BCAIHUB — Business Central & AI Consulting

For as long as most Business Central partners have been planning around Microsoft’s release cadence, the rhythm has been predictable: a Wave 1 plan lands around February, a Wave 2 plan lands around July, and everything a partner needs to plan the next six months of client conversations sits in one document, published twice a year.

That rhythm just ended, and I don’t think most partners have fully registered what replaced it yet.

There Is No Wave 2 Plan This September

Microsoft’s own FAQ on the change asks directly whether there will be a Release Wave 2 announcement this September. The answer given is one word: no. Starting this month, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse roadmap content moves entirely to the AI at Work roadmap, a single destination that also covers Microsoft 365, Copilot, and custom agents built in Copilot Studio. New release plans stop being published to Microsoft Learn. Release Planner itself, the tool many partners used to build saved, filtered views of what mattered to their practice, retires completely by November 15.

Microsoft’s stated reasoning is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as corporate framing: few organizations run Dynamics 365 in isolation anymore. Business Central increasingly operates alongside Power Platform automations, Microsoft 365 workflows, and Copilot agents as part of the same business process, and a roadmap split across separate twice-yearly documents for each product line was never built for that reality.

What Actually Changes in How You Track What’s Coming

The old model published a feature once, in a wave document, and that entry was essentially frozen at publication. The AI at Work roadmap instead tracks each item through a visible lifecycle In Development, Rolling Out, launched updated continuously in place rather than disappearing once it’s been announced. A feature Microsoft commits to in any given month now appears on the roadmap close to that commitment, rather than waiting to be bundled into the next twice-yearly announcement alongside dozens of unrelated items.

There’s a cutover detail worth planning around directly: only roadmap content with a public preview or general availability date of June 1, 2026 or later migrates to the new roadmap. Everything earlier stays in the old release plans, which remain online for historical reference but stop receiving updates. For the next few months, anyone tracking “when did this feature actually ship” needs to know which side of that June 2026 line an item falls on, and check two different sources depending on the answer.

The Part That Connects to Everything Else in This Series

Alongside the new roadmap, Microsoft has also published a Release Communications MCP Server, letting organizations pull roadmap data directly into their own AI tools and workflows rather than checking a webpage manually. This is the same pattern running through nearly every other v29 change I’ve covered recently administrative and informational tasks that used to require a person checking a page are increasingly available as something an agent can query and act on directly. A roadmap-monitoring agent that flags relevant upcoming features for a specific partner’s installed extensions, checked continuously instead of twice a year, is now a realistic thing to build rather than a hypothetical one.

{
  "servers": {
    "MRC-MCP-Server": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/releasecommunications/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What This Actually Requires From Partners

The practical risk isn’t the roadmap change itself. It’s the saved context that quietly depends on the old structure. Release Planner’s saved views and filters do not transfer to the new roadmap anyone who built a filtered view around their practice’s product mix loses that configuration when Release Planner retires, unless they document it beforehand. Internal documentation, proposal templates, and onboarding material that link directly to specific release plan pages need auditing too, since those links stay live for historical content but stop being the place new information appears.

None of this needs to happen today. It needs to happen before November 15, and the work is small enough that doing it now, deliberately, is meaningfully easier than doing it in a rush once the old tool disappears.

Finally

A roadmap update rarely feels like the kind of change worth a full newsletter issue. But the shift from a predictable, twice-yearly disclosure to a continuous, always-on one changes something real about how a Business Central partner plans client conversations, proposal timing, and internal training schedules work that was built, for years, around a calendar rhythm that no longer exists.

The partners who adjust their own internal planning cadence to match this now will experience the transition as a minor process update. The ones who keep checking a bookmark that stopped updating will find out the hard way, sometime after November 15, that the roadmap moved and nobody on their team noticed.