Don’t let legacy applications hold back your adoption of innovation
Organizations around the world are exploring how AI and agents could redesign and transform their critical business processes. But for many, that ambition is constrained by the time, cost or complexity of moving from the business applications they rely on today to the agentic applications they need for the future.
Often, we hear from leaders that they feel locked into systems customized over years, surrounded by point solutions and connected through complex integrations. What began as an initiative to simplify and modernize the technology stack has, over time, accumulated layers of customization, integration, and business decisions, creating the very complexity it was intended to overcome.
Today, we are introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Activate, a comprehensive, AI-powered tool that can help partners and customers move to Dynamics 365 faster, with less manual effort and lower migration risk. It is informed by hundreds of successful, recent, Dynamics 365 migrations, to analyze requirements, generate configurations, and migrate data from applications like Salesforce. Our goal is to help partners and customers migrate to Dynamics 365, a leader in the customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) categories, with greater speed and confidence.
We are starting with a public preview for organizations moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365, with additional Dynamics 365 implementation scenarios to planned for ERP and other business application providers.
Move beyond CRM lock-in. Activate what’s next
Now in public preview, the Salesforce migration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Activate combine CRM environment analysis, actionable migration recommendations, and automated migration execution with built-in guardrails in a Microsoft-hosted experience. It will analyze an existing Salesforce CRM environment and build a detailed understanding of its data, business processes, customizations, and dependencies. This context helps implementation teams determine what needs to move, identify potential issues earlier, and prepare for the transition to Dynamics 365.
But the goal is not simply to recreate an organization’s existing CRM in a new system. With Dynamics 365 Activate, partners and customers can quickly decide what to preserve, simplify, or redesign with Dynamics 365 and AI—spending less time reconstructing the past and more time building what’s next. ERP capabilities will be coming later this year.
Turn years of complexity into a blueprint for the future
Understanding an existing business application environment is difficult because it reflects years of decisions and customization. Data models reflect how the business has evolved, customizations capture unique requirements and exceptions, and integrations connect processes across the organization. While some of the complexity remains essential, others can be simplified and left behind.
Dynamics 365 Activate profiles data and entities, identify relationships and dependencies, and surface customizations that require attention. This gives implementation teams a clearer blueprint for what should move, what should change, and what should be redesigned before migration begins. In early customer engagements, Dynamics 365 Activate has processed over six billion data records, enabling teams to quickly profile large-scale environments and focus migration efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
The impact becomes more tangible when applied to a customer’s environment. For example, Comcast was looking for ways to accelerate its migration assessment and gain a clearer view of its Salesforce landscape. The CRM discovery capabilities in Dynamics 365 Activate provided greater visibility into the company’s existing environment and the key considerations that could inform its migration planning.
Dynamics 365 Activate’s discovery capabilities helped accelerate our migration assessment by providing greater visibility into our Salesforce landscape and key migration considerations. The insights enabled our teams to make more informed planning decisions and establish a stronger foundation for the Dynamics 365 transformation journey.
Sathish Arumugam, Manager – Software Dev and Engineering, Comcast
Dynamics 365 Activate can also provide greater visibility and validation throughout implementation, helping organizations identify migration risks earlier and approach deployment with greater confidence.
Dynamics 365 Activate brings together the right combination of technology, expertise and partnership to help accelerate our transformation journey. The approach provides greater visibility and validation throughout delivery, helping reduce risk while improving confidence in business outcomes. For Ziwi Pets, the opportunity to achieve faster time-to-value and deliver a solution that closely reflects our operational needs was a compelling factor in moving forward.
Benjamin Boase, CEO - Ziwi Pets
The value of this understanding grows as it carries forward. Context established during discovery can inform business-process decisions, solution design, configuration, migration, testing, and deployment rather than being repeatedly rediscovered, documented, and translated as work moves across teams.
For implementation partners, this means spending less time on resource-intensive workstreams like discovery and analysis, and more time to applying their methodology, industry expertise, solution architecture, and change management they bring to an implementation.
Human-led, AI-accelerated is core to how we operate at congruentX. As an AI-native company, we combine Microsoft’s AI migration tooling with cX IP and delivery accelerators to compress discovery and migration complexity, accelerate the path from legacy CRM to measurable, sustainable business outcomes, and keep our team focused on the high-value work that drives those outcomes. At cX, we do not just target outcomes, we guarantee them.
Marty Priest, Managing Partner & CEO, congruentX
Dynamics 365 Activate represents a significant step forward in how Dynamics 365 solutions can be delivered. By combining Microsoft’s innovation with a collaborative delivery approach, we’re able to accelerate the journey from concept to value while reducing implementation risk and improving solution quality. What excites us most is the true partnership between Microsoft, Fusion5 and our customers, working together in rapid cycles to validate outcomes earlier, make better decisions faster, and ultimately deliver business transformation, with greater confidence.
Kristy Brown, Chief Executive -New Zealand, Fusion5
One implementation experience for your business changes
While we are beginning with CRM migrations, moving from one business application to another is only one reason organizations implement Dynamics 365. Some are starting fresh to support a new business model, process, or part of their organization. Others are moving from an existing CRM or ERP platform. And existing Dynamics 365 customers need to continually evolve as they enter new markets, add applications, or transform business processes.
Our vision for Dynamics 365 Activate is to bring one agentic implementation experience to all three journeys, helping organizations start, move, and grow with greater speed and confidence.
- Start new. When an organization implements Dynamics 365 to support a new business model, process, or part of the business, Dynamics 365 Activate can help teams move from requirements to a solution designed for how they want to operate.
- Move from a known source. Dynamics 365 Activate can begin with what already exists, using AI to understand the data, processes, customizations, and dependencies within the current environment. Salesforce is our first migration scenario, with additional CRM and ERP migration scenarios to follow. The goal is not simply to move what exists, but to give customer and partner teams the context they need to decide what should move, what should change, and what should be left behind.
- Grow what exists. For customers already using Dynamics 365, the next implementation might involve a new application, business process, geography, legal entity, or business unit. Dynamics 365 Activate can build on the environment and business context already in place, helping teams extend what they have instead of beginning each new project with another lengthy discovery effort.
The broader opportunity for Dynamics 365 Activate is to make implementation intelligent, continuous, and reduce time to value while reinforcing Microsoft’s ability to unify customer data, productivity, and business processes. We will continue investing across CRM and ERP workloads, with planned capabilities including agentic mapping and test sampling, natural-language migration guidance, and executive assessment summaries.
Whether an organization is starting, moving, or growing, changing the applications beneath the business should not require years of work before the next idea can become real.
Ready to get started? Join the public preview of Salesforce migration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Activate, or explore the documentation to learn more.
If you have any questions about how Dynamics 365 Activate will support your organization, we encourage you to reach out to our Microsoft representative or implementation partner.
