Power Platform News Today October 2025

This fall October 2025, the Microsoft Power Platform community is buzzing with anticipation for the Power Platform Community Conference 2025 (PPCC), a 3-day event in Las Vegas (Oct 28–30, 2025). Now in its fourth year, PPCC has become the annual gathering for low-code enthusiasts, IT leaders, citizen developers, and partners to celebrate creativity and cutting-edge tech.

The theme this year is “Speed of Innovation,” spotlighting the rapid momentum enabled by AI “agents” and low-code transformation. Attendees will get a full week of action: two days of pre-conference workshops (Oct 26–27) to deep-dive into hands-on labs, three days of keynotes and breakouts, and even bonus workshops post-conference on Oct 31. With over 100 speakers and 150+ sessions covering Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, and the new Copilot/agent tools, there’s content for everyone from newbies to seasoned pros.

The conference vibe is both casual and electric – think of it as a low-code homecoming. You can start your day learning the latest Power Platform roadmap updates in one session and by afternoon be swapping ideas with MVPs in the community lounge. Microsoft’s product teams and Customer Advisory Team (CAT) are heavily involved, so attendees hear directly from the engineers and leaders shaping the products. In fact, several Microsoft Corporate Vice Presidents are headlining PPCC 2025: Charles Lamanna (Biz Apps & Industry AI) will discuss how autonomous agents are reshaping business processes; Kim Manis (Power BI & Fabric) is unveiling new analytics and data visualization innovations; Ryan Cunningham (Power Platform apps) will demo how Copilot and agents are transforming app development; Nirav Shah (Dataverse) will share how data and AI go hand-in-hand; and Sangya Singh (Power Automate) will showcase the latest in intelligent automation. It’s a who’s-who of Microsoft’s business apps braintrust, all on one stage.

One exciting new addition this year is an “Agent Hack” hackathon on-site. On October 29, makers of all skill levels can team up to build AI-powered solutions using the Microsoft Copilot Studio (the new Power Platform agent toolkit) – a friendly competition to see who can create the cleverest “Copilot” or workflow agent. It’s a perfect embodiment of the event’s spirit: rolling up your sleeves and innovating together. And PPCC is truly a global party: participants from 50+ countries are expected, bringing diverse stories of how low-code and AI are making an impact locally. The common thread? A passion for transforming work through apps, automation, and AI. Microsoft is framing this movement around the idea of “Frontier Firms,” organizations that embrace intelligent agents alongside people to radically boost productivity. Nowhere is that vision more on display than PPCC. In the words of Microsoft’s Power Platform team, this conference is where “apps, agents, and Copilot  together in harmony, powered by a single managed platform”. In short, Las Vegas is about to host a high-energy crash course on the future of work – and the community is here for it.

Release Wave 2 2025: AI Everywhere in Power Platform

Timed with the conference, Microsoft is also rolling out the 2025 Release Wave 2 for its business applications, covering new features from October 2025 through March 2026. This wave brings hundreds of updates and is perhaps the most AI-infused release yet. Across the Power Platform – Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Dataverse, and the brand-new Copilot Studio – the message is clear: Copilot AI and “agentic” automation are now built into the fabric of the product.

What does that look like in practice? For one, building apps is getting even more intuitive. In Power Apps, makers can describe a business problem to a new Plan Designer, which then marshals a team of AI agents to propose a solution – generating not just an app, but flows, data tables, even Power BI reports to fit the need. There’s an “agent feed” that lets you oversee and fine-tune what your helper agents are doing, and an App Agent that can essentially “vibe-code” your app: you simply say what you need (or even supply a rough sketch or image of a UI), and Copilot will build out the app interface and connect the data. Microsoft is essentially moving from code-first development to intent-first development, where you tell the platform your intent and AI does the heavy lifting. It’s a bold step toward making app creation a human-AI collaborative experience.

