Introducing AI Agents in Business Central

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AI-Integrated Business Operations

As was clear to everyone at Directions EMEA 2024, Microsoft has big ambitions to bring AI-powered business processes to businesses.

Copilot Studio

We saw this, among other things, with the announcement of the ability to create autonomous agents in Business Central with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Dynamics 365 Copilot in Business Central acts as your AI assistant – in other words, it works for you. In Copilot Studio, you have the ability to easily create, manage, and connect your agents to Copilot.

Agents in Business Central

To understand the concept of agents, you can think of agents as the new apps in an AI-powered world. Microsoft’s vision is that businesses will have a wide range of different agents – from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous agents that work entirely on their own.

A single agent in Business Central will work on behalf of a single employee, an entire team, or perform a specific function to execute and manage various business processes in the company, from lead generation to sales order processing to order delivery confirmation. Copilot in Business Central provides the ability to interact with your agents.

Agents in Business Central follow the instructions and settings that users give them, and use artificial intelligence to figure out what to do to solve the tasks they are given.

If special situations arise, for example when an important message needs to be prepared or something crucial needs to be approved in the system, it addresses the user and asks for help.

Microsoft about agents in Business Central

• The agents in Business Central are designed to automatically adapt to customizations and extensions, without, or with only a few, additional instructions.
• Over time, Microsoft will enable partners to build new standalone agents in Business Central and extend 1st party agents.
• The sales order agent will be the first autonomous agent in Business Central.

The Sales Order Agent

With the release of Business Central 26, which will be released in April with the 2025 release wave 1 upgrade wave, Microsoft is introducing the first out-of-the-box agent in Business Central, the Sales Order Agent, which automates the process of capturing sales orders from email messages.

The AI-powered Sales Order Agent in Business Central is designed to automatically manage all parts of the process:

• Receive item requests from customer emails in a shared corporate mailbox.
• Identify the customer from those registered in Business Central.
• Create sales quotes with the desired items.
• Confirm item availability.
• Forward the sales quote to the customer for approval.
• Receive confirmation, convert the quote to a sales order, and share the order with the customer via email.

The Sales Order Agent has access to only the parts of Business Central that it needs to perform the specific tasks it has been assigned. The agent is automatically given the right permissions and an appropriate role when the help desk employee is activated.