Key takeaways
- Dynamics 365 Sales storage appears under Licensing > Dataverse in the Power Platform admin center, and database storage in GB for your Sales environment is the figure to report.
- Trial, preview, support, developer and Teams environments show 0 GB, so open their details to see what they use.
- Export to Excel handles up to 100,000 rows at a time; the full history goes through Azure Synapse Link into an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account as CSV files, for tables with change tracking on.
- You don't need to export anything to apply: have your GB figure, years of history and license count ready, and the data vendor anonymizes the records before any AI lab sees them.
01
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales data, and why do AI labs and data vendors buy it?
The short answer
Dynamics 365 Sales data is the record of how a company sells: its leads, opportunities, quotes, orders and the activities logged against each one, stored in Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Sales app. AI labs (companies that build and train AI models) and data vendors (companies that anonymize business records and package them for those labs) buy an anonymized copy because the records show how a large, multi-step sale is priced, negotiated and won or lost.
What a Dynamics 365 Sales environment records
Dynamics 365 Sales is a customer relationship management (CRM) app, software where a sales team keeps track of everyone it sells to. It stores its records in Dataverse, Microsoft's database service for business apps. Each kind of record has its own table, and each record in a table is a row.
A lead is a person or company that might buy, and an opportunity is a sale the team is actively working on. Quotes, products and competitors can be attached to an opportunity, and phone calls, emails, appointments and tasks are logged against it as activities. The company's installation of the app lives in an environment, which is a separate Dataverse database with its own tables and its own storage.
Why a linked sales history teaches an AI model something
An AI model learns by studying a very large number of examples and finding the patterns in them, and those examples are called training data. Public text shows a finished sales pitch, but it does not show how a lead became an opportunity, how a quote was reworked after the customer pushed back, or why the deal was lost. A Dynamics 365 Sales environment records every one of those steps in order.
The quote, product and competitor tables attached to opportunities add the pricing side. They show how enterprise deals, which often involve several buyers and long negotiations, are priced and won.
AI labs now want to train AI agents, software that carries out a job step by step, and an agent learns a job from records of that job being done. A data vendor can turn anonymized sales histories into worked examples that an agent studies like an answer key, or into a practice copy of a sales process in which the agent is scored on each attempt. The full mechanism is in AI training data: why AI companies want your company's data.
How Dynamics 365 Sales fits into a dataset
Dynamics 365 Sales is usually one of several apps in a company's dataset, next to email, documents and billing records. Companies are paid $100K to $2M or more per dataset, according to micro1, the data vendor we typically refer companies to. The price covers the whole dataset, not each app on its own, and what your data is worth explains what moves it.
02
Where does Dynamics 365 Sales show how much data you have?
The short answer
The Power Platform admin center shows storage under Licensing > Dataverse, in a tile called Usage per storage type that splits database, file and log storage into gigabytes (GB). Tenant admins, Power Platform admins and Dynamics 365 admins can open it. Dataverse reports size, not record counts, so database storage in GB is the figure to report for your Sales environment.
How to read your storage
The steps below read the size of your Sales environment from Microsoft's own admin pages, as described in Microsoft's Dataverse capacity-based storage details.
- Log in to the Power Platform admin center with a tenant admin, Power Platform admin or Dynamics 365 admin account.
- In the navigation pane choose Licensing, then select Dataverse under Products.
- Read the Usage per storage type tile. It shows how much database, file and log storage the whole tenant uses.
- Select your Sales environment, either from the Top environment consuming storage tile (choose See all environments) or from the Environment list on the Dataverse page. Its own usage tile and a Consumption per table list now show the size of each table.
- As an alternative route, open Licensing > Capacity add-ons > Dataverse and select Details beside the environment.
The Consumption per table list shows which tables take the most space, and selecting a table name shows its daily usage trend for up to the past three months.
What the three storage types hold
Dataverse splits what it stores into three kinds, and each has its own meter. Database storage holds the rows in your tables, which is the figure that measures your sales records. File storage holds attached files such as PDFs, and log storage holds audit logs.
