We are pleased to announce that the new cloud-powered Customer search is now GA. It is also available for customers in regions like India and Brazil.
By default, feature is not enabled and thus, all Customer Search related queries are happening on SQL but upon enabling this new feature from 'Feature management' all Customer Search related queries will be processed in the cloud using Azure Cognitive Search and not SQL anymore. Two major benefits - considerably better performance and great improvements in search relevance when looking up customers.
More information on this new wave of customer search experiences can be found here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/commerce/POS-search-improvements#cloud-powered-customer-search
We are inviting you all to try this new feature in your customer's sandbox & experience the mentioned benefits. Upon their successful vetting of improvements, you can get this enabled for their production environments immediately.
Thanks in advance. Looking forward to enabling this on your customer environments at the earliest. Please feel free to reach out on this email asharchw@microsoft.com, if you may have any further questions or concerns related to this feature.