On 25 April 2023 I ran the cVation slot at Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day in Copenhagen. The brief: walk the BizApps partner community through what the Wave 1 2023 release notes meant in practice, where Dynamics 365 was heading on its 20-year anniversary, and how Copilot was about to land across every product on the stack.
Let's explore
Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day setup: 20 years of Dynamics, one platform now
The day opened with a birthday card. Dynamics CRM 1.0 shipped in 2003. By April 2023 the same product line carried the Dynamics 365 brand across Sales, Service, Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain, Commerce, and Business Central, with Dataverse and Power Platform underneath. The point of the timeline was not nostalgia. It was to remind the room that every partner upgrade path in the previous five years had moved customers onto one shared platform, which is exactly what made the Copilot wave possible.
Dataverse 2023 roadmap in three boxes
Microsoft’s Dataverse update for Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day FY23 split the work into three lanes: Approachable Data, Accelerated Delivery, and Built for Enterprise.
- Approachable Data: Dataverse Workspace with easy-as-Excel table experiences, Power Fx beyond formula columns, 3-click Virtual Table wizards over SQL and Excel, a single comprehensive Dataverse connector for Power Automate, and a simpler security UI.
- Accelerated Delivery: dynamic Microsoft Entra (then AAD) security group sync to Teams and business units, Dataflow performance and storage gains, new Power Automate templates, and tighter Microsoft 365 integration for email, meetings, and appointments.
- Built for Enterprise: archival policies for unlimited storage, Bulk Operation APIs and Elastic Tables for pro-dev scale, Power BI and Azure Synapse Link optimisations, plus Risk & Compliance hardening (Lockbox, CMK, network isolation, Managed Identity).
The Q1 2023 Copilot timeline partners had just lived through
Between January and March 2023 Microsoft shipped or announced AI features almost weekly (see Microsoft’s own Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot announcement from 16 March 2023 for the framing). By the time we landed in the room on 25 April the partner channel needed a single map of what was already out and what was coming. The slide below was the map:
- January: Microsoft and OpenAI extended the partnership. Azure OpenAI Service went GA.
- February: Dynamics 365 Viva Sales added GPT. Bing and Edge launched Copilot on GPT-4. Bing Search arrived in Windows 11.
- March: Dynamics 365 Copilot rolled out across Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Customer Insights, Supply Chain, and Business Central. Microsoft 365 Copilot was announced for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva Engage, and Business Chat. Power Platform Copilot landed in Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder.
Demo: AI Builder with Azure OpenAI Service inside a flow
The live demo was the part the room remembered. I walked partners through the new AI Builder GPT template inside Power Automate. The scenario: a shipping clearance email arrives in Outlook with container numbers and registration numbers buried in a paragraph of prose. One template, one instruction (“extract container numbers and registration numbers from the text below”), and the flow returned a clean structured list ready for the next step. No regex, no custom AI model training. Two years later this is the same pattern that powers most “automate the inbox” agents in Copilot Studio.
What I told partners at Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day
Three things, none controversial in hindsight. First, every Dynamics 365 project from then on would have a “where does Copilot fit” question in scope, so price it in. Second, the Dataverse hardening work (Lockbox, CMK, Managed Identity, network isolation) was finally enough to take Power Platform into regulated workloads the room had been losing to bespoke .NET builds. Third, the AI Builder GPT action was the path of least resistance into agentic automation for customers already on Power Automate, and it would compress more billable hours than the headline Dynamics 365 Copilot SKUs. That was the practical Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day takeaway: ship the small AI wins first, then layer the named Copilots on top.
Related Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day posts
- Power Platform Partner Day FY23 (October 2022): the previous partner day, six months earlier, where the “do more with less” framing started.
- Heading to Seattle for Microsoft Build 2023: the developer event three weeks later that filled in the platform story behind Copilot.
- ITU Power Platform 2024: a guest lecture covering where Copilot in Power Apps and AI Builder ended up a year on.
