The Future of Dynamics 365 in Membership

After a series of insightful conversations with membership organisations while exhibiting at Membership Excellence 2025, one theme came up again and again:

“Where is Dynamics 365 heading, and what does that mean for us?”

With so many membership bodies now embracing digital transformation, AI, and smarter self-service, there is a growing appetite to understand how Microsoft’s roadmap will reshape CRM, member engagement, operations, training, events, and reporting over the next five years.

So, we thought we’d put our thoughts down on paper.

Microsoft’s investment in AI is reshaping Dynamics 365 at speed. Copilot is no longer a 'nice-to-have' - it is becoming the core way people interact with business systems.

Soon, your team will spend less time clicking through complex CRM screens and more time asking the Copilot to do the work:

• "Summarise this member’s engagement over the last year."

• "Identify who is at risk of non-renewal and create a follow-up list."

• "Draft a CPD compliance reminder based on recent submissions."

With Copilot Studio, partners like Wattle can extend these capabilities into sector-specific tasks - membership renewals, CPD audits, committee governance, event attendance rates, onboarding activities, and more. For membership organisations, this is game-changing: faster processes, better decisions, and a dramatically more intuitive user experience.

A fundamental shift is underway. The Dataverse - not Dynamics 365 - is becoming the real engine of the Microsoft business ecosystem.

Dynamics 365 apps (Sales, Customer Service, Marketing) will increasingly become modular workloads running on the Dataverse, opening the door to:

• Composable business capabilities

• Standardised schemas

• Easier extensibility

• Faster integrations

• Low-code customisation

For membership organisations, this means more flexibility and less technical debt. 

Microsoft Fabric is set to transform how membership organisations use their D365 data.

This is the new foundation - a future-ready data and insights layer for membership bodies, professional institutes, and trade associations.

Fabric provides:

• A unified lakehouse (OneLake)

• Real-time data pipelines from Dynamics 365

• Predictive analytics

• AI model training

• No-ETL reporting

• Deep integration with Copilot

For membership organisations, this unlocks insights they’ve never had before:

• Renewal risk prediction

• Member lifetime value

• CPD forecasting

• Training demand trends

• Segmentation by behaviour, not demographics

Dynamics 365 may be the system of record, but the Power Platform is becoming the system of action.

Microsoft is shifting:

• Classic workflows → Power Automate

• Plugins → Low-code plugins

• Form logic → Power Fx (low code language)

• UI controls → Modern controls

• Manual journeys → Automated flows

For membership organisations, this means:

• Truly automated renewals

• Automated onboarding workflows

• Event registration and assignment flows

• CPD submissions and review processes

• Committee and governance life cycles

The Dataverse Web API is now central to how Dynamics 365 integrates with websites and portals.

This means modern digital experiences depend on:

• Efficient OData querying

• Secure authentication

• Structured content modelling

• Event-driven synchronisation

And it’s precisely why organisations are moving away from ad-hoc WordPress integrations toward single tech stack ecosystems, like Microsoft, which offers:

• Better performance

• Stronger security

• Richer personalisation

• Tighter CRM alignment

Put simply - the future of the member experience is API-first, CRM-powered, and deeply integrated.

Dynamics 365 is evolving into:

• An AI-native business platform

• Built on the Dataverse

• Connected through Fabric

• Automated by the Power Platform

• Extended through industry-specific accelerators (like our own MemEx platform)

For membership organisations, this represents a generational leap in capability - more insight, more automation, more personalisation, and less friction across the member lifecycle.