One of the topics in the 2019 release wave 2 is the simplified lead management experience.

Probably the most interesting feature for lead management will be that we can now enable the automatic creation of account, contact and opportunity records during qualification of a lead. This speeds up the lead management sales cycle and reduces the number of clicks significantly.

Another thing that caught my attention. When you select an existing account or contact, the system fills in the appropriate fields on the lead form.
Or as stated in docs:

“Auto-populate contact and/or company-related fields when a sales rep selects an existing contact and/or account at the creation of a new lead.”

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2019wave2/dynamics365-sales/simplified-lead-management-experience

This auto-populating functionality is one of those things customers ask for on a regular base. In many cases it requires scripting, so I hope they will extend this in the future. Ideally we can enable and configure this on any relationship.

I haven’t found a way to determine which fields are filled in the lead scenario or if we can change those.
I thought it would be based on relationship mapping but no dice…

One more thing to keep in mind… As soon as you manually enter data in one of these auto-populated fields none of them will be auto-populated.

But if this is a first step in configurable auto-population, then I like where it’s going!

And last but not least this his feature is available in both the legacy web client and Unified Interface. Something we don’t see often these days!