Meanwhile, Power Automate (Microsoft’s workflow and RPA tool) is supercharging automation with AI. The new wave introduces generative AI actions and intelligent document processing, letting flows understand content and make decisions. A nifty Copilot Expression Assistant can now help create or fix complex formulas using natural language – for example, just type “format the date as DD-MM” and it will produce the correct expression for you. Even more impressively, Power Automate’s desktop RPA capabilities now include an AI-powered recorder: you can literally perform a series of actions on your screen (clicks, keystrokes, etc.) while explaining your process aloud, and Copilot will turn that demonstration into an automated desktop flow. In other words, show the AI what you do, and it learns to automate it – a game-changer for tackling legacy apps or manual processes that lack APIs. Power Automate is also adding “human in the loop” features like advanced multi-stage approvals with AI suggestions. For instance, a new Intelligent Approvals feature will analyze historical data to recommend an approval decision, so managers don’t have to scrutinize every request in detail. The approver can simply accept the AI’s suggestion or override it, speeding up workflows while maintaining oversight. All these enhancements aim to help organizations automate smarter, using AI to handle the grunt work and surface insights, while humans handle exceptions and final calls.

Crucially, Microsoft knows that unleashing all these AI agents and copilots could be chaos without proper governance. So Release Wave 2 places a big emphasis on low-code governance and security. A new unified Power Platform governance center is arriving, giving IT admins one place to manage and monitor all these apps, flows, and AI agents across the enterprise. Admins will get better visibility and control, from setting usage policies to tracking agent behaviors, making this rapidly growing ecosystem more secure, governable, and enterprise-ready. Microsoft even rolled out Personal Developer Environments (PDEs) – basically sandboxed, user-specific dev spaces – so citizen makers can experiment freely with Copilot and build solutions in a contained environment that IT can still oversee. Early adopters at Microsoft’s own IT department saw a 32% monthly jump in maker activity after routing users to PDE sandboxes, with no corresponding increase in governance headaches. In short, the platform is trying to say “yes” to innovation without sacrificing control.

Data integration is another cornerstone of this release. The Microsoft Dataverse (the data platform underpinning Dynamics 365 and Power Platform) is being enhanced to act as the nerve center for enterprise data in AI scenarios. New features like Dataverse for AI Agents and improved Dataverse Search mean that Copilots and agents can index both structured and unstructured data and retrieve it intelligently at runtime. In practical terms, Copilot can now pull insights from across your databases, documents, and even integrate knowledge from outside systems. Over 1,000 connectors are available to plug in external sources, so your AI helpers can seamlessly act on data whether it lives in an Excel file, a CRM record, or a third-party app. Microsoft is also previewing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Dataverse, which will let large language models securely query your business data via plugins. This could drastically improve how AI understands context from line-of-business data. And for those of us who’ve ever accidentally deleted a record in a database and broken into a cold sweat – fear not, Dataverse is introducing a much-needed recycle bin feature to easily restore deleted records. It’s a small quality-of-life addition that shows Microsoft is minding the basics even as it pushes into futuristic AI territory.

Even the more niche corners of Power Platform are getting polished with AI and security in mind. Power Pages (the web portal builder) will soon include a built-in security scan agent that monitors your site for vulnerabilities and anomalies in real time. Low-code web developers will get guided remediation tips to fix any issues – no security expertise required. And the low-code formula language Power Fx is adding out-of-the-box AI functions like AISummarize(), AITranslate(), and AISentiment(), so makers can easily sprinkle AI text analysis or translation into their apps without writing complex code. All told, the 2025 Wave 2 release embodies a new era of “intelligent” low-code: Microsoft is weaving Copilot AI into every product, and giving orgs the tools to manage it. Early access previews have been available since August, and as of October 1, many of these capabilities are hitting general availability for customers worldwide. The next few months will be exciting (and busy) for Power Platform adopters, as they dig into these features and discover new ways to build faster, automate smarter, and innovate securely on Microsoft’s AI-fueled platform.

