September 2026 was when Microsoft said the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform items would arrive on the new AI at Work roadmap for real. As we’ve entered October now, it feels like the logical moment to evaluate how the “One Roadmap” initiative has changed the state of communication and product development transparency and predictability for Microsoft business applications customers.

For my earlier perspectives on what the end of release waves means, check back on this issue from August:

The earlier Release Planner site and the MS Learn pages for release wave documentation are telling visitors “Release Plans will no longer be published starting in September 2026” and that “Release Planner retires by November 15, 2026”. In this week’s newsletter issue, I will go through the new information sources available and evaluate how things compare with the former practices with release waves.

If there are no more waves, that also removes the biannual launch events showcasing new features. Where is this information broadcast these days? I’ve attended a couple of the post-wave webinar sessions that presumably are meant to replace the April and October online events. At least this is where the banner on the AI at Work roadmap site is telling customers to go.

This week, at the “AI at Work Webinar: Copilot, Apps, & Agents”, the latest one-pager for the roadmap highlights was presented. The live version with the latest info is available via the short URL https://aka.ms/AIatWork/RoadmapandResources.

The session itself consisted mainly of demos going through the expected functionality of both Copilot Code and Autopilot. Pretty interesting to watch, but unfortunately the marketing team has decided these won’t be conveniently available on YouTube to watch without registering for the events. In the most Microsoftian way imaginable, there is a new portal where you have to register first, to then be able to register for the actual Discovery Sessions. Because portals.

I’m unsure if the sessions under this portal will cover the more technical details that existing Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers and partners want to see. So far, it’s just all been Copilot and more Copilot. If you’re a person that is managing line-of-business applications like CRM systems, you would not have learned anything directly related to those from these monthly webinars.

We haven’t yet seen any significant changes to the functionality of what used to be the Microsoft 365 roadmap and is now branded as the AI at Work roadmap. It remains a painful user experience for anyone who isn’t looking for marketing autoplay videos and instead wants to scroll past to the actual roadmap items list. This is a clear step back compared to the earlier Release Planner site.

The positive thing about this site is the Microsoft Release Communications MCP Server offering the data via an API, so that we can build our own apps & agents on the data. That was of course possible already with the Release Planner site built on Power Pages, too, but not as clearly advertised as a documented route. This is where the new roadmap model has genuinely managed to improve transparency.

As I mentioned in the earlier article, I’ve built a Frontier version of my existing releaseplans.net site to prepare for the new data sources. While I’m not yet making it the default version until I see how Microsoft actually publishes data, the Frontier version is running and now has a new key feature: “Show BizApps only”. This switch removes all the other MS products like Excel, Edge etc. from the list and just gives the apps you and I are likely to care about.

Let’s take advantage of the MRC MCP server in our analysis, too. I used Claude to pull data about BizApps products listed on the Release Planner and check how well they are now covered on the AI at Work roadmap. The image below shows the overview, but you can also view it as a web page here.

Some products are completely missing from the roadmap, but many of those absences can be explained by Microsoft’s habit of reimagining products every few years. More notable M.I.A. casualties are Power Pages, D365 Customer Insights Data, and Dynamics 365 HR.

When it comes to the number of items on the roadmap, it looks a lot worse. Surprisingly, the one product that has decided to stick with naming its releases with the deprecated “2026 release wave 2” format has the most roadmap items: Business Central. 70 out of the 80 roadmap items dropped there with a “launched” status, showing most of this stuff was already done & dusted and thus easy to report on.

Aside from Field Service, the rest of the Dynamics 365 products are hibernating. There are a few individual items on the roadmap here and there. If you’re a customer who’s paying $105 per user per month for D365 Sales Enterprise and you’re thinking “should we just vibe code our own CRM instead of paying for these licenses”, that one single roadmap item for Sales isn’t going to convince you to remain on the Microsoft first-party products for long.

Platform services like Dataverse don’t have a single planned feature listed on the roadmap, if we ignore that one related item about F&O migration from LCS to PPAC. One could easily be led to think that all development has been put on hold. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth, given how one of the most requested features ever just dropped as a preview for Dataverse: filter-based security.

This is just one example of the gap between what’s happening in product development and what Microsoft communicates to customers.

Just because there aren’t many items on the roadmap doesn’t mean the products aren’t changing all the time. Features keep arriving across the board, beyond just Copilot, showing that there are investments being made in the business apps. The only thing that’s missing is upfront communication on what exactly the product teams are planning to launch and when.

Let’s take the single-slide summary shown above from the October webinar as an example. Given how compact the information shown there is, surely Microsoft has ensured that these highlighted items are on the AI at Work roadmap? As if! Out of the 20 items, 8 cannot be found even directionally on the roadmap. The list below highlights seven with no entry in either roadmap source, plus two with only a directional roadmap match. These are announcements from slides gated behind event registration, which is itself gated behind portal registration: