Free live webinarSame team, more pipeline: AI-powered marketing for Dynamics 365 · Wed 11 Nov · 1:00pm ET · with Microsoft MVP Mark SmithSame team, more pipeline · 11 Nov
Save my seat →
Copilot drafts an email, turns a sentence into a segment, sketches a journey. Each is a genuinely useful assist inside one builder. None of them is the campaign — that is still your week. ThinkingStreams starts a campaign from a brief and hands you drafts to judge, while keeping the Dynamics integration you moved there for.
Microsoft is not behind on AI and we are not going to pretend they are. Customer Insights – Journeys ships real Copilot features, and we link to their own documentation so you can check ours against theirs.
Everything below about Microsoft is quoted from Microsoft Learn or from their published pricing, checked on 6 October 2026. The argument is not that they lack AI. It is about where the AI sits, and what happens to your bill when the programme works.
Microsoft's Copilot capabilities are listed from their own documentation, not characterised by us.
| ThinkingStreams | Customer Insights – Journeys | |
|---|---|---|
| What the AI is asked to do | Run the campaign: plan it, draft every asset against the plan, and keep going as you change your mind. | Assist inside a builder: draft an email, suggest an image, rewrite copy, create a segment, create a journey structure. |
| Where a campaign starts | A brief in your own words. You get a plan plus drafted emails, SMS and pages to judge. | A journey structure from natural language — then you build the content, the segments and the assets into it. |
| Does it remember you | Business DNA holds your positioning and voice; agent memory keeps what it learns, so corrections stick. | Each assist takes the tone or topic you pick for it, per generation. |
| Recurring work | Routines run the repeating work that was never a customer journey. | Journeys, for customer-triggered orchestration. |
| Reporting | Ask a question in plain language and get the report. | Analytics and dashboards in-product. |
| What you are billed on | The intelligence itself — not seats, not contacts. | “Interacted People” — anyone you market to, counted once per 12 months, across the tenant. |
| Published price | From $650 USD/month on an annual commitment. We sell the intelligence, not seats or contacts. | $1,700 USD/tenant/month paid yearly, including 10,000 Interacted People. $1,000 USD with a qualifying Dynamics 365 app. |
| Cost of reaching 50,000 people | No change. We do not price on how many contacts you hold. | Eight add-on packs at $250 USD/pack/month — $2,000 USD/month on top of the base. |
| Dynamics 365 integration | Two-way sync, plus data push of emails, SMS and form submissions as Standard, Virtual or Elastic tables. | Native — it is a Dynamics 365 application. |
Claims about our own product, which you can check against our documentation and in a demo.
Two-way sync of leads, contacts and marketing lists. We do not ask you to move your CRM data anywhere, and we do not become the master of it.
Data push writes emails, SMS and form submissions into your own environment, attached to the Contact and Lead records your sales team already uses. Standard, Virtual or Elastic tables, as a managed solution that modifies nothing of Microsoft's.
Describe the campaign you want and get a plan with drafted emails, SMS and pages to review. When you are rebuilding a year of assets from scratch, that is the difference between a quarter and a fortnight.
A journey canvas for contact-triggered automation, plus routines for the recurring work that is not a journey at all.
Ask in plain language and get a report, rather than rebuilding dashboards against a new data source.
Measures how your brand shows up when people ask AI assistants, and recommends fixes. Not something the Dynamics marketing stack addresses.
Marketing teams are now asked for several times the output they produced two years ago — more campaigns, more channels, more personalisation, measured harder — with the same headcount.
An assist that makes each step faster does not close that gap, because the number of steps is unchanged. You still decide the sends, build the segments, write or approve each asset and wire them together. Copilot makes the writing quicker. It does not make the campaign for you, and the campaign is the work.
In Customer Insights – Journeys each Copilot feature is its own moment: a content idea here, a query assist there, a journey structure from a sentence. They are good features and they do not add up to a campaign, because nothing carries the thread between them.
Here you describe the goal, the audience and the offer once. ThinkingStreams comes back with the plan and the drafted emails, SMS and pages against it. Change your mind halfway and it keeps the context — you are talking to something that already knows what this campaign is for.
Microsoft's email generation asks you for key points, a topic and a tone each time. That is a reasonable design for a feature. It is a poor design for a brand, because nothing accumulates — the tenth email starts as ignorant of you as the first.
Business DNA holds your positioning, voice, audiences and tone once, and every agent is grounded in it. Agent memory keeps what it learns about your business and about you, so a correction you made last month does not have to be made again.
This is from Microsoft's published pricing and licensing documentation on 6 October 2026, not from us, and the figures are US dollars — worth saying plainly, because in a lot of markets that is the whole conversation. The base plan is $1,700 USD per tenant per month, paid yearly, and the capacity it includes for reaching people is 10,000 Interacted People.
