On 25 August 2026, Microsoft told the Power Platform world that release plans are over. The blog post, published at aka.ms/ReleasePlannerMigrationBlog under the headline 'Moving beyond release waves with the AI at Work roadmap', announced that roadmap content for those three products, plus Microsoft 365, Copilot and custom Copilot Studio agents, moves into the AI at Work roadmap, the renamed Microsoft 365 Roadmap. Two admin message centre posts landed the same day, MC1461528 covering the renamed roadmap and MC1461529 covering the retirement of the Release Planner tool. Release Plans stopped publishing on Microsoft Learn from September 2026, and there is no 2026 Release Wave 2 document.
Most admins missed it. It landed in the last week of August, in the quiet stretch before wave 1's own coverage period closed out that September, and Microsoft framed the change as consolidation. It is that. It is also the end of the one artefact most upgrade calendars and change advisory boards were built around, a dated, filterable, per-feature commitment you could build a plan against.
What changed, and when
The publishing cut-off is precise. Microsoft's release plans page, updated 27 August 2026, confirms Release Plans stopped appearing on Learn from September 2026 onward. Everything already published stays where it is. Microsoft's wording is that existing release plans remain available for historical reference until further notice, and that covers the whole back catalogue rather than a subset of it. What moves is the roadmap items inside Release Planner. Items carrying a public preview or general availability date of 1 June 2026 or later transition from Release Planner into the AI at Work roadmap, and Microsoft has dated that migration rather than leaving it open. It runs from September to November 2026 and completes by 15 November 2026, when the Release Planner portal at releaseplans.microsoft.com retires. After that, the AI at Work roadmap becomes, in Microsoft's words, 'the primary destination for public roadmap information'.
Microsoft's stated reason holds up. Few organisations run Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Copilot and custom Copilot Studio agents in isolation, and Microsoft's own line is that these products increasingly operate together rather than on separate tracks. A fixed twice-yearly wave made sense when each product shipped to its own clock. Microsoft says new capabilities now publish as soon as plans are committed and ready to share, instead of waiting for the next scheduled wave. That's a reasonable trade to make, even if it costs you a calendar date to plan around.
What you keep, and what you lose
Open the AI at Work roadmap at aka.ms/AIatWorkRoadmap and the feature set looks close to a release plan, sometimes better. You can filter by product, status, release phase, platform, cloud instance and new or updated date. Every feature carries a title, status, product, description, tags, the date it was added and the date it was last modified, with an expandable view showing roadmap ID and cloud instance. GA targets are still dated, shown through three statuses, In Development, Rolling Out and Launched, each carrying its own date. None of that is thinner than what a release plan entry gave you.
Two things are new and worth using immediately. RSS subscription now covers the whole roadmap or a single feature, through Outlook or any other reader, which release plans never offered. And filtered links are shareable, set your filters, copy the browser URL, and the filter selections travel with it, so a link you send opens to the same view for whoever clicks it.
The losses are narrower than they first look, but they are real. No PDF will be produced for a future wave, because there are no future waves, though the existing wave documents keep their PDF downloads. CSV export, through the download icon above the filters, covers all features or just your filtered set, and it does not format the way a wave document did for a partner deck. The personalised views saved under 'My Release Plans' in Release Planner do not survive the retirement, so those get rebuilt, though the new roadmap has its own Save filters option to rebuild them into.
Your wave 1 plan, and the cancelled wave 2
The 2026 Release Wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are still live on Learn, covering April through September 2026. They were published 18 March 2026, general availability began 1 April 2026, and Microsoft says they'll stay up for historical reference. That half of your year is unaffected by any of this.
A 2026 Release Wave 2 plan doesn't exist, and none is coming. Under the schedule Microsoft has now dropped, wave 2 would have covered October 2026 through March 2027, with general availability starting 1 October 2026. That date is cancelled outright. If your change advisory board calendar has an entry for an October wave 2 rollout, take it off. Nothing arrives on that date because nothing is scheduled against that date any more. New Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse capabilities publish to the AI at Work roadmap continuously instead, as each one is finished, starting from September 2026.
Early access, the old opt-in window ahead of a wave going GA, is deprecated in favour of the monthly release channel, the new name for the same mechanism. Turn it on per environment in the Power Platform admin center, under Environments, then Settings, then Product, then Behavior, and set the release channel to Monthly. Microsoft ships applications roughly six weeks ahead of the enablement date for either channel, and inside a single station that leaves about a four week window between a feature becoming available and it being switched on. Preview features on the monthly channel refresh weekly, a tighter cadence than the old wave model ever gave you.
What's worth tracking right now
A handful of items on the current roadmap deserve a bookmark if you own agent governance. Manage agent security with enhanced admin controls reached public preview on 31 May 2026, and Microsoft lists general availability as September 2026 without yet marking it released, so treat it as imminent rather than done. It lets admins set which authentication methods an agent can use, Entra ID, an approved external provider, or a flat block on anonymous access, plus policies governing how agents get shared. Automate governance with Agentic Center of Enablement entered preview in September 2026, with no GA date yet, and runs three agents of its own, Highlights for daily snapshots, Insights for continuous governance scans, and Action Plan for generated remediation steps. It switches on automatically for any admin with at least one managed environment, so you may already have it running without having asked for it.
On cost, message centre post MC1451872 announced granular Copilot credit consumption tracking with pay-as-you-go caps, in preview from 22 August 2026, giving admins per-user capacity limits and consumption caps with usage indicators attached. On environment hygiene, move apps out of the default environment has been in preview since 30 January 2026, with general availability listed for September 2026 and not yet marked as shipped, with a guided wizard for canvas apps and SharePoint forms plus a bulk flow-based option for doing it in volume. GitHub support for source code integration in Power Platform went to preview on 31 August 2026, still with no GA date, extending native source control to GitHub alongside the existing Azure DevOps option.
If you'd rather pull roadmap data into your own tooling than check a browser tab, Microsoft also stood up a Release Communications MCP server, hosted at microsoft.com/releasecommunications/mcp, exposing both the AI at Work roadmap and Azure Updates through four tools, without authentication or licensing cost attached.
Whoever owns your internal roadmap documentation should treat the next seven weeks as the deadline that matters. Release Planner disappears on 15 November 2026, and whatever you haven't exported, screenshotted or rebuilt as a saved filter by then stays behind with it.