At Community Summit North America 2026, which is being held from 12-15 October in Nashville, Tennessee, product manager Rita Kimani led a session that covered how Microsoft is bringing demand planning, supply chain management and commerce closer together.
In a session titled, ‘From Demand Signal to Delivered Order: The Unified Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management & Commerce Roadmap’, Kimani spoke about how Microsoft is developing its Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Commerce applications to help businesses manage various processes as a connected whole.
“Businesses need to do more than predict what customers will buy,” said Kimani. “They must connect those forecasts with pricing, purchasing, inventory and fulfilment decisions to ensure they can meet demand.”
Microsoft is investing in demand planning capabilities that help users understand not only what a forecast predicts, but also why the system has arrived at that result. “For a planner, if you cannot see why [a forecast has been produced],” said Kimani. “It becomes harder to understand and act on the information.”
Microsoft has made historical data available alongside calculated forecasts and added explanations to help planners interpret the results. The aim is to give employees greater visibility into the factors influencing demand, rather than asking them to accept a prediction without understanding its basis.
That visibility can also challenge established ways of working. Kimani described a manufacturing customer that discovered its planners’ manual adjustments were making forecasts less accurate.
“They’d been making those adjustments for years,” she said. “However, the new visibility showed that the changes were not improving the forecast and, in some cases, were making it worse.
This example highlights an important consideration for businesses introducing AI and advanced planning tools: technology can provide better information, but employees also need to understand when their own interventions help or hinder the outcome.”
Microsoft is also working to make demand planning more responsive to commercial decisions. Its unified pricing management data entity is available in demand planning, allowing information about historical prices, planned promotions and changes to net prices to inform forecasts.
This could help businesses anticipate the effect of a promotion before it takes place, rather than trying to explain an unexpected change in sales afterwards.
“Instead of having to explain after the fact why there was a spike in demand,” said Kimani. “Businesses could use information about upcoming promotions to inform their planning.
Connecting these processes is particularly important in retail, where pricing decisions can influence demand and businesses need to understand whether they have the stock and fulfilment capacity to respond.”
Another area where Microsoft is investing is in commerce capabilities that are designed to make shopping more personal and help employees serve customers more effectively. Kimani demonstrated an AI-powered fashion stylist that lets shoppers describe what they are looking for in a natural conversation.
Rather than browsing product categories individually, a customer could explain the occasion and preferred style and receive recommendations for a complete outfit, including clothing, shoes and accessories from the retailer’s catalogue. The customer could then request alternatives with a similar aesthetic before purchasing the selected items.
Kimani said the example showed how retailers could move beyond conventional product searches towards more guided, personalised shopping experiences. She also noted that such experiences could be built using existing Microsoft commerce capabilities, rather than requiring an entirely separate platform.
“AI can also change how employees work inside physical stores,” said Kimani.
In a second demonstration, an AI agent helped a sales associate find products, check availability, add items to a basket and arrange delivery. It could suggest complementary products and answer questions about warranties and safety requirements using company guidance.
The agent can also help if a transaction failed by providing troubleshooting instructions and preparing an email for the support team, including details of the error and the steps already taken.
The aim is to give store associates information and assistance within their existing workflow, reducing the need to switch between systems or interrupt customer service to find an answer.
“These experiences must operate within the business’s existing security arrangements,” said Kimani. “The store associate agent uses Microsoft Entra and commerce authentication and permissions, meaning its access is governed by the permissions assigned to the authenticated user.”
Beyond the shopping experience, Microsoft is investing in the capabilities that businesses need to support more complex commercial relationships. B2B buyers, Kimani says, may need to place orders on behalf of several outlets or businesses, rather than purchasing for a single organisation.
She also highlighted work to allow buyers to use one identity to purchase from multiple businesses or outlets, reducing the need to sign in and out of separate accounts.
“B2B is almost never just a one-buyer, one-seller kind of relationship,” said Kimani. “It’s more often a chain, with different organisations and people involved at each stage.”
Microsoft is also developing more flexible pricing management, allowing businesses to tailor prices according to customers, products and other order attributes. They can simulate pricing changes before publishing them and adjust prices across product categories. These capabilities sit alongside investments in supplier engagement, inventory management and warehouse operations. Kimani described supplier engagement as a way to support the full supplier relationship, including onboarding and collaboration through a supplier portal.
“The portal is perhaps a part that people might underestimate,” she said, highlighting its role in moving beyond simply managing suppliers towards working with them more effectively.
Microsoft is also investing in the ability to buy and fulfil orders across locations, including businesses operating multiple legal entities or franchise networks. Improvements to warehouse capabilities are intended to support the practical demands of moving products through the supply chain.
Taken together, the roadmap reflects Microsoft’s ambition to connect decisions that have traditionally been handled across different business processes. “Demand forecasts can inform purchasing and pricing, commercial decisions can feed back into planning, and inventory and fulfilment capabilities can help businesses respond to customer orders,” said Kimani. She adds that the value lies in considering the entire process rather than treating each application or task in isolation. “AI can help shoppers find products and employees complete work, but those experiences depend on the underlying systems and data being connected.
“The challenge for businesses is therefore not simply to introduce more AI. It is to ensure that the technology helps them make better decisions across the journey from recognising demand to delivering the order.”