Dynamics 365 customers now have access to 30 new CRM skills in the new Microsoft Copilot experience.
The pre-built skills are available in Copilot Cowork, Microsoft’s AI workspace for generating business assets like presentations, briefings, summaries and action plans using specialised skills and tools.
Across experiences like Cowork, Autopilot (in private preview) and Code (Frontier programme), the new skills work with over 180 tools across Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – allowing Copilot to use customer information stored in your CRM.
Businesses can also extend the skills into custom agents that support workflows their teams already use.
Commenting on the announcement, Strategy 365 MD, Gavin Nixon, said: “Dynamics 365 remains the source of customer data, business processes and governance, but Copilot is increasingly becoming the place where users interact with that information and turn it into meaningful work.”
The skills are designed to help sales, customer service, and marketing teams complete common business tasks using natural language, without having to manually navigate through multiple CRM screens and records.
Separately, Microsoft has also introduced a Dynamics 365 CRM experience in Microsoft Teams, currently in public preview, which can bring sales and service context such as pre-meeting briefs, case notifications and account updates into connected Teams channels.
Get caught up on Cowork
- What can Copilot Cowork do? Real use cases
- Copilot Cowork and Dynamics 365 – use cases
- Microsoft Build 2026: from Copilot to Autopilot
- Copilot Cowork is now generally available – before you switch it on, read this
- Microsoft 365 Copilot, Cowork, and Scout: which to use?
- Microsoft 365 Copilot trial allows SMEs to test AI for 30 days
- Microsoft reveals new Copilot experience
What is Copilot Cowork? (as of October 2026)
Before exploring the announcement, here’s a reminder of what Cowork is. Originally an agent in Copilot, Cowork is now Microsoft’s ‘delegate work’ experience inside the Microsoft Copilot app, designed to run longer, multi‑step tasks across multiple sources, while showing its progress and asking for approval before taking sensitive actions.
When Cowork was first announced, we tried and tested a few Copilot Cowork and Dynamics 365 use cases and created a customer care call deck from live Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service data, along with a few other examples.
It’s also worth remembering that there’s Copilot Chat (the Microsoft chat most people already use) and there’s the paid Microsoft Copilot app (recently renamed from Microsoft 365 Copilot), which now contains a Cowork tab.
What can the new skills do?
Microsoft says the new skills can help users perform a range of common CRM activities, including:
- Identifying at-risk sales opportunities
- Creating customer engagement strategies
- Preparing for customer meetings and leadership reviews
- Investigating customer service cases
- Researching solutions to customer issues
- Drafting customer responses
- Producing customer summaries and value reports
- Proposing CRM record updates for review
- Tailoring customer outreach using Customer Insights
- Drafting and reviewing on-brand emails
- Launching customer journeys with consent and readiness checks built in
Rather than creating these workflows from scratch, organisations can use Microsoft’s pre-built skills to support common sales, service, and marketing processes.
How do Dynamics 365, MCP tools and skills work together?
Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service and Customer Insights remain the systems where customer data and business processes are managed. MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools then make that data and approved business actions available to AI experiences, while skills provide the task-specific guidance needed to complete particular sales, service, and marketing activities.
Skills are reusable packages of instructions and expertise that help Copilot perform specific tasks in a consistent, structured way. You don’t generally need to specify a Skill in your prompt: Cowork interprets what you’re asking, creates a plan, and automatically selects the appropriate Skills and tools to carry it out. This means users can simply describe the outcome they want in natural language, while Skills provide the specialist methodology behind the scenes.
Cowork already allows organisations to create their own skills but now Microsoft has created a library of CRM-specific skills covering common sales, customer service, and marketing tasks. This gives organisations a starting point rather than requiring them to design every workflow themselves.
Here’s how they work:
Dynamics 365
Remains the source of customer records, opportunities, cases and business data.
MCP tools
Allow AI to access relevant information and approved actions.
Skills
Provide guidance on how particular tasks should be completed and what a useful output should look like.
So, retrieving a customer record is an action performed through a tool. Understanding why a deal has stalled and recommending what to do next is where a skill comes into play. The skill helps Copilot decide what information to consider and how to structure its recommendations.
What does this mean for users?
