What it does

The Copilot side pane in a sales app answers questions about CRM data in plain English — "show my pipeline with deals closing in the next 30 days", "what's my lead conversion rate for the last quarter" — alongside a set of predefined prompts for catching up on records and getting account news. It queries Dataverse first and falls back to SharePoint when the answer isn't in the CRM.

Key facts

• Open it from the Copilot icon on the command bar. Where Microsoft 365 Copilot is enabled for the app, the icon splits into Chat (Microsoft 365 Copilot and the Sales agent) and App Skills (the Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales prompts described here).
• Three entry points: starter prompts shown when the pane opens, the View Prompts prompt guide, and free-text natural language in the chat box.
• Sales-specific terminology is supported out of the box for four topic areas — conversion rates, deal cycle, pipeline with filters, and deal sizes and values.
• Answers come from Dataverse first. If Dataverse has nothing, Copilot offers a follow-up prompt to search SharePoint rather than searching it automatically.
• What's new with my sales records returns accounts, leads and opportunities updated in the last seven days that you own, capped at the five most recently updated per record type, and only reflects changes to admin-configured fields.
• What's newly assigned to me returns records created and assigned to you in the last 15 days that have no prior emails, calls or appointments.
• What's changed shows the last 10 updates from audit history for a lead, opportunity or account within a seven-day window, and needs auditing plus audit history access on the seller's role.
• Account news is Bing-sourced and needs tenant consent. On a record it returns news for that account; from a grid it returns news for the top 10 accounts you work with, ordered by associated revenue. Sellers can toggle Bing off for themselves from the Tools icon in the pane.
• Copilot decides whether a SharePoint document is a sales document from its length, type and sales keywords. Anything under 30 words, or without those keywords, is classified as non-sales and won't surface.
• Customisation happens in Copilot Studio against the agent named Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, and needs the Copilot Studio Author role. You can add topics, edit the SalesSparks topic to change the prompt guide, and add glossary terms and synonyms under the SalesSpecificQnA knowledge section. Custom topics consume Copilot Studio credits. This customisation route is documented as preview.
• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales keeps no chat history across sessions. The Sales agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot does.

When to use / skip

Natural language Q&A demos beautifully and is the weakest part of the story in practice, because it lives or dies on how closely your data model matches Microsoft's assumptions. On a near-vanilla implementation with sensible field usage, it's genuinely useful for sellers who won't build a view. On a heavily customised org — renamed tables, custom revenue fields, opportunity stages that don't mean what they say — it will answer confidently and wrongly until someone does the glossary work.

Treat it as a feature with a configuration cost, not a free extra. If nobody on the project owns the glossary and synonyms, set expectations accordingly and steer sellers to views and dashboards for anything they'd act on.

Configuration decisions

• Whether anyone owns glossary and synonym maintenance in Copilot Studio, and who gets the Copilot Studio Author role.
• Which business terms and custom columns map into the glossary — typically the org's own words for revenue, stage, region and product.
• Whether to customise the prompt guide via the SalesSparks topic so sellers see prompts that match your process rather than the defaults.
• Whether to add custom topics at all, weighed against the Copilot Studio credit consumption they bring.
• Whether Bing-sourced account news is allowed, and if not, whether to disable the Gen AI Bing News topic in Copilot Studio as well as withholding tenant consent.
• Whether SharePoint fallback is wanted, and which folders Copilot is pointed at.

Gotchas

• Sellers assume the pane can see everything. It can't: the catch-up prompts are limited to accounts, leads and opportunities, within fixed windows, and capped at five or 10 records. Someone will report the cap as a bug.
• "What's new" only reflects the fields an admin configured. A field nobody added to the configuration can change all day and never appear.
• Recent changes rely on audit history, so the answer is empty for any period before auditing was switched on, and for any user missing organisation-level audit privileges.
• Glossary and synonyms are shared between Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales and the Sales agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is convenient — but welcome card and prompt suggestion customisations don't carry over to the Sales agent at all.
• Customisation is done in a Copilot Studio agent that sits outside your Dynamics solution unless you deliberately put it in one. Do the work in a solution or you'll be redoing it by hand in every environment.
• No chat history means a seller can't come back to yesterday's answer. If that matters to them, the answer is Microsoft 365 Copilot, not this pane.

Consultant notes

• Demo with the client's own terminology, not Microsoft's. Ask the sponsor for three questions they'd ask their pipeline, try them live, and fix the glossary in front of them if they miss.
• Budget explicit time for glossary and synonyms in any org with custom revenue or stage fields. Half a day here saves a fortnight of "Copilot is wrong" tickets.
• Be blunt with sellers about the caps and time windows. The feature's credibility is destroyed the first time someone believes "what's new" is a complete list.
• Check the Copilot Studio customisations are packaged in a solution before you promote anything to UAT.
• If the client is licensed for Microsoft 365 Copilot, show both panes side by side and let them choose which one sellers are trained on rather than supporting two habits.

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Worth another look if Microsoft extends natural language answers beyond accounts, leads and opportunities, or moves glossary configuration out of Copilot Studio.