We wanted to know what happens when you connect Copilot Cowork and Dynamics 365 following our last blog, What can Copilot Cowork do? This article is a follow-up (so we’d advise reading our previous blog first), and in this blog, we once again tested it on our own data – rather than repeating the marketing.
We cover three real examples: a weekly team meeting turned into a recap deck for a colleague who was on leave, a customer care call deck prepped from live Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service data, and a rough ‘Order of Magnitude’ project proposal pulled together from Dynamics 365 data, an Excel version of the proposal, meeting notes, and internal documents. We have removed the customer names and stripped out private details, but these use cases illustrate how powerful Cowork has become when connected to your CRM.
Please note: As of writing this article in early June 2026, Cowork is still part of Microsoft’s Frontier preview programme. Microsoft has not confirmed a general availability date yet, so treat everything below as ‘what it does in preview’, not ‘the finished article’.
It’s also worth remembering that there’s Copilot Chat (the Microsoft chat most people already use), there’s Cowork connected to your Microsoft 365 data (using Work IQ and Microsoft Graph), and now there’s Cowork connected to Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365.
Cowork takes you on a journey and lets you see the map
Out of the box, Cowork already writes, summarises, researches, builds decks, docs and spreadsheets across your Microsoft 365 content.
The older way of wiring Copilot into a business system gave you one answer from a few sources, with very little sight of how it got there. Cowork works across several sources in a single go, takes multiple steps to finish the job, and lets you watch it reason as it works. Give it a few sources and you’ll see them line up in the references panel. Then a plan appears: a step-by-step list of what Cowork intends to do to reach the result you asked for.
As it works, you can open up its thinking and watch the route it's actually taking, not just wait for the destination.
If it heads down the wrong path because it’s misread the brief, you can cut in mid-task and put it right. We’ll go into how to brief it later on, but you’re better off describing the finished result in as much detail as you can and letting Cowork plan the way there.
How is Cowork connected to Dynamics 365?
You connect Dynamics 365 to Cowork via plugins. Here’s how it works: it’s all connected through Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard connection that lets Cowork and Dynamics 365 talk to each other, closer to a universal connection than a custom connection for every app.
Plugins are the packaged bridges to your business systems, each one bundling the skills and connectors Cowork needs to work with that system. Then Work IQ is the layer of intelligence that sits on top of Microsoft Graph, the underlying map of your people, files, and activity, helping Cowork understand context like who you work with and what you are working on.
- To connect Cowork to Dynamics 365, a few things need to be in place:
- You'll need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.
- Your organisation needs to be enrolled in Microsoft's Frontier programme.
- Then because Cowork runs on Anthropic's models, the setting for ‘AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors’ may also need switching on in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
- And, of course, you'll need Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, or both.
We covered the full setup in the FAQ of our last blog.
Once that’s set up, finding the Dynamics 365 plugins is straightforward. In the chat window, select the + icon (hover over it and it reads “add attachments”), choose Manage plugins, then Browse plugins. If your organisation has Dynamics 365 Sales or Customer Service, they show up in the catalogue. They sit next to other Microsoft plugins like Fabric IQ and third-party ones such as Miro, monday.com, and Morningstar, so it is an open ecosystem rather than a closed Microsoft set.
Two small things are worth knowing. First, switch on only the plugins you need for the job in front of you. Every plugin you enable is another door into your data, so a leaner setup is quicker. Second, if your business runs more than one Dynamics 365 environment, a live one and a sandbox for example, Cowork will ask which one to connect to before it starts.
What can you do with Cowork connected to Dynamics 365?
Example one: a weekly meeting becomes a recap deck
One of our team missed the weekly catch-up, so we asked Cowork to build them a recap. It took the meeting transcript and one of our branded templates, it then looked at previous but relevant blog content records from Dynamics 365 Sales, and produced a tidy deck they could read in five minutes instead of scrubbing through an hour of recording.
Where the old approach was a closed box, where you sent a prompt and had no idea what it was trying or how it was deciding, Cowork shows its working. We could see it read the transcript, read Dynamics 365 Sales data, pick out the decisions and observations, and assemble the slides in order.
We like that with Cowork, you can see its reasoning, and you’re not handed a result and asked to take it on faith. You can follow along, catch a wrong turn early, and steer. For anyone who has been caught out by a confident but wrong AI answer, that is the feature that earns Cowork a place in the working week.
Example two: a customer care call deck, built from live Dynamics 365 Sales & Customer Service data
Before a regular check-in with a long-standing client, we asked Cowork to prepare a care call agenda. Since it was connected to Dynamics 365, in one pass it pulled together an account snapshot, the licences they hold and when those renew, their support entitlement and remaining hours, the key contacts on the account, and recent support cases, including one that had been cancelled. It also gathered every blog we had published since the previous call, so we could flag anything worth sharing with them.
That information did not come from one system. The account and licence detail lived in Dynamics 365 Sales, while the support cases and entitlement lived in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Cowork drew on both in the same prompt and stitched them into a single agenda using the PowerPoint skill.
Bear in mind that the output is only ever as good as the data underneath it. If your Dataverse records are messy or out of date, the result will inherit those gaps. Clean data in, useful prep out. Something to bear in mind too: a single query returns up to 50 rows, so for anything larger, it will pull the data in multiple batches of 50 records.
Note: if your business data needs a serious strategic sort out, see our our data migration and integration services.
Example three: a project proposal slide deck, drafted in minutes
The third test was the most demanding. We asked Cowork to draft a proposal slide deck (Rough Order of Magnitude) for a potential project with a customer. That document normally costs a consultant the best part of a morning (or more): pulling data from Dynamics 365 Sales, the notes from two or three meetings, lots of emails, and a stack of internal reference documents, then shaping the lot into something a client could actually read and understand.
