Accelerate innovation with AI: Introducing the Product Change Management agent template
We’re thrilled to announce the public preview of the Product Change Management agent template—an AI-powered solution that transforms how manufacturers manage the process of change across equipment, products, processes, and more. Built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, the agent automates workflows and connects systems, helping teams cut approval times from weeks to days, reduce errors, and bring innovations to market, faster.
Learn how Copilot Studio can help build and customize agents that work for your operations.
Reenergizing change management with AI
Engineering change management (ECM) is how manufacturers manage change without causing production chaos. Changes move through a complex, controlled path with requests reviewed, approved, and rolled out to multiple stakeholders and systems. Whether responding to market shifts, regulatory updates, or quality improvements, manufacturers initiate millions of change requests each year.
Today, ECM is slow. While highly collaborative, the process is easily bogged down by siloed information, manual steps, and disconnected processes. When it breaks down, costs from scrap, stoppages, and delayed product launches pile up.
The Product Change Management agent template addresses these pain points by infusing intelligence, automation, and orchestration into this otherwise manual process. The agent provides a managed solution that can be tailored to specific business needs—accelerating deployment while ensuring consistency and governance. Connecting people, data, and systems together with Microsoft AI, it simplifies execution—cutting approval times to days, improving uptime, and ensuring change traceability.
Powering AI change management end-to-end
The Product Change Management agent template is an AI-powered orchestrator, built in Copilot Studio. It autonomously manages engineering change processes through a series of specialized sub-agents, collaborating with your team to ensure every change is executed efficiently and accurately. Using Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams, the agent shifts manual tasks to focused reviews and refinement—delivering faster, safer changes with fewer errors and less review turmoil, while maintaining compliance and alignment. maintaining compliance and alignment.
Some key capabilities set it apart:
- Automated workflow orchestration. Accelerate approvals by coordinating the entire change process, from request to closure, autonomously. Embedded into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, the agent initiates impact analysis, routes approvals, and updates records—keeping stakeholders informed.
- System of record synchronization. Keep engineering and operations systems aligned. The agent ensures updates are consistently reflected across product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, eliminating rework and maintaining alignment from design through delivery.
- Collaborative stakeholder engagement. Simplify communication across engineering, quality, and operations with natural language interfaces and intelligent routing. This ensures that the right people are engaged at the right time, reducing bottlenecks and accelerating approvals.
- Data-driven impact analysis. Evaluate proposed changes across inventory, suppliers, and production. The agent surfaces real-time insights to guide decision-making and flag potential risks early—empowering teams to act.
- Built-in compliance and traceability. Document and audit changes at every step. The agent enforces governance policies, tracks decisions, and supports regulatory compliance without adding complexity.
In short, product change management lays the agentic foundation for manufacturing digital threads—enabling agility, transparency, and reliability for every stakeholder.
Transforming change management at Coca-Cola Beverages Africa
Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the eighth largest authorized Coca-Cola bottler in the world by revenue, and the largest on the continent—operating in 14 countries. Serving more than 800,000 customers, CCBA accounts for 40% of all Coca-Cola ready-to-drink beverages sold in Africa through a host of international and local brands.
With thousands of stock keeping units (SKUs), multiple packaging formats, and a relentless focus on sustainability, CCBA runs one of the most complex beverage supply chains in Africa. Agility is critical especially when managing formulation and packaging changes that ripple across multiple production lines, inventory systems, and financial models.
Every year, CCBA makes more than 1,000 changes to its bottle molds alone, often driven by material availability or sustainability initiatives. Historically, these changes relied on manual workflows: engineers drafting requests, planners emailing spreadsheets, and multiple handoffs across departments. This process was slow, error-prone, and risky. A single misalignment could mean production downtime, inaccurate cost data, or compliance gaps. The Product Change Management agent template from Microsoft is transforming this process.
Acting as a digital orchestrator, the agent brings intelligence, speed, and reliability to the CCBA change lifecycle. Here’s how:
- Smart initiation. When a planner or engineer triggers a change, such as switching a supplier or updating a packaging component, the agent immediately identifies all affected products and plants. It auto-drafts the request, applies the standard template, and fills in known details like part numbers and descriptions—eliminating repetitive manual work.
- Automated routing. The agent ensures the request moves to the right reviewers in the correct sequence, removing guesswork and delays. Notifications flow through familiar tools like Teams and Outlook, alerting stakeholders when action is required.
- Instant system updates. Once approvals are complete, the agent updates Microsoft Dynamics 365 in real time, syncing bill-of-material data. It confirms changes immediately, rather than days of manual checks.
The Product Change Management agent is streamlining equipment management across CCBA’s capital assets and products, enabling faster identification of impact areas and responsible individuals, and improving operational efficiency
—Joshua Motsuenyane, Chief Information Officer, CCBA
While this strategic collaboration is still new, CCBA is already seeing results. Actions that once took days of back-and-forth now happen in hours or less. Product change management also represents a major milestone in its Frontier Firm journey—making change management a focus across one of Africa’s most dynamic manufacturing networks.
Creating the future of change management in manufacturing, together with partners
AI-powered change management is now imperative. As changes proliferate across more assets and systems, manufacturers need governed, AI-guided workflows to maintain speed and quality. Discrete manufacturers—building complex products from computers to cars—feel it the most: disconnected systems and manual handoffs slow adoption, raise error rates, and suppress productivity. PTC and Microsoft are changing that.
Together, we’re building an agentic architecture that bridges operations and engineering systems, enabling faster decisions with enterprise visibility. Enabled by technologies such as model context protocol (MCP), native PLM agents in Windchill and ERP agents in Dynamics 365 interoperate to surface problem reports, collate data from multiple systems, and drive automation in PLM workflows such as change impact analysis, where data governance rules are established, ensuring AI agents work in the right context and within the right controls.
Ready to simplify change and accelerate execution?
Product Change Management agent template
In combining Microsoft for Manufacturing with expertise from partners, we can deliver better, more comprehensive industry solutions. As we expand this ecosystem, manufacturers will gain even broader interoperability, deeper insights, and more resiliency across their value chain.
Shaping the manufacturing Frontier
With the Product Change Management agent template, manufacturers gain a trusted technology partner in navigating every engineering change. Part of a broader vision to enable intelligent digital treads across manufacturing, product change management is about empowering teams to innovate with confidence, backed by data and AI automation.