Rather than switching between programmes and records to create business assets like meeting notes or presentations, users can now describe what they need in natural language, and Copilot pulls together the relevant Dynamics 365 information before producing a useful output.
Examples include:
- Pipeline analysis based on Dynamics 365 Sales data
- Identifying opportunities that may be at risk
- Creating 30-day customer engagement plans
- Preparing executive review presentations
- Summarising customer service cases
- Prioritising support requests
The result is that users can spend less time searching for information and more time acting upon it.
How Cowork, Code and Autopilot fit into the picture
With Cowork able to prepare complete deliverables using Dynamics 365 customer data, organisations can use AI to move work towards a decision faster. For more advanced scenarios, Code can be used to build reusable interactive tools and applications around these CRM skills, while Autopilot is designed to handle recurring tasks and workflows in the background. As Microsoft puts it, “Dynamics 365 remains the system of action for customer data and business processes, while teams gain ready-to-use expertise where they work”.
Cowork
Cowork is designed to help users complete work and create deliverables using information from connected systems.
For example, a sales user could ask Copilot to analyse their pipeline or prepare briefing materials for an executive review. These outputs are generated from Dynamics 365 data without the user needing to manually assemble the information themselves.
Code
Code allows organisations to build reusable interactive tools and applications using the same customer data and skills. CRM skills can be used as part of interactive solutions that help users investigate pipeline opportunities or analyse customer information in a consistent way.
Autopilot
Autopilot focuses on recurring tasks and workflows such as monitoring business information in the background and triggering actions or notifications when specified conditions are met. This allows organisations to automate routine activities while keeping appropriate governance controls in place.
Examples of the new CRM skills
Here are a few of the new pre-built skills included in the release…
Sales Skills
- Pipeline Prioritiser
- Deal Rescue
- Customer Engagement Strategy
- Competitive Strategy
- Business Case Composer
- Deal Desk
These skills are designed to help sales teams understand risks, identify priorities and prepare customer-facing plans and recommendations.
Customer Service Skills
- Case Triage
- Answer Research
- Draft Customer Reply
- Case Preparation Brief
- Customer Brief
- Value Metrics
These skills help service teams identify urgent issues, research solutions and prepare responses more efficiently.
Customer Insights Skills
- Customer Outreach
- Email Content Advisor
- Customer Brief & Value Metrics
These skills are designed to help marketing teams create audience segments, develop customer journeys, draft and validate email content, and access unified customer profiles and value metrics.
What about governance and security?
Microsoft has said users should be able to distinguish clearly between recommendations made by AI, actions approved by users, and changes that are actually made within business systems.
These new capabilities do not automatically grant permission to update records or send communications without appropriate authorisation. Where a skill proposes a CRM record update, the user can review it before any change is made.
For organisations exploring Code and Autopilot scenarios, it’s important that IT teams consider which actions are authorised, where review processes are required and how unsuccessful actions should be reported.
Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 permissions remain in place and access to the plugins and skills continues to be governed by administrator settings, licensing, organisational policies and user permissions.
Before investing in AI, use our free AI Readiness Checklist to determine whether your organisation has the right foundations in place. Tools such as Microsoft Copilot can surface information that users already have permission to access across Microsoft 365. If permissions are too broad or sensitive information is not properly controlled, this could expose data that users should not ordinarily see.
The checklist provides an indicative readiness score, high-level recommendations and practical next steps, helping you identify potential risks before progressing to a detailed assessment or wider AI adoption.
Book a free call with us to go through the AI Readiness Checklist.
Our view on this announcement
Speaking following the skills announcement, Gavin said: “In our opinion, Microsoft’s approach recognises a practical challenge faced by many businesses. While AI can be extremely powerful, most users don’t have the time or expertise to design highly structured prompts, custom skills or complex workflows. By providing ready-made CRM skills for common sales, service and marketing scenarios, Microsoft appears to be reducing the amount of setup required while helping users achieve more consistent outcomes.
“We’ve been helping businesses implement Dynamics 365 for almost a decade now. Previously, users often had to navigate Dynamics 365 dashboards, records and reports themselves. With Cowork and these new CRM skills, they can ask questions in natural language, receive recommendations, create plans and even prepare materials without leaving the Copilot experience. That’s become the main business application for getting work done.”