Cowork wove all of that into a single branded deck. It laid out our proposal for a model-driven Power App built on Dataverse, set out indicative costs for the first year, and listed the assumptions, the risks, and a sensible set of next steps. As a starting point it was genuinely strong, and it spared us hours of blank-page wrestling.
It is also exactly the kind of work where you keep your hand firmly on the wheel. The figures were a reasonable first pass, not a quote. The scope was a reasonable first sketch, not a signed statement of work. On anything that touches pricing, professional judgement, or a commitment to a client, Cowork is the draft and never the final word. Treat it as a head start which needs checking, never the finished article (but close), and you’re looking at a very powerful tool.
Turning a good prompt into something you can reuse
A pattern shows up once you have lived with Cowork for a while. The prompts that produce the best work are the ones that describe, in detail, what a finished result should look like. Cowork can take a very large brief, up to around 16,000 characters, so there is room to spell things out. Rather than ‘write a care call agenda for X Client’, you set out the sections you want, the tone, what to include and what to leave off, and what a good version looks like when it is done. The more precisely you describe the finished article, the closer the first draft lands.
Once you have a prompt that works, you do not want to rebuild it every time. Cowork lets you save it as a custom skill: a short Markdown file, a SKILL.md, that lives in your OneDrive under Documents/Cowork. Write it once and it becomes a reusable instruction you can call on whenever that job comes round again.
For information about sharing these skills with others, see our FAQ section below.
What Cowork and Dynamics 365 means for your business and what to sort first
Cowork is at its best taking you from a blank page to a solid ‘mostly there’ first draft, when it can reach the right data.
That same reach is the thing to handle with care. As Gavin Nixon, Strategy 365 Managing Director, puts it: “Cowork works with the permissions you already hold. If your access to files, SharePoint sites, and Dynamics 365 records is broader than it ought to be, Cowork will happily work across all of it, and so will anyone else on your team. As you can imagine, that means your permissions must ideally be reviewed before you switch tools like this on.
“We know you’re keen to get stuck in with AI, but we’d advise taking the time to tidy up access first, then connect Cowork, not the other way around.”
Microsoft Purview captures Copilot activity, Cowork and its plugins included, in its audit logs, so you can see who did what. Paired with sensible permissions, that gives you the safeguard and the paper trail.
So, what can Copilot Cowork do with Dynamics 365?
Quite a lot, on the evidence of our own testing. It can turn a meeting into a usable recap, prepare a customer call from live Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service data, and draft a project scope that would otherwise swallow half a day. It does all of this across several systems at once, and it shows you how it is working.
It thankfully does not replace thinking. All our examples required a person to think in the first place to create the input source, then again to check, correct, and take ownership of the outputs.
Used that way, with clean data and tight permissions behind it, Cowork hands your team back the hours that used to disappear into gathering information, and lets them spend those hours on the judgement that genuinely needs a person.
If you’re considering connecting Cowork to your Dynamics 365 environment, the smart first move is preparation. Strategy 365 helps businesses get their permissions, data, and governance into shape, so that when you do switch it on, it works as an advantage rather than a liability. If that is on your radar, contact our team before you open the door. Call 01782 916920.
How do you connect Copilot Cowork to Dynamics 365?
To connect Cowork to Dynamics 365, a few things need to be in place:
- You’ll need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.
- Your organisation needs to be enrolled in Microsoft’s Frontier programme.
- Then because Cowork runs on Anthropic’s models, the setting for ‘AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors’ may also need switching on in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
- And, of course, you’ll need Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, or both.
We covered the full setup in the FAQ of our last blog.
Once that’s set up, in the chat window, select the + icon, choose Manage plugins, then Browse plugins. If your organisation has Dynamics 365 Sales or Customer Service, they show up in the catalogue.
Can Cowork see your Dynamics 365 Customer Service cases?
Yes, when the Dynamics 365 Customer Service plugin is switched on and your account has the right permissions. In our testing it pulled support cases, entitlements, and remaining support hours, and combined them with Sales data in the same prompt. You do need the appropriate Customer Service roles for it to reach that data.
Does Cowork respect your existing Dynamics 365 permissions?
It does. Cowork works within the permissions you already hold through Entra ID and Dataverse, and switching on a plugin does not widen that boundary. It can only reach data you can already reach. That is also why we push so hard on tidying permissions before you connect: Cowork will work across everything you have access to, so the cleaner that access, the safer the result.
Can you share Cowork skills with your team?
Yes, you can share Cowork skills, but there’s currently no simple ‘share button’. A common workaround is a shared folder of skills and a prompt library that colleagues copy from. It works to a fashion, but Cowork’s skill discovery only scans your own OneDrive, so a file sitting in a shared folder will not appear in someone else’s Cowork on its own – you have to drop it in there, or ask to use a skill from a shared folder.
The official supported route is to package the skills, and any connectors, into a plugin, which an admin then deploys to the whole organisation or to specific groups from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Build the skill once, wrap it in a plugin, and the whole team gets it properly instead of through a copy-and-paste chain. However, this is a more technical route for a developer or your Microsoft Partner to look at.
Which Claude model powers Cowork?
Cowork runs on Anthropic’s Claude models. Two are worth knowing about: Sonnet, the everyday model that handles most work quickly, and Opus, the heavier one used for harder reasoning.
Is Copilot Cowork generally available yet?
As of early June 2026, no. It is part of Microsoft’s Frontier preview programme, and Microsoft has not confirmed a general availability date.