Who can see the numbers
The tenant-wide summary is visible only to tenant admins, Power Platform admins and Dynamics 365 admins. An environment admin, who manages a single environment, lands on the Dataverse tab instead. A user holding one of the three admin roles can also grant an environment admin permission to view the Capacity summary.
Why a trial or developer environment shows 0 GB
Trial, preview, support, developer and Microsoft Teams environments do not count against your organization's capacity, so the list view shows them as 0 GB. This does not mean they are empty. Select the environment, then open its details or its environment capacity analytics page to see what it actually uses.
The default environment is shown differently too: it includes 3 GB of database, 3 GB of file and 1 GB of log capacity, and the list view shows only the amount used beyond that. Open its Details to see actual usage.
03
What should you know about your Dynamics 365 Sales data before you apply?
The short answer
Have three facts ready: the database storage of your Sales environment in GB, how many years you have used the app and how many people hold a Dynamics 365 Sales license. They go into the data manifest, the written summary of which apps hold your records, how many years each covers and roughly how much. You don't need to run an export to find them.
The size in GB
Enter the database storage of the environment as the figure, with GB as the unit. File storage holds attachments, so mention it separately if the environment has a lot of it. Dataverse reports size rather than a count of records, which is why GB is the unit for this app.
The years of history
For years in use, open the Accounts or Opportunities view in the Sales app, sort it by Created On and note the oldest year that appears.
The number of seats
Count the users who have a Dynamics 365 Sales license assigned. People who only hold another Microsoft license do not count as Sales seats.
What you don't need to do first
You don't need to export anything to apply, and you don't need to clean or scrub an export. The data vendor anonymizes the records before anyone else sees them, and nothing moves until a lawyer-reviewed license is signed. The application, the intro call and each later step are laid out in how to sell your company's data.
04
How do you export your full Dynamics 365 Sales history?
The short answer
For a quick look, open a table in the Sales app and choose Export to Excel > Static worksheet, which saves one view of up to 100,000 rows. For the full history, a user with the Dataverse system administrator security role links the environment to an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account, and Dataverse writes CSV copies of every table you pick and keeps them current.
A quick export to Excel
An Excel export is the right tool for sampling a single table. Microsoft describes it in Export to an Excel static worksheet.
- Open the Sales app and select a table in the left navigation, such as Opportunities.
- Choose the view you want, and filter it if the table is large.
- On the command bar select Export to Excel, then Static worksheet to export every page of the current view, or Static worksheet (Page only) to export just the page on screen.
- When the download finishes, open the file from your downloads folder.
One export holds up to 100,000 rows. A wide view with many lookup columns (columns that pull in a value from a related table) can time out, so split a large table into batches with filters, for example one year of created dates at a time.
The full history with Azure Synapse Link
Azure Synapse Link is a Microsoft service that copies Dataverse tables into Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, a file store on Microsoft's Azure cloud that your company rents. A user with the Dataverse system administrator security role sets it up in Power Apps, as Microsoft explains in Create an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with Azure Data Lake.
- Sign in to Power Apps (make.powerapps.com) with the Dataverse system administrator security role.
- In the left navigation choose Link data, then Other Links. If Link data is missing, select More and then Discover all.
- On the command bar select + New link to data lake.
- Choose the subscription, resource group and storage account, then select Next.
- Choose every table you need, either one by one or by pasting a comma-separated list into the search box, and select Save.
Dataverse then writes a folder for each table, holding snapshot files in CSV format (plain text with values separated by commas, which opens in Excel). The service refreshes the snapshots every hour, creates a new snapshot only when the data changed, and keeps the latest five.
What Azure Synapse Link requires
Synapse Link needs several things in place before the first step works. The table summarizes them.
| Requirement | What it means |
|---|---|
| Security role | The Dataverse system administrator role in the environment. |
| Storage account | An Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account with hierarchical namespace turned on, created in the same Microsoft Entra tenant as your Power Apps tenant. |
| Azure access | The Owner role, or a custom role with equivalent permissions, on the storage account, plus the Reader role on its resource group. |
| Tables | Only tables that have change tracking turned on can be exported. |
Change tracking is a table setting, called Track changes, that lets Dataverse tell which rows were added or edited.
