Building a customer journey should be simple: describe your goal, and the system builds it. In reality, marketing teams spend hours configuring triggers, wait steps, branching conditions, and channel sequencing to bring a single campaign idea to life.
For many teams, a five-minute idea becomes a two-hour project, and often ends with a request to Marketing Operations to “just build it for me.” This inefficiency slows campaign execution and keeps specialists buried in repetitive configuration work instead of strategic thinking.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is now closing this gap with Journey Creation Agent, a new AI-powered capability that turns plain-English descriptions into fully structured, ready-to-review journeys. Instead of manually assembling every step, you simply describe what you want to achieve, and the agent drafts the entire journey: steps, timing, branching, and channel sequencing included.
In this guide, we’ll explore what the Journey Creation Agent is, why it matters, how it works with real business examples, the requirements to get started, and the tangible benefits it brings to marketing teams.
Why Do We Need a Journey Creation Agent?
Building a journey from scratch involves far more than dragging tiles onto a canvas. It requires deliberate decisions about when the journey starts, how long to wait between messages, what happens if contacts don’t respond, and which channel to use at each stage. Getting all of this right takes both platform expertise and significant time.
This creates two persistent challenges in most organizations:
- Business users with promising campaign ideas must depend on specialists to translate those ideas into journeys, which delays execution.
- Even experienced journey builders spend considerable time on repetitive configuration work rather than strategy and content development.
Journey Creation Agent eliminates this friction. It lets anyone with a clear goal describe that goal conversationally, and the system assembles the steps using best-practice patterns for timing and branching.
What is a Journey Creation Agent?
Journey Creation Agent is an AI assistant built into Customer Insights – Journeys that transforms plain-language descriptions of campaign goals into ready-to-review journeys. You describe your target audience, what you want to send, and roughly when, and it proposes a complete flow using the segments and content already in your environment.
It’s important to understand what the agent does today: it assembles existing building blocks into a journey.
The agent does not create new audience segments, and it does not write new email or SMS content for you. However, if those assets are already prepared, the agent can put together a logical, ready-to-refine journey in a fraction of the time it would normally take.
What Can It Do?
- Turns a conversation into a journey: Describe your goal, audience, and timeline, and receive a proposed journey with steps, wait periods, and branching already mapped out.
- Works across channels: The agent can sequence email, SMS, push notifications, and custom channels, and set up conditional branches. For example, send SMS only to contacts who didn’t open the earlier email.
- Nothing goes live without your review: Before publishing, you get a visual preview of the proposed journey and can request changes or open it in the journey designer for manual fine-tuning.
- Uses your real data: Journey proposals are grounded in the segments, triggers, and content already in your environment, so the output reflects what is actually available.
- Connects with Sales and Service: You can build journeys triggered by events elsewhere in Dynamics 365. Such as a new opportunity, a stalled deal, or a resolved support case. This helps marketing and sales stay in sync without manual handoffs.
Key Requirements Before You Start
Before implementing the Journey Creation Agent, ensure the following prerequisites are met:
- You need a Marketing Manager or Marketing Professional role, or equivalent permissions, to create and publish journeys.
- Currently, the agent responds only in English.
- This is a preview capability, so it is not intended for production-critical use, and functionality may change.
- Having your segments and content (email, SMS, or push notification drafts) ready in advance makes the conversation faster and initial proposals more accurate.
- Using the agent draws on your organization’s allocated Copilot credits. Monitor usage accordingly.
- An administrator must enable the feature in AI Hub, and your tenant must be opted in to use the underlying AI model through Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Center.
To enable, navigate to Settings > AI Hub > “Add and manage agents.” Verification is simple: check AI Hub under AI Agents to confirm “Journey Creation Agent” appears as added and enabled.
You can verify this by going to AI Hub and checking under AI Agents that “Journey Creation Agent” shows up as added and enabled, with just a simple set of configuration steps involved – no lengthy setup needed.
The steps that are configured for this setup are as below:
- Overview: A quick summary of what Journey Creation Agent does and the value it brings, before you turn anything on.
