Need help in alternatives to ACS - job router and chat
Microsoft announced that ACS Chat and Job Router are retiring on September 30, 2028, while existing workloads remain supported during the transition and no new resources creation is supported after 23 oct 2026
This is particularly concerning for us because we recently implemented a live-agent solution using ACS Chat + Job Router + Microsoft Teams.
Our architecture is roughly:
Customer → Chatbot → ACS Chat → Middleware → Job Router → Agent Queue → Teams
We already completed the implementation through Dev and QA, including custom routing, agent availability checks, conversation lifecycle/state management, queue handling, and Teams integration.
During our initial design phase, we actually evaluated Dynamics 365 Contact Center, but moved away from it primarily because of the cost/licensing model(~8k/user/month). So going back to D365 Contact Center isn’t really an option for us.
That’s what makes this retirement announcement painful becoz a significant amount of engineering effort has already gone into the current architecture, and it was almost done and we don’t want all of that work to simply become a dead end. 🙂
I’m looking for ideas from people who have built similar systems:
-> Is there a viable alternative to ACS Job Router without adopting D365 Contact Center?
-> Could we keep Teams as the agent interface and replace Job Router with a custom routing/queue service?
-> For the customer chat side, would Microsoft Graph + Teams work, or would a third-party CPaaS be more appropriate?
-> If anyone was in this same huddle, Has anyone already started planning a migration from ACS Chat/Job Router?
Looking for any suggestion and solutions that preserve the existing architecture as much of the existing implementation as possible, rather than completely rebuilding the solution.
Thanks in advance.