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The Skilling Shift: What's Changing in Microsoft's Certification Catalog This Year

Thursday, July 30, 2026
Reading time: 3 minutes

A summer series from Companial Learning

If you’ve tried to book a Microsoft certification exam recently and noticed the exam code doesn’t look quite right, you’re not imagining things. 2026 brings the biggest reshuffle of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform certification catalog in years, and it’s still happening as you read this.

Most of the changes we’ll cover fall between June and the end of August, so we’re spending this summer walking through them one certification at a time. A new post every week, each one built around a single certification or training change. What’s retiring, what replaces it, what’s genuinely new, and what’s still an open question, because in more than one case even Microsoft hasn’t fully answered that yet.

Why this is happening

Microsoft has spent the past year rebuilding its certification portfolio around one idea: AI is no longer a bonus skill on top of a role, it’s part of the role itself. Copilot, agents and natural language tooling are now treated as baseline knowledge for the jobs these certifications validate, not an advanced topic reserved for specialists. In practice that means AI shows up in almost every role and almost every training on the roadmap, not tucked away in a handful of AI specific exams.

That plays out in two ways.

First, a large batch of retirements. Long standing exams across Power Platform (PL-200, PL-500, PL-600) and Dynamics 365 (MB-240, MB-700, MB-335, MB-280) are on their way out, most of them by the end of August.

Second, a new AB series. In their place, Microsoft has launched a family of AB certifications: AB-100, AB-210, AB-250, AB-410, AB-620, AB-900 and more, all built around agentic AI, Copilot Studio and AI enhanced application design.

It's not a clean one for one swap

Here’s the part that matters most if you’re planning training or a certification path. Not every retiring exam has a direct replacement.

Some transitions are straightforward. PL-200, for example, is officially and explicitly replaced by AB-410. Same core platform, with a substantial AI layer added on top.

Others are much less clear. Several expert level Dynamics 365 certifications are retiring with no direct successor at all. Microsoft points to the new AB-100 as a possible next step, while stating clearly that it is not a like for like replacement. AB-100 is a broader, expert level credential that spans a much wider scope than any single retiring exam. For a few subject areas, there’s no replacement in sight yet, direct or otherwise.

That distinction, confirmed replacement versus recommended next step versus genuinely open question, is something we’ll flag clearly in every post in this series. We’d rather tell you a gap is still unresolved than paper over it with a confident sounding guess.

The impact reaches further than exam codes

A few knock on effects worth keeping in mind:

Partner program impact. Microsoft’s Solutions Partner designations and specializations rely on these certifications for scoring. When a certification retires without a formally confirmed replacement, that creates real uncertainty for partners tracking their designation status.

Content that outlives its certification. Some product areas are losing their certification path entirely even though the underlying product and the skills to use it remain very much in demand.

Training, not just testing. A retiring exam usually means a retiring instructor led course too, which raises a practical question for a training provider like us. Do we simply drop the content, or is there still enough demand to justify keeping some version of it alive, certification or not.

What to expect from this series

Each post takes one certification or training change and walks through what’s retiring and when, what Microsoft has confirmed as the replacement if anything, how the actual exam content compares in terms of what carries over, what’s new and what’s dropped, and what it means in practice if you’re currently studying, holding or teaching toward it.

We’ll keep it practical and specific. No vague claims that AI is changing everything, just what’s actually different and what to do about it.

Next week: PL-200 versus AB-410, a side by side look at what’s really changing for Power Platform functional consultants.

Vincent Bellefroid
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