Dynamics GP 18.8: Enhancing a Classic ERP

Not all the action is in cloud-born services – Microsoft hasn’t forgotten its on-premises customers. Case in point: Dynamics GP, the stalwart SMB ERP system that’s been around for decades (fondly known as Great Plains), received a notable update in October 2025. The Dynamics GP 18.8 release (also branded as “GP 2026”) landed right on October 1, 2025, bringing a mix of community-driven enhancements and behind-the-scenes improvements to keep this workhorse humming. Microsoft even jokes that GP 18.8 is a “Sunrise, not a Sunset” for the product, signaling ongoing commitment even as cloud ERP offerings like Business Central rise in popularity.

So, what’s new in GP 18.8? Interestingly, many of the features were direct requests from GP’s loyal user base – a nice nod to the community. For example, in the Sales module, GP will now prompt you if you try to save a Sales Order without required fields filled in, preventing those frustrating incomplete records that cause errors down the line. In Payables management, a small but smart tweak: the Vendor Class Roll Down feature (which applies vendor class changes to all vendors) now defaults to “No” instead of “Yes” to avoid accidental mass updates. There’s also a new filter for Sales Batches that shows only unposted sales batches, making it easier for accountants to review and post the right batches without wading through posted history. For finance folks dealing with fixed assets, GP 18.8 adds support for the latest IRS luxury auto depreciation limits – the system’s Luxury Auto Depreciation table will be automatically updated with current values so you don’t have to manually edit those each year. And on the compliance front for global companies, VAT submission capabilities got an upgrade with better handling of digital certificates and secret keys, aligning GP with evolving tax regulations. Sprinkle in a variety of quality-of-life fixes (like more reliable reporting in certain modules), and GP 18.8 shapes up to be a welcome tuning of an already mature system.

Under the hood, Microsoft has also updated GP’s tech stack support to keep it current. Security enhancements include compatibility with TLS 1.3 – the latest encryption protocol – which is important as older TLS versions get phased out. Administrators will also note that GP 18.8 is tested with the newest infrastructure: it supports SQL Server 2025 and Windows Server 2025, giving you the green light to run GP on the latest servers. Development-wise, Visual Studio 2019 remains the recommended IDE for customizing GP, ensuring those who build GP add-ons have a stable toolset. Another notable improvement is in integration security: GP now offers encrypted email and Power BI credentials, meaning any connections between GP and Office 365 (for emailing documents) or Power BI (for dashboards/reports pulling GP data) are better protected. These changes collectively help GP fit into modern IT environments with stricter security requirements.

Perhaps the most significant news for GP customers is Microsoft’s commitment to extend GP’s supported lifespan. At the Community Summit conference last year, Microsoft hinted at this, and now it’s official: GP will be fully supported with updates through December 31, 2029, and critical security patches will continue until at least April 2031. That gives GP users a defined runway of several more years. It’s a relief for organizations that rely on GP and weren’t ready to transition to cloud ERP yet. Microsoft’s GP team (led by veteran program manager Terry Heley) is making it clear they’ll back GP through the end of this decade as a “safe-haven” ERP. Of course, 2029 is effectively the sunset date for GP, so many customers are using this window to plan migrations (often to Dynamics 365 Business Central). But in the meantime, if you’re a GP shop, you can take advantage of the new 18.8 features knowing your system is secure, up-to-date, and supported for years to come. It’s not often you hear cheers in the context of 30-year-old software, but the GP community is genuinely excited about this release – proof that there’s still some gas left in the Great Plains tank.

Business Central: Pricing Changes and Cloud Value

On the cloud ERP side, Microsoft is making waves with Dynamics 365 Business Central – and not just with features, but with pricing. For the first time in over five years, the cost of Business Central is going up. Microsoft announced that effective November 1, 2025, Business Central’s base license prices will increase roughly 10-15% (depending on the edition) to better reflect the product’s greatly expanded capabilities. Concretely, the Essentials user license will climb from $70 to $80 per user/month, and the Premium license from $100 to $110 per user/month. (Device licenses are also nudging up from $40 to $45.) To soften the blow, Microsoft is boosting the included storage with each license – Essentials users will get 3 GB of database storage (up from 2 GB), Premium will get 5 GB (up from 3 GB) bundled in. In other words, you’re paying a bit more but also getting more capacity out of the box. This pricing change will apply to new subscriptions and to renewals after Nov 1; existing subscribers won’t see a price hike until their next renewal comes due.

