model.
7. You will receive a warning that this will be applied to all the reports/dashboard that is referencing this schematic data model. You can accept it and proceed to publish it to the workspace. 

Updating the maximum connections in Power BI from 10 to 300 or more is a strategic move that can markedly improve the performance of your customized reports. 

Learn more

For more information about creating custom reports in Dynamics 365 Contact Center, read the documentation: Overview of data model customization | Microsoft Learn 

For more information about optimizing reports in Power BI, refer to  Evaluation configuration settings for Desktop – Power BI | Microsoft Learn

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We are excited to announce the Copilot Studio-powered customer feedback survey in Dynamics 365 Contact Center, now in preview. Now, contact center managers can use Copilot Studio Survey in the Contact Center admin center to dynamically respond to customer feedback.  

Traditionally, management can take a long time to act on the feedback that customers provide. Additionally, managers may have to use various tools to capture customer feedback across different channels. In the era of AI, we can reimagine customer feedback management in Dynamics to enable real-time, automated, and personalized feedback loops, helping our customers unlock immense business value. 

With this feature, contact center managers can use the generative AI capabilities of Copilot Studio bots to streamline the survey configuration process across channels. Supervisors get a holistic view of the feedback, all while maintaining flexibility and customization. 

Choose your customer feedback survey

Starting in Dynamics, you can quickly author survey bots using either a blank template or one of three standard survey metrics:

• Customer Satisfaction Score
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score.

After creating the survey bot, you can open it in Copilot Studio for bot authoring and customization. Add additional questions, use Power Automate to trigger workflows based on customer responses, and design your bot to meet your business needs. Best of all, once your bot is published, you can use it across voice, live chat, and social channels. The result is a unified, centralized survey configuration process. 

Copilot-powered customer feedback in action

For a real-world example, let’s use Contoso Bank, which places a high value on customer feedback. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric is of particular interest, as it helps them measure customer loyalty. To leverage this, they use the new Copilot-powered customer feedback survey feature to quickly create an NPS survey bot from the Dynamics 365 Contact Center admin center and deploy it across all their channels. In Copilot Studio, they customize the bot to trigger a Power Automate flow to create a follow-up case if the score is less than 5. This bot engages with customers at the end of the call or conversation and gathers their feedback. If the NPS score is less than 5, it triggers Power Automate to create a follow-up case. This ensures they promptly attend to any unhappy customers, thereby quickly improving overall customer satisfaction and loyalty for Contoso Bank. 

In today’s world, where customer feedback is crucial, this feature is a game-changer. Businesses can quickly gather and act on feedback, ensuring they stay responsive and attuned to customer needs. The result is customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Learn more

To learn more about enabling and using the Copilot-powered survey, read the documentation.

The post Unlock the Microsoft Copilot Studio-powered customer survey appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of spatial annotations in Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft Teams! This milestone marks a significant step forward in enhancing mixed reality collaboration for frontline workers. 

Customers using Dynamics 365 Field Service, Guides, and Remote Assist licenses get the new spatial annotation capabilities automatically enabled in Teams mobile and desktop at no extra cost. 

Before, spatial annotations required a standalone mobile app or a HoloLens 2. Now, frontline workers can benefit from 3D inking and arrow placement directly in the Teams mobile and desktop apps during any 1:1 call, group call, or Teams meeting. 

Mobile mixed reality collaboration platform 

Previously, frontline workers used Teams within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Guides applications to collaborate with spatial annotations. The Remote Assist mobile app was a popular choice for workers on the go. It allowed fast and easy connections with collaborators on a call, showed the task over video, and allowed annotation together.  
 
Now, this core functionality is available directly in the Teams mobile app. For workers who are on the move, having all their core collaboration capabilities in a single app simplifies their job. It eliminates the need to switch apps, ensuring that all collaboration capabilities from Teams are readily available.  

No more context switching

Using spatial annotations is as straightforward as joining a Teams meeting or making a call. With the front-facing camera, users share their view with remote participants for real-time collaboration while in the flow of work.  Technicians in the field can place 3D arrow and ink annotations by tapping on their video to discuss with remote peers.  

Desktop users can see this video feed and add their own annotations to overlay important information on physical objects. This enhances comprehension and enables workers to fix issues faster. Users can move and change angles without losing track of annotations anchored to their environment. This advanced level of interaction empowers Teams users, sharing insights and reducing miscommunications which could lead to mistakes or rework. 

Streamlined and secure enablement

Accessing spatial annotations directly in Teams mobile means fewer apps for administrators to provision, update, and audit.  Users benefit from end-to-end encryption, data loss prevention, and compliance certifications in Teams mobile. These additional security measures protect against unauthorized access to confidential company information.  
 
Infusing spatial capabilities into apps technicians are already using, on devices already in their pockets, is just one way we’re evolving mixed reality workflows at Microsoft. We’re excited about this step towards democratizing mixed reality and bringing advanced and intuitive solutions to more people across industries. 
 
This integration ensures that frontline workers have all their collaboration tools in one place, simplifying workflows and enhancing productivity. Learn more here.

Please Note: Spatial annotations is now generally available directly in the Teams mobile app. The standalone Remote Assist app on mobile devices is being deprecated. Affected users will be notified about this change. 

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