An alternative: Link to Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's analytics platform. Choose + New link then Fabric link on the Link data page, and Dataverse keeps a copy of your tables in the Delta Parquet format (a compressed, column-based file format that analytics tools read directly). No storage account of your own is needed, as Microsoft's Link to Fabric page explains. The link adds every non-system table that has Track changes on, and the copy uses your Dataverse database storage, so your usage figure rises.
What an export leaves out and how long it takes
An Excel export covers one view at a time and does not carry attachments. Synapse Link copies only the tables you select, so a table you leave unchecked is never copied. Microsoft gives no time estimate for the first copy; a large environment takes longer, and the status of the initial sync appears in the model.json file that Dataverse writes into the storage account.
Sources: Microsoft Learn, Dataverse capacity-based storage details, Export to an Excel static worksheet, Create an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with Azure Data Lake and Link to Fabric. Steps checked against these pages in November 2026.
05
What stays private when Dynamics 365 Sales data is licensed?
The short answer
The company decides which tables are in the copy, and the data vendor replaces names and other personal details with consistent stand-ins before an AI lab sees anything. The company keeps ownership of its sales history, and the license covers defined records for a defined use.
You choose what is in scope
Azure Synapse Link copies only the tables you select, so tables holding employee details or sensitive customer data can stay out of the copy. A company can license opportunities, quotes and activities and keep everything else where it is. The data vendor also deletes records too sensitive to clean safely instead of anonymizing them.
Names are replaced before a lab sees them
Anonymization means replacing every detail that identifies a person, such as a name or an email address, with a stand-in that is the same every time it appears. The opportunity still reads in order, so a lab can learn from it, but it no longer says who the buyer is. The diagram below shows one record before and after.
The method, including what is deleted outright and how you review samples, is in how company data is anonymized for AI training.
Ownership and payment
Licensing gives the buyer limited rights to a copy, while the company keeps ownership of the originals. The terms that matter, such as exclusivity, permitted use and deletion, are covered in data licensing. micro1 pays in full within 30 days of accepting the data, usually as a single payment.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Why does the Power Platform admin center show 0 GB for one of our environments?
Trial, preview, support, developer and Microsoft Teams environments do not count against capacity, so the list shows them as 0 GB. Select the environment and open its details or its environment capacity analytics page to see what it actually uses.
Can we export more than 100,000 rows to Excel in Dynamics 365 Sales?
Not in one export. Excel exports stop at 100,000 rows at a time, so filter the view into smaller batches, such as one year of created dates each, or copy whole tables with Azure Synapse Link.
Which role do we need to set up Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?
A user who holds the Dataverse system administrator security role in the environment. That user also needs the Owner role (or equivalent custom permissions) on the Azure storage account and the Reader role on its resource group.
Why are some tables missing from our Synapse Link or Fabric copy?
Only tables with change tracking turned on can be exported. Open the table's settings in Power Apps and turn on Track changes, then add it to the link.
Do we need to export Dynamics 365 Sales before we apply?
No. The application takes about two minutes and shares no data. You need the database storage of your Sales environment in GB, your years of history and your license count for the intro call. The full export is needed later, when the records are transferred after you sign the license.
Can we license only part of our Dynamics 365 Sales data?
Yes. Synapse Link exports only the tables you select, so a company can license opportunities, quotes and activities and leave out tables that hold employee or sensitive customer data.
What is Dynamics 365 Sales data worth to AI labs and data vendors?
Sales history is priced as part of a whole dataset rather than on its own. Companies are paid $100K to $2M or more per dataset, according to micro1, and the price depends on the years of history and how completely the records show each deal. What your data is worth explains the factors.
Bottom line
Know what is in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, then see what it is worth
You don't need to export anything to apply. Apply in two minutes, describe your records on the intro call, and micro1, the data vendor we typically refer companies to, prices the whole dataset and sends an offer 1–2 days later.
Not legal, tax or financial advice. Figures come from micro1's published pages and public reporting as of November 2026.