- Prerequisites – Confirms the requirements are met (like tenant opt-in for the AI model and required licensing) before the agent can be enabled.
- Settings – Where you actually toggle the agent on/off and configure any environment-specific options for how it runs.
- As this agent uses “Microsoft Dataverse” connector will be used by this agent, so make sure you have connected those through Copilot Studio as below:
Business Scenarios: Real-World Examples
Scenario 1: Onboarding New Contacts
A company runs regular sign-up campaigns. Every time someone new joins a particular audience list, the marketing team wants them to receive a short series of welcome emails. Manually building this means configuring a segment-based trigger, adding each email in sequence, and setting appropriate gaps between them.
The marketing executive opens Journey Creation Agent and simply describes the outcome: start a welcome journey whenever a new contact is added to the target segment, and send a short series of onboarding emails over the first few days. Using the / shortcut, they point the agent to the exact segment and let it pick up the associated email content already prepared in the library.
Within moments, the agent proposes a segment-based journey with an entry condition, three touchpoints in sequence, and sensible wait periods between sends. In this example, the “Welcome” email is sent immediately when the contact joins the segment, again after Day 5, and once more after Day 10—a gentle series of reminders. The marketer reviews the flow and opens it in the journey designer for a final check before publishing.
Scenario 2: Nurturing New Leads
Sales regularly receives leads from a web form, but not every lead is ready to speak with a salesperson immediately. Marketing wants a structured nurture sequence that keeps leads engaged until they show more interest.
The marketing manager describes the goal conversationally: build a lead nurture journey that automatically follows up with anyone who submits the relevant form, using associated email content. The agent checks the form and linked content assets and proposes a journey that starts immediately upon form submission, sends the intended email, and branches based on whether the lead engages.
Scenario 3: Sending a Recurring Newsletter
Many teams run regular newsletters for specific audiences. Perhaps a monthly update for customers or a topic-focused newsletter for subscribers. Manual setup typically requires creating a recurring schedule, tying it to the right segment, and ensuring timely delivery. With Journey Creation Agent, the content marketer describes the desired pattern: send a newsletter to the chosen segment on a set cadence, covering a given topic.
Across all three scenarios, what normally requires significant manual configuration is drafted in minutes through simple conversation, freeing marketers to focus on messaging and strategy rather than mechanics.
How to Use Journey Creation Agent
Step 1: Start a New Journey with the Agent
In Customer Insights – Journeys, go to Journeys in the left-hand navigation under the “Real – time journeys” area, click on “New journey” button as below:
Upon clicking on the button, you will be able to see the Journey Creation Agent (preview) page as shown below. If you don’t want to use it, then you can skip and create from blank as well.
Now, let’s use the Journey Creation Agent (preview) feature to create the journey.
Step 2: Describe What You Want to Build
This is where you tell the agent what you have in mind. You can either start typing your own description straight into the text box, or lean on the ready-made prompt cards the agent offers, such as Onboarding, Lead Nurture, or Re-engagement. If none of the visible cards match what you need, select “See more” to browse the full list of pre-built prompts and pick one closer to your scenario, then tweak the wording to fit. The more detail you include about your audience, timeline, and preferred channels, the more complete the first draft will be. You can also type / in the message box to quickly search for and reference an exact segment, trigger, or content asset by name.
Step 3: Answer Any Clarifying Questions
If the agent needs more information to build an accurate journey, it will ask follow-up questions – for instance, whether the journey should start on a fixed date, as soon as a contact qualifies, or when a specific event happens. You can pick from the suggested options or simply type your answer.
Good to know: if a dedicated “Welcome” or “Onboarding” email has not been created yet, the agent does not leave that step blank. Instead, it picks another existing email record from the environment as a placeholder, so the journey structure stays complete and ready to review. This is a helpful stand-in, but it also means it is worth double-checking each step’s assigned content before publishing, and swapping in the right email once it has been created.