So why now for the price increase? Microsoft points to the tremendous growth in Business Central’s functionality in recent years. In the half-decade since the last price tweak, Business Central has evolved from a basic SMB accounting system into a full-featured mid-market ERP with a dose of AI. Microsoft’s Bryan Goode (CVP for Business Apps) explained that BC has added “hundreds of new features across finance, analytics, supply chain, manufacturing and beyond” in that time. Just in the past year, Business Central introduced its own Copilot AI (for example, an AI that can help write product descriptions or analyze cash flow in plain language), AI-powered financial analytics that can generate charts and forecasts, and even AI-assisted account reconciliations to speed up the month-end close. The product also saw deeper integration with Power Platform (e.g. easier building of Power Apps that connect to BC data), new industry-specific analytics content for manufacturing and finance, a dedicated sustainability tracking module, and stronger regional localizations for global customers. All these enhancements were included at no extra charge for years. Microsoft is essentially saying: we’ve dramatically increased the value of Business Central, and the new pricing reflects that value (and helps fund future innovation).

To further justify the increase, Microsoft is bundling the additional storage and promising “comparably priced across currencies” adjustments (meaning they’re aligning global prices more evenly). For customers and partners, the takeaway is that Business Central remains a strategic bet for Microsoft, and they’re confident enough in its maturity (and demand) to ask for a bit more money. Even at $80-$110/user, BC is often cheaper than competing cloud ERPs, and its tight integration with the rest of Microsoft 365 is a selling point that grows stronger with each update. The inclusion of Microsoft Copilot in BC is a hint at the future: expect even more AI features (likely announced in upcoming release waves) that will help justify that monthly fee. If you’re an existing customer, you have until your next renewal to budget for the new prices – and perhaps to consume the new capabilities that come with it. And if you’re considering an upgrade from an older system (like Dynamics GP or NAV) to Business Central, Microsoft’s message is that the product is richer than ever, but soon will come at a slightly richer price too.

Dataverse and Power BI: Unified Data and Analytics

No modern business app story is complete without analytics and data, and Microsoft is weaving its data platform (Dataverse) and analytics platform (Power BI) ever tighter into the fabric of its solutions. At PPCC 2025, one keynote is literally about data: Kim Manis, VP for Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, is slated to showcase the latest and greatest in data analytics, AI-driven insights, and visualization. Meanwhile, Nirav Shah, who leads Microsoft Dataverse engineering, will speak on how a solid data foundation enables smarter decisions and AI experiences across the board. These appearances underscore how central these services are to Microsoft’s Business Applications vision.

The Dataverse (which underpins Dynamics 365 apps and Power Platform apps as their cloud database) is leveling up to serve an AI-centric world. In 2025 Release Wave 2, we see Dataverse enhancing its support for “agentic” workloads – meaning it’s optimized to feed information to AI agents and copilots in real time. One new concept is Dataverse for Teams of Agents, allowing multiple AI agents to safely share and act on the same data backbone. Dataverse’s search functionality is also becoming more AI-ready, indexing both structured data (records, rows, columns) and unstructured content (think notes, files, conversations) so that Copilot can retrieve relevant info with semantic smarts. Practically, when you ask a Copilot question like “What is our top-selling product this month and what are customers saying about it?”, the AI can pull both the sales figures and scan text from related customer feedback, because Dataverse has indexed it all. Microsoft is also introducing more advanced data collaboration features in Dataverse to support AI: for example, a new knowledge management system in Copilot Studio uses Dataverse as the central place to connect various knowledge sources (enterprise databases, documents, even third-party services) to your copilots. And let’s not forget basic data hygiene – the addition of a one-click restore for deleted Dataverse records (the recycle bin feature) will save a lot of headaches and support tickets for admins. It’s clear Microsoft wants Dataverse to be seen not just as “the Dynamics CRM database” but as a unified data hub for the AI era, capable of federating data from Microsoft 365, Microsoft Fabric (OneLake), and external systems into a single logical model. That positions customers to get more value from their data, since the AI can draw on a 360-degree view of the business.

