Direction EMEA 2024 conference was a huge success, with more than 3200 attendees in Vienna for the annual biggest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner’s conference.

The conference shared the big Business Central momentum:

• More than 40000 customers using Business Central online now.
• A big increase in Business Central solutions.
• A huge increase in customers moving from Business Central on-premises to Business Central online.
• More than 60% of the SMBs prioritize cloud-based ERP nowadays

AI for all

It’s absolutely clear to all that Artificial Intelligence is a key target for Microsoft at any level.

AI is also a catalyst for Business Central growth. Customers are excited about the possibilities that AI offers nowadays, but it’s also quite clear that they are taking baby steps in its adoption into everyday business. And this is the mission that Microsoft has: increasing the AI adoption in the organizations.

The AI offering that Microsoft has now for organizations is quite large. Together with having AI models on Azure (with the enterprise-grade level that this platform offers), we have also tools for easy AI adoption:

• Personal productivity: Copilot for Microsoft 365
• Business Process: Copilot Studio
• Line of Business applications: AI embedded in Dynamics 365 Business Central

In this new 25.x release, Business Central adds the worldwide availability of 7 Copilots functionalities integrated into Dynamics 365 Business Central:

• Marketing text suggestion
• Bank account reconciliation
• Assisted Analysis
• Sales Lines suggestions
• E-document matching
• Series suggestions
• Item substitution

Microsoft announced also the worldwide availability of the integrated Copilot Chat, with a public preview extended to all countries starting from January 2025. It will initially support only English language, with a rollout of more languages later in 2025.

Sales Order Agent

During Directions EMEA, for the first time in the Business Central platform Microsoft introduced the concept of “Agentic AI”.

AI chatbots use generative AI to provide responses based on a single interaction. A person makes a query, and the chatbot uses natural language processing to reply.

The next frontier of artificial intelligence is Agentic AI, which uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to solve complex, multi-step problems autonomously. This new AI concept can enhance productivity and operations across industries.

AI Agents use the following process for solving tasks:

• Perceive: AI agents gather and process data from various sources, extracting meaningful features and relevant entities.
• Reason: A LLM acts as the orchestrator, or reasoning engine, that understands tasks, generates solutions, and coordinates specialized models for specific functions.
• Act: By integrating with external tools and software via application programming interfaces, agentic AI can quickly execute tasks based on the plans it has formulated.
• Learn: Agentic AI continuously improves through what is called a feedback loop.

Dynamics 365 Business Central will start soon to embrace the Agentic AI concept, with the introduction of a Sales Order Agent, its first autonomous agent. The new agent uses AI to automate the full process of capturing sales quotes and orders from customers’ requests expressed in natural language, for example, via a mail message.

The new integrated Sales Order Agent will be able to:

• Receive and analyze customers’ requests via email.
• Engage in multi-turn email conversations with customers to clarify the request.
• Check for item availability, inventory, attributes, variants.
• Create and update sales quotes with requested items, configure pricing and delivery dates.
• Compose emails with sales quotes as attachments and dare it in the same mail thread.
• Convert sales quotes to sales orders upon a salesperson or customer confirmation.
• Automatically resolve validation errors when possible.
• Bring humans in the loop to validate key decisions.
• Can be triggered automatically and on-demand by internal and external processes.
• Acts within defined permissions and profile (role).
• Detects and deflects irrelevant and malicious email content.

The Sales Order agent is in private preview at the moment.

A public preview is planned for December 2024 (US only). Additional countries and languages will be added in early 2025.

Microsoft plans to enable partners to build new autonomous agents in Business Central and extend the first-party agent in the future.

With the new Copilot Studio, you can build your own agents already today by using Business Central as a data source (using the standard connector for Business Central). But remember that complex AI agents for Business Central can also be built with a full-code approach too (I’ve recently done some webcasts showing using Semantic Kernel for Business Central agents).

Microsoft-managed AI resources

Helping partners and customers by providing AI solutions is a key milestone for Microsoft.

In order to achieve that, Microsoft announced the Microsoft-managed AI resources initiative, created to supply 3^rd party apps with AI capacity out of the box via a fully managed and transparent experience.

The new managed AI service is a resource abstraction layer that offers managed and shared (multitenant) AI resources for creating AI-based business applications and services. In more simple words, you will be able to use Microsoft’s resources to create your own AI solutions.

To use the managed resource, you don’t need to have AI models deployed on Azure or spending for AI traffic. But you need to have an active and non-blocked Azure OpenAI subscription.

Microsoft will take care of scaling and resource governance for the AI platform (consumption, operational limits, quotas, etc.).

This new capability for partners will be in public preview around December 2024, without costs. During this period, Microsoft will tune up the capacity and the operational limits. Later, during 2025, general availability will start (probably some fees can be applied).

New reporting experience

The world of Dynamics 365 Business Central reporting is changing rapidly fast. In the last release, Microsoft introduced:

• Improved Report Explorer.
• Rich Excel Layouts.
• Better document report creation with Word Layout customizations (plus a dedicated Business Central add-in for creating Word reports).
• Enhanced financial reporting and data analysis.

However, the partner’s mindset related to reports should also change a bit. If a customer asks, “Can you build me a report?” instead of responding with “Yes, how should it be formatted?” the approach should start to be different. The new question for the customer should be: “What do you need to analyze, and for what?”.

Dynamics 365 Business Central now has a lot of data analysis capabilities. With Project Yellowstone, Microsoft has enriched the product with a set of dedicated Power BI Apps for reporting.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central version 25.1, you now have Power BI apps for the following functional areas:

• Finance
• Sales
• Purchasing
• Inventory
• Inventory Valuation
• Warehouse
• Projects

These apps add to the product:

• More than 70 Power BI interactive reports
• Power BI reports embedded in core Business Central experience

These are all exciting features tailored to the end user.

But what about the platform?

Dynamics 365 Business Central adoption is growing, and the Business Central market is always more enterprise. Always more big customers are adopting the new SaaS ERP and so investments in performance and security are continuous.

Some numbers:

• API calls are growing 54% YoY
• Job Queue tasks are growing 78% YoY
• Browser interactions are growing 83% YoY

Security is a massive recurrent investment for Microsoft and Business Central. Now you have:

• Multi-factor authentication
• Entra Apps for integrations and automations
• Entra Conditional Access to restrict traffic by location or source
• Azure Service Tag for restricting external systems connection to Business Central
• Sensitive Field Monitoring
• Customer Managed Keys and Lockbox to add extra privacy layers

You can read more about the security investments here.

I want to close this post with the plans for the next 2025 Wave 1 period:

I will not go into details in this plan, but I mark a red star into one of the hidden aspects that can be a game changer… stay tuned 😉