What Is A Release Wave?

It’s that time of year again where Microsoft announce the details of the first release wave of 2025.

These release waves are available twice a year. One comes in April and another in September. The details for the release wave often get released a few months prior to their general availability. There are 3 stages to this release wave.

The stages of release are:

• Early access
• Public Preview
• General Availability

For the most part, you’ll see the functionality become available to you in the general availability, but in some cases, you may get early access to the features.

What does this mean?

This means that Microsoft are releasing updates to Customer Insights Data that will further enhance the existing functionality, so you may see some new buttons, or new features you can leverage, so it’s always worth keeping an eye on what is coming from the wave release. The date of public preview varies for each feature, some will begin in March, but for others you’ll need to wait until August 2025.

General availability often begins to roll out in June 2025 but will scatter through to November 2025.

Overview Of Customer Insights – Data

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data is Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP). This allows people to transform their organization by empowering marketing, sales and service professionals.

With the highest level of data governance and compliance with an enterprise level CDP build on Microsoft Azure, you’ll be able to maintain full control over your customer data.

If you aren’t currently leveraging the power of Customer Insights – Data, then get in touch and we can showcase the ability to you.

What To Expect & When

This release wave is broken down into three topics:

• Copilot & AI Innovation
• Faster Time To Insights
• Personalized Customer Experiences

Copilot & AI Innovation

Personalizing your customer interactions is essential in the modern market as the demands that we see from our customers and prospects increases and the ability of the technology we use continues to evolve.

In this release wave, you will be able to get responses grounded in Customer Insights when chatting with Copilot and an increase in the accuracy of autonomous agents by grounding them. Ultimately this means that the impact of Copilot on your day-to-day activities is increasing constantly. These features will reach general availability in July 2025 and September 2025.

Faster Time To Insights

Making better use of time is everyone’s goal, after all… time is money. This release wave enhances the time to get the data you need, resulting in more time to action the other tasks you need to do.

You’ll soon be able to use Microsoft OneLake as a data source, although the general availability date for this is still TBC. In June you’ll be able to accelerate your time to insights with data in a Delta Lake format. A Delta Lake is the optimized storage later that provides the base layer for tables in a Lakehouse. So, you’ll see the time here reduced. Later in the year you will see a sync between Customer data and insights to OneLake as well as faster insights by choosing tables and data format to sync.

Personalized Customer Experiences

Some super refined technical marketing campaigns can look at previous interactions with a user, to tailor your communications with them going forward. But with this release wave, the complexity of this is being removed and brought to everyone in Customer Insights.

As of June 2025, you’ll be able to use behavioural data, collected by Customer Insights, to create segments and measures. This means that you’ll understand who interacts with which campaign and use this information to tailor the campaigns going forward.

From A/B testing content types, to re-engaging the cold leads in your data base, this is a huge step forward for Customer Insights, bringing the hyper-personalization required in the modern market to the standard functionality in Customer Insights.

If you want to learn more about hyper-personalization in your marketing, or perhaps learn more about the differences between a Data Lake, Delta Lake and a Lakehouse, then please feel free to get in touch today.