On the Power BI side, 2025 has been a landmark year. Power BI turned 10 years old and got a new home inside Microsoft Fabric, which is the company’s ambitious new all-in-one analytics platform. There were some community jitters initially (“Is Power BI being subsumed by Fabric?”), but Microsoft has been vocal that Power BI remains core and its development is accelerating. Arun Ulag, Microsoft’s CVP for BI, emphasized that investment in Power BI has only increased since the Fabric launch, with monthly feature updates continuing unabated. In fact, at FabCon 2025 (a Fabric community event earlier this year), the Power BI team showed off a raft of upcoming improvements. Among them: a long-awaited proper dark mode for the Power BI app (cheers from analysts everywhere), new modernized visuals (e.g. updated slicers, cards, maps), and deeper integration of Power BI with the Fabric data lake (through a capability called Direct Lake mode that lets Power BI query data in OneLake storage with near-import speeds).

Microsoft’s positioning of Power BI is interesting: they call it the “glue” between two worlds – the world of the data professionals (data warehouses, data science, big models in Fabric) and the world of business users (the folks in Excel, Teams, Outlook and PowerPoint who consume insights). Power BI bridges these by making data from the lakehouse accessible in interactive reports that non-technical users can use in the tools they already work with (like embedding live Power BI charts in Excel or Teams). That strategy isn’t changing; if anything, it’s being reinforced. For example, the latest Excel for web can natively insert Power BI pivot tables. Teams has a “Microsoft 365 Copilot” that can pull answers from Power BI data. And with Dataverse now tying into Fabric, we see scenarios where a Power BI report can use real-time Dataverse data combined with big data from a data lake – all without users needing to know where the data lives. Microsoft is ensuring that analytics is ubiquitous: whether a user is in a Dynamics 365 screen or reviewing a report in Power BI, or even chatting with a Copilot in Teams, they’re tapping into the same trove of enterprise data and AI insights. The commitment to Power BI’s roadmap, plus recognitions like Gartner’s continued placement of Microsoft as a Leader in analytics and BI platforms, signals that Microsoft intends to stay at the cutting edge of business analytics. From big data to self-service BI to AI-driven narrative insights, the integration of Power BI + Fabric + Dataverse + Copilot is arguably Microsoft’s competitive moat against other players. For organizations, this means less friction moving from data to decisions: the tools are aligning so that analytics flows as freely as data itself. Keep an eye on Power BI updates in the coming months – the pace of innovation is as fast as ever, and if you blink, you might miss a new feature that could delight your analysts or executives.

The Outlook for Business Apps

It wouldn’t be Microsoft Business Applications without talking about Outlook – long the hub of daily work for millions. Microsoft’s strategy to embed business app functionality into Outlook (and Teams) is ongoing, making sure that users can engage with CRM or ERP data in the flow of their emails, meetings, and chats. The modern Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a key piece of that puzzle, allowing salespeople to track emails and appointments to CRM, or view customer info next to an email thread, without leaving Outlook. As Microsoft modernizes Outlook (with a new unified Outlook client rolling out), they are also pruning outdated features. One notable change: the legacy “contact tracking” feature in Dynamics 365 App for Outlook (which let you sync an Outlook contact into the CRM system) is being deprecated as of Oct 1, 2025. The reason given is that the new Outlook doesn’t support that old method, and Microsoft wants to focus on features that align with the latest Outlook experience. Users of the old Outlook client who relied on contact tracking will need to manually add contacts to D365 going forward, as there’s no like-for-like replacement in the new world. This is a small change in the grand scheme, but it reflects a broader push: streamline the Outlook integration to be leaner and more aligned with modern Office 365. (For context, Microsoft had already retired the even older Dynamics CRM Outlook COM add-in back in 2020, fully replacing it with the current App for Outlook which is web-based and much more lightweight.)

