DynamicsMinds isn’t just another conference. Literally every attendee you’d ask about it would tell you how unique the event is in both its surroundings and atmosphere. I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to reimagine the terminology used when referring to DynamicsMinds: it’s not a conference — it’s a festival.

Out of the thousand plus attendees, one in five is also a speaker at the event. Despite there being a big emphasis on the ERP side of Dynamics 365, even for a Power Platform guy like me there were just too many interesting sessions to choose from. In this week’s newsletter I’ll share the interesting bits about my visit to Portoroz, Slovenia.

My session this year was titled “What license does your agent really need?” I submitted the session topic back in December, after Microsoft had announced the preview of Agent 365 at Ignite 2025. I figured that by May the licensing model of the agentic employee story would probably be public information. Well, some answers were provided in the May 1st GA launch but some of them only sparked further questions to explore. At least that meant I had a lot to talk about during the 45 minute slot.

I didn’t want to only show slides but also some live agent license consumption data in my tenant. Vibe-coding should make it quick to spin up new demo artifacts, but since Copilot Studio does not yet have CLI support, generating Copilot Credits consumption turned out to be quite laborious. What was super simple, though, was taking the raw CSV reports from PPAC about entitlement consumption and throwing them into Copilot Cowork. In less than 15 minutes, I had a demo-ready Excel workbook with multiple tabs and charts to illustrate the different dimensions of agent billing, in a far more useful format than anything in PPAC could deliver.

I always try to attend a few F&O sessions when I get the chance, even if my hands-on experience with the product is non-existent. Licensing enforcement has been a hot topic in the Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations domain for over a year now. In the session by André Arnaud de Calavon and Fatih Demirci, I saw how many variables there are around security roles, privileges and duties that impact the level of user license required. Whew! On a lighter note, André’s slide about Standard vs. Premium licenses helped me discover the absolute cheapest way to buy additional Dataverse capacity — which is getting 10 F&O Premium seats, even if you’re not using the product.

The word of the year 2026 for Microsoft business apps community has to be MCP. I lost count of how many MCP related sessions I attended, but I’m pretty sure you could have assembled one entire track out of those for the three-day event. That’s not a bad thing, considering how often the protocol name is used as a simple “sure, we support that via MCP” way without drilling into the practical details and gaps.

Juan Antonio Tomás and Oriol Ribes showed a great “what to use where” slide on the different options to keep in mind. After MCP first became popular in the developer community, soon some were already saying “MCP is dead” and doubling down on CLI’s instead. In reality, you’ll most likely need to use both MCP servers, CLI’s, skill definitions and traditional REST API calls to develop and run solutions built for business apps use cases in the enterprise.

And even if you’re not a code-first developer, the role of MCP servers is crucial to understand also in the GUI context of tools like Copilot Studio. Angeliki Patsiavou and Sean Astrakhan demonstrated how it makes a difference whether your agent is accessing data through knowledge stored in Dataverse, the traditional Dataverse connector or the new Dataverse MCP server. Crazy stuff. And that’s even before we talk about the differences between the Sydney and Samba orchestrators behind your Copilot agent.

Someone had to say it, and I’m glad Ivan Ficko was the brave one to put up the slide: “Canvas apps are dead”. Then, I made a post about it on LinkedIn late at night, went to sleep and woke up to 100+ comments and growing. It reminded me of why I picked this graphic to be my company logo:

The original framing for Ivan’s slide was how Power Apps code apps have gradually matured to a point where it is hard to justify trying to build net-new canvas apps anymore. You can even take an existing canvas solution, point GitHub Copilot to it, and ask it to build a proper React app out of its YAML definition. At that point, none of the frustrating limitations of canvas apps apply anymore. Instead, you’re free to treat it as a code-first artifact that any LLM will know how to develop further, create test suites for, validate via built-in agentic browser in VS Code, and so on. All while still leveraging the managed platform and the familiar connectors.

Canvas apps truly have lost their place in my world. And I ain’t sad about this. Sure, the idea of having to prompt my apps into life via a tiny chat window rather than a visually rich WYSIWYG editing experience is not that attractive. Yet the trade-offs we’d need to make by sticking to canvas apps and hoping that Microsoft would modernize the tooling is just too big when compared to what AI coding agents can do for you.

With apps based on codegen, I can stop being the “old man yells at Microsoft” type of a guy who curses all the fine features the platform vendor has left to rot for years. Now, it is up to me to build the solutions the way I want them. I can move to yelling at my coding agents and blaming only myself for not being able to create the outcome that I envisioned. That is a mighty empowering feeling.

