About

/

Contact

Honest, practical help for navigating Dynamics 365 — without the headache

Copilot in D365 Business Central: AI for the Mid-Market

·

by

Bobbi

Post #003 – AI In Microsoft ERP

BC customers may have more AI capability available to them right now than they realize — and some of it doesn’t cost extra. Here’s the full picture.

BC’s Approach to AI Is a Little Different

Microsoft has made a deliberate decision to position Business Central as the AI-first ERP for the mid-market. That means Copilot capabilities have been baked in as core platform features — not add-ons — and the pace of AI feature delivery in BC has honestly been faster than I expected. There’s a real breadth to what’s available today, and the 2026 Wave 1 has pushed things further with autonomous agents that handle full workflows end to end.

For BC users in accounting and finance roles, the practical applications are concrete enough that I want to walk through them in detail rather than just giving you a high-level summary.

What’s Available in BC Today

Here’s a rundown of the key Copilot and AI features in Business Central, with a status indicator for each:

  • Bank Account Reconciliation Assist – This is the one that gets the most attention — and for good reason. BC’s automatch already handles most transactions, but Copilot picks up