The Outlook integration isn’t going away – far from it. If anything, Microsoft is making sure that as AI comes into Office apps, it hooks into business data too. Imagine drafting an email and having Copilot summarize the latest customer order info from Dynamics 365 within Outlook, or scheduling a meeting and having Copilot suggest a sales opportunity record to associate with it. Those kinds of cross-app intelligence are on the horizon, enabled by the common data and AI services under the hood. Microsoft clearly sees productivity apps (like Outlook, Teams) and business apps (Dynamics 365, Power Platform) as part of one interconnected “Digital Work” platform. Their market positioning heavily leans on this integration. It’s something competitors often can’t match as deeply – the fact that your ERP, CRM, analytics, and office tools can all talk to each other and share an AI assistant. For example, the Microsoft 365 Copilot that’s being introduced knows how to pull data from both Outlook and Dynamics if needed, because of the Dataverse and Graph connections. This is a big differentiator for Microsoft’s business apps in the market.

From a high-level market perspective, Microsoft’s Business Applications group is charging ahead with an AI-first, cloud-first agenda – and it’s paying off in recognition. Just recently, Gartner once again named Microsoft as a Leader in its 2025 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, citing the company’s vision of AI-powered development and its massive community of millions of “citizen developers.” Microsoft’s concept of “Frontier Firms” (those that put “intelligence on tap” at the center of their operations) is basically a challenge to customers: the most successful companies of the next decade will be those who embrace AI agents as coworkers and automate the drudgery out of their processes. With the Power Platform + Dynamics 365 portfolio, Microsoft is positioning itself as the platform of choice to become one of those Frontier Firms. They’re not shy about this vision – at PPCC we heard rallying cries to “step into the movement” and lead the transformation with these tools. It’s a bold, optimistic pitch that resonates with organizations looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Of course, lofty visions aside, the proof will be in execution. As we move into 2026, companies will be testing these new copilots and agents in real workflows: Can a Power Platform Copilot truly reduce development time by 50%? Will AI recommendations in approvals actually be trusted by managers? How smooth (or not) will governance be when hundreds of employees start spinning up their own AI “agents”? Cautious adopters will be watching for success stories and best practices. But the aggressive adopters and tech-forward organizations – the audience of this very article – are likely already piloting some of these capabilities, eager to seize any edge AI can provide. The good news is, Microsoft is providing the tools, guidance, and an enthusiastic community to support this journey. From the glitz of a Las Vegas conference, to the nuts-and-bolts of an on-prem GP update, to a price tweak that signals confidence in a product’s value – all these developments paint a picture of a vibrant, evolving Microsoft Business Apps ecosystem. The common thread is the infusion of AI and the drive to lower the barriers to innovation. Whether you’re a Power Apps developer, a GP consultant, or a CFO relying on Business Central, the latter half of 2025 has delivered plenty of news to act on.

One thing is certain: Microsoft is not slowing down. They are full-speed ahead (at the “Speed of Innovation,” one might say) in pushing the boundaries of what business software can do. The challenge and opportunity for organizations is to keep up with this pace – to experiment, to provide feedback, and to skill up their people to take advantage of these new tools. In the year ahead, we’ll likely see AI agents moving from demos into daily use, more legacy workloads finding new life through the Power Platform, and perhaps even tighter licensing integration across products as the ecosystem matures. It’s an exciting time to be in the Microsoft Business Applications space. As Ryan Cunningham of Microsoft put it, bring your ideas, bring the heat, and let’s shape the future together. The frontier of business software is here – and it’s packed with Copilots.