For instance, if I’m not happy with what the conference apps and websites allow me to do, I can just roll my own. So, on my way from Helsinki to Venice to Portoroz, I spent a couple of hours putting together a personal DM26 app that served not only as a session catalog but also as a mobile-first business card app that presented who I am and what my activities at the event were going to be. The first part was done on my laptop before boarding the plane, the finishing touches like QR code and content optimization I prompted via Claude Code while sitting in a shuttle bus hurling down the Italian autostrada.

Since I have also given up PowerPoint and moved to creating my presentations with Slidev and Markdown files, I realized the same GitHub repo could serve as the slide player. If I had wanted to, I could have just run the full presentation from the GitHub Pages website that the attendees also had access to. But since I didn’t trust the venue Wi-Fi, I launched a local web server from my laptop with a shell script that Codex has prepared for me. From there on, it’s just interacting with a web app like in any other tool. These things will sound very complex, until you just go ahead and do it — at which point you’ll be “oh, that’s all there was to it?”

If it was a Microsoft organized event, the framing of AI would have surely been a lot more sugarcoated. But at DM26, thanks to what the organizers prioritize as the important values and topic to discuss, there was plenty of room for critical discussion on what’s happening in the world today.

I was a panelist at two sessions covering this theme. The first one, “Don’t Look Up: How AI Is Redesigning Work, Roles, and Learning”, went right into the dystopic side of what may happen if machines replace human workers. Many fear how especially junior employees at Dynamics partner companies will have a hard time getting into the business. Personally, I trust the kids will be alright with finding their way and place in the AI-infused working environment. The bigger risk is with middle management who doesn’t realize the structures and barriers at work will come tumbling down as LLMs democratize the act of building software and give on-demand bespoke tools for any information processing need.

The other panel, “From SaaS to OaaS – What Happens When AI Does the Work”, was focused on the partner business model impact. Seat-based SaaS licensing was a goldmine for companies like Salesforce and Microsoft for two decades, but now we can no longer ignore the inference costs from using LLMs as part of the products. Will consultants need to move from Time & Material to Time & Tokens billing, or commit to a true outcome-based pricing model? I think we’re not there yet, regardless of how vendors like to use OaaS and other fuzzy credit concepts to obfuscate the actual cost of services.

Being the only solopreneur in the partner panel, my perspective was of course quite different from a typical Dynamics company — or even a customer org. What I’ve seen happen with coding agents in the past six months and how they’ve transformed my own work is pretty wild. The big concern is no more “can I do this” but “should I do this”? Pacing yourself with all these possibilities unlocked by Claude & co. requires a lot of intentional self-management. One piece of advice I gave to the audience was to also be very open about the things that didn’t work with your AI experiments. Failing is an integral part of how humans learn new things. Let’s not rob ourselves this opportunity to collectively learn from mistakes by masking it all under the fabricated success stories that AI chatbots are so good at producing. Honesty and transparency are more important now than ever before.

Accepting that sometimes the tools you have built are no longer the right ones for the job is one example of honesty. When a company like Microsoft chooses to create their keynote UI mock-ups of their upcoming products not with MS technology but by using an AI app generator like Lovable, that’s a sign of not being afraid to admit that maybe Power Platform isn’t the best choice for every scenario. Olof Hedin from Lovable said that Microsoft staff are already broadly using the product for internal needs. It reminded me of how MS engineering also embraced Claude Code to improve their agentic software delivery capabilities. When the world moves at the speed of AI, there’s no room for the “not invented here” syndrome.

What’s the secret formula that makes DynamicsMinds such a stand-out event? I think it’s simply this: the people organizing it truly care about the people attending it. There’s no other way to explain the attention to detail and the passion that shows in everything around the event. This is a virtuous cycle that in turn makes the attendees feel welcome and appreciated, thus opening up their minds for encounters with old and new friends from the community. And then, magic happens.

Like with any festival, the all-star line-up is a key selling point for making people want to purchase their ticket. The way speakers in particular are taken care of at DM is outstanding. I truly couldn’t think of anything more that the organizers could do in terms of hospitality — and yet I bet the standards will be exceeded next year again.

Thanks to all the folks I had a chance to interact with in Portoroz this year. And for those that didn’t make it there, be sure to reserve the last week of May 2027 in your calendars already!