Microsoft Built an AI Tool Specifically to Pull Customers Off Salesforce

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 team announced Dynamics 365 Activate on September 9 — an AI-powered migration tool built specifically to move organizations off Salesforce and onto Dynamics 365, and it’s already processed more than six billion data records across early customer engagements. The tool profiles an existing CRM’s data, entities, relationships, and customizations, then combines automated discovery, recommendations, and execution with built-in guardrails to carry out the migration itself rather than just scoping it. It’s currently in public preview for Salesforce-to-Dynamics-365 moves specifically, with ERP and other source migrations planned later in 2026, and Microsoft frames it as supporting three journeys: net-new implementations, migrations from a known competitor, and expansion of an existing Dynamics footprint. Comcast’s Sathish Arumugam is quoted saying Activate’s discovery capabilities “helped accelerate our migration assessment” by improving visibility into their Salesforce landscape before the switch.

The timing lines up with a vulnerability Salesforce disclosed about itself less than a week earlier. Jason Lemkin’s read of Salesforce’s Q2 FY27 earnings found combined Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue at roughly $3.9 billion — up 210% year-over-year — but fewer than 5,000 of Salesforce’s more than 150,000 total customers have a production AI agent actually running, with CEO Marc Benioff himself acknowledging “most of them have not started their AI transformations yet.” Benioff also conceded Salesforce is “still trapped in some ways in old per user pricing models” even while running four pricing models simultaneously. Microsoft is targeting exactly that gap: a huge installed base that hasn’t yet operationalized agentic AI on its incumbent platform, at the moment switching costs — historically the thing protecting Salesforce’s base — are the main thing standing in Microsoft’s way. It’s also consistent with what practitioners are already reporting about life after a CRM switch: Union Square Consulting’s Gerry Marletta has described teams using MCP to query Salesforce data without logging into the UI at all, suggesting the real competitive fight may be less about which CRM owns the interface and more about which platform’s data agents can act on fastest.