Customer Insights: Journeys 2025 Wave 2

Key insights

• Release window: The Customer Insights - Journeys 2025 Release Wave 2 rolls out from October 2025 through March 2026, bringing major AI-led updates that help teams deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences.
  
• Copilot and agents (GA): Copilot is generally available and embedded across Journeys to offer generative AI help—automating routine tasks, suggesting journey steps, and speeding campaign creation without deep technical skill.
  
• AI-powered personalization & orchestration: The release uses AI to craft tailored interactions across channels, trigger actions for the "moments that matter," and optimize engagement and conversion in real time.
  
• Real-time unified customer profiles: Integration with Customer Insights Data enriches profiles instantly, enabling deeper personalization and timely interventions based on up-to-date customer behavior.
  
• Sales-marketing alignment & pipeline boost: AI agents help qualify leads, reduce silos between marketing and sales, and accelerate pipeline growth with clearer, measurable outcomes.
  
• Copilot voice conversations & filter on values: New features include copilot-powered voice conversations for conversational engagement and improved "filter on values" controls for precise audience targeting; admins get a mix of auto-enabled features and configurable settings to ease adoption.
  

Overview of the Video

In a recent YouTube video, Heidi Neuhauser [MVP] walked viewers through Microsoft’s forthcoming update, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys 2025 Release Wave 2 (see Dynamics CRM), scheduled to roll out from October 2025 through March 2026. She explained how the release layers generative intelligence into customer journey orchestration by embedding Copilot and AI agents directly into workflows. Consequently, teams can more quickly design and execute personalized engagements at scale, using real-time signals to act on the "moments that matter." Overall, Neuhauser framed the update as an acceleration of automation and personalization across marketing and sales functions.

Key Feature Highlights

First, the video highlighted enhanced AI-powered personalization and orchestration that let organizations target critical touchpoints with richer, context-aware actions. Furthermore, those capabilities use unified customer profiles to trigger interactions dynamically, which helps marketers and salespeople react when opportunities appear. In addition, Neuhauser demonstrated new voice-enabled experiences and filtering controls, such as the ability to filter on values and carry out Copilot-powered voice conversations. As a result, the platform aims to reduce friction in campaign creation while improving responsiveness to customer behavior.

The release also promises improved pipeline management and tighter sales-marketing alignment by enabling AI agents to assist with lead qualification and collaboration. Moreover, embedded assistants propose next-best actions, automate routine tasks (Power Automate), and guide users through setting up complex journeys without deep technical skills (Power Apps). These productivity enhancements intend to shorten time-to-value and make advanced orchestration accessible to more team members. However, the benefits depend on proper configuration and data quality to realize consistent outcomes.

Copilot, Voice, and Agent Integration

Neuhauser devoted part of the video to explaining how Copilot moves from preview to broader availability and how voice interactions are gaining prominence within journeys. Specifically, the Copilot-powered voice conversations enable agents to interact with customers via natural language while the system captures contextual data to inform next steps. Consequently, organizations can design smoother conversational flows that feed directly into customer profiles and downstream actions. Yet, such conversational AI requires clear governance, training data, and monitoring to avoid inconsistent or unsafe responses.

Additionally, the agent model enables hands-off orchestration for some repetitive processes, freeing teams to focus on strategy rather than execution. In practice, designers can combine human oversight with autonomous agents to scale predictable tasks while preserving human judgment for complex decisions. Nevertheless, this hybrid approach introduces tradeoffs: it reduces manual work but increases the need for oversight, testing, and operational rules to prevent automation errors. Therefore, teams must balance autonomy with control to capture the benefits safely and reliably.

Real-Time Profiles and Data Integration

A central pillar of the update is the connection to Customer Insights Data (integrations such as Microsoft Dataverse), which supplies unified, near-real-time profiles to inform journey triggers and personalization. By enriching journeys with fast, comprehensive customer signals, organizations can react to behavior and context more precisely than before. Consequently, personalization becomes more timely and relevant, increasing the likelihood of positive customer outcomes. However, the quality of personalization remains dependent on data completeness, identity resolution, and integration fidelity.

Moreover, Neuhauser underscored that integrating diverse data sources improves insights but also raises operational complexity for IT and data teams. For example, organizations must decide how to prioritize data hygiene, latency, and privacy controls while maintaining responsive experiences. These decisions involve tradeoffs between the speed of activation and the thoroughness of identity stitching, so stakeholders should align on acceptable risk and performance targets. Ultimately, a pragmatic approach to data governance ensures the platform supports both real-time needs and compliance requirements. (See Power BI for analytics and reporting guidance.)

Administration, Adoption, and Practical Challenges

The video noted that certain features will be enabled by default, whereas others require administrator configuration, which influences adoption speed and customization. As a result, IT and business leaders must coordinate on rollout plans that include enabling appropriate controls, training users, and monitoring usage. Furthermore, Neuhauser suggested that without careful planning, organizations risk underutilizing AI assistants or misconfiguring journey logic, which could reduce trust in the system. Therefore, structured change management is critical to maximize the value of these new capabilities.

Finally, Neuhauser addressed common tradeoffs such as balancing speed against accuracy, and automation against human oversight, while highlighting the need for measurable objectives. For instance, teams should define clear KPIs for personalization and pipeline outcomes, then iterate on models and orchestration based on results. In conclusion, the video paints a view of the 2025 Release Wave 2 as a step toward more intelligent, real-time customer engagement, but it also cautions that success depends on data quality, governance, and thoughtful adoption strategies.

Keywords

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