An interacted person is anyone you market to. They are counted once, stay counted for twelve months, and are totalled across every Dataverse environment in the tenant. So the capacity you are buying is measured in exactly the thing a successful marketing programme increases.
Going from 10,000 to 50,000 means forty thousand more, sold in packs of 5,000 at $250 USD per pack per month — $2,000 USD a month on top of the base, before any growth in your unified-profile count.
If you are already deep in the Microsoft estate, Customer Insights is a serious product with a serious profile-unification engine behind it, sitting natively on Dataverse with no integration to build. Entra identity, Power Platform, Fabric, Teams — it all lines up because it is all one vendor.
If what your organisation values most is single-vendor consolidation and you have the budget the published price implies, that is a legitimate reason to stay, and we would rather you heard it here than discovered we had hidden it.
This is the question every Dynamics team asks first, so here is the specific answer. ThinkingStreams syncs two-way with Dynamics 365 for Sales, and your CRM stays the system of record throughout — we do not become the owner of your customer data by connecting to it.
Engagement records go back where your sales team can see them. Data push writes emails, SMS and form submissions into your environment, attached to the Contact and Lead records they already use — as Standard tables, as Elastic for very high volume, or as Virtual, where nothing is stored in Dataverse at all. It installs as a managed solution alongside what you have; no existing table is changed.
Your existing email templates come with you, and you move them yourself. Template import is a feature in the product, not a professional-services engagement you book and wait for.
The import does the fiddly part. Merge fields written in another tool's conventions — *|FNAME|*, %%first_name%% — are converted to this platform's form. Your old unsubscribe link stops working the day you leave, so the import repoints it at your unsubscribe URL while keeping the footer design you already have. Scripts, forms and tracking widgets are stripped, because mail clients block them anyway; your layout, styles, images and Outlook-specific markup are kept exactly as they were. Anything it cannot map becomes a flagged placeholder, and it tells you precisely what it changed — nothing is silently filled in for you.
After that an imported template behaves like any other: it lands in the Library, you can @-mention it in a session, clone it into a campaign, or ask the assistant to change it.
Your leads, contacts and segments are not a migration problem either. They stay in Dynamics, which is where they already are.
Microsoft published a transition playbook in December 2022, told customers in July 2023 that outbound marketing was closed to new customers and would receive no new features, announced in August 2024 that it was being removed after 30 June 2025, and removed it from all environments in May 2026. That is a long, well-signposted runway, and nobody should pretend it was a surprise.
What it still means in practice is that a lot of Dynamics marketing teams have spent 2026 rebuilding work they had already done once. Segments whose membership vanished. Emails and forms that exist but cannot be used. Power BI reports pointed at a data source that moved.
If you are going to rebuild regardless, the switching cost that normally protects an incumbent is not there. That is the whole argument. We are not claiming real-time journeys cannot do the job — we are saying this is the one quarter in a decade where comparing is nearly free.
We have not published a feature-by-feature scorecard against Customer Insights – Journeys. Microsoft ships changes to it monthly, and a table like that is out of date before it is indexed. Everything we say about Microsoft's product on this page is quoted from Microsoft's own documentation with a link, and everything we say about ours is in our documentation or demonstrable in a demo. If you catch us overstating either, tell us and we will fix the page.
No. Customer Insights – Journeys has Copilot for creating journeys from natural language, query assist for segments, email content generation, image recommendations and content rewriting — that list is from Microsoft's own documentation, checked 6 October 2026. Our argument is about scope: each of those assists you inside one builder, and the campaign around them is still yours to assemble.
No, and this is the point of the connector. ThinkingStreams syncs two-way with Dynamics 365 for Sales, Dynamics stays the system of record, and marketing engagement — emails, SMS, form submissions — is pushed back onto the Contact and Lead records your sales team already works in, as Standard, Virtual or Elastic tables.
The Microsoft figures are theirs, published on their pricing page in US dollars and quoted as of 6 October 2026; check them yourself. Ours start at $650 USD a month on an annual commitment. The structural difference is what you are buying: we sell the intelligence rather than seats or contacts, so growing your database does not move you into a higher capacity tier.
Profile unification is a genuinely strong part of Microsoft's offering and we have not claimed to replace it. Teams who need that engine and also want an AI-native marketing experience should talk to us about running ThinkingStreams against a Dynamics environment that keeps it.
You do. Guards set what agents are allowed to do, and approvals gate anything that sends. Nothing reaches a customer because an agent decided it should.
Not a canned demo scenario. Give us a real brief and watch what comes back — then price it against the meter you are on today.
Prefer to talk first? Book a demo or get pricing from the top of any page.