The agent picks up existing content correctly whenever a matching email is already available in the environment. In this case, since a “Welcome” email already existed, the agent picked it up on its own and reused it across all three touchpoints without needing any manual correction.
If a dedicated email had not existed yet, the agent would instead have picked another existing email record from the environment as a placeholder, keeping the journey structure complete and ready to review. Either way, it is worth glancing over each step’s assigned content before publishing, just to confirm it is exactly what you intended.
Step 4: Review the Proposed Journey
The agent presents a structured proposal covering the journey type, each touchpoint with its suggested content, the wait periods between steps, the branching logic, and how contacts enter and exit the journey. Go through each section to confirm it matches what you had in mind.
Step 5: Refine Through Conversation
If something is not quite right, just say so in the chat – for example, asking to change a wait period, add a condition after a step, or swap in a different piece of content. The proposal updates immediately based on your feedback.
NOTE:
Do as much refining as you can in the agent chat before clicking “Review and Publish,” since after that point, you’re back to standard manual editing on the canvas.
Step 6: Move to the Journey Designer and Publish
Once the structure looks right, select “Review and Publish” to open the journey on the standard canvas with every proposed step, condition, and content assignment already in place.
From the journey canvas, now you can make any further manual adjustments – adding or removing steps, changing conditions, or adjusting timings – exactly as you would with a journey built from scratch.
When everything looks good, publish the journey as usual.
For more details, you can refer to the official Microsoft documentation here.
Benefits of Journey Creation Agent
- Faster journey creation: What once took hours of manual configuration is now drafted in minutes through simple conversation.
- Lower dependency on specialists: Business users without deep platform expertise can build solid journeys independently, freeing Marketing Operations specialists for higher-value work.
- Consistent, best-practice structure: The agent applies sensible defaults for timing and branching, ensuring journeys follow best practices even when built by non-experts.
- Better alignment across teams: Because the agent can trigger journeys from Sales and Service events, marketing, sales, and support can coordinate outreach without manual back-and-forth.
Conclusion
Journey Creation Agent transforms how marketing teams build customer journeys. By turning plain-language goals into structured, editable journeys, it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for business users while keeping every decision firmly in human hands.
Ready to transform how your marketing team builds customer journeys?
Reach out to us at crm@inogic.com to explore how Journey Creation Agent can accelerate your customer engagement strategy. Our team of Dynamics 365 experts is here to guide your implementation and maximize value from day one.
FAQs
1. What is Journey Creation Agent in Dynamics 365?
Journey Creation Agent is an AI-powered assistant built into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys that converts plain-language descriptions of campaign goals into fully structured, ready-to-review customer journeys. Instead of manually configuring each step, you describe your objective, and the agent drafts the complete journey including entry conditions, touchpoints, wait periods, and branching logic. All existing segments and content in your environment are used to create accurate, actionable journey proposals.
2. How long does it take to build a journey with Journey Creation Agent?
What typically takes 2-3 hours of manual configuration can now be completed in minutes. You describe your campaign goal in conversational language, answer a few clarifying questions, review the proposed journey structure, and refine it through chat. Most users report drafting a complete journey in 5-15 minutes, compared to hours when building manually on the canvas.
3. Can Journey Creation Agent write email content or create new segments?
No. Journey Creation Agent assembles existing building blocks only. It does not create new audience segments, write email copy, or generate SMS and push notification content. However, if your email, SMS, and push assets are already prepared in your environment, the agent can select and sequence them intelligently throughout the journey structure.
4. What permissions do I need to use Journey Creation Agent?
You need a Marketing Manager or Marketing Professional role in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, or an equivalent set of permissions, to create and publish journeys with the agent. Additionally, a system administrator must enable the feature in AI Hub, and your tenant must be opted in to allow the underlying AI model through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Center.
5. What channels can Journey Creation Agent use in customer journeys?
Journey Creation Agent can sequence multiple channels including email, SMS, push notifications, and custom channels. It can also set up intelligent conditional branches, such as sending SMS only to contacts who did not open a previous email. This cross-channel capability helps ensure coordinated, multi-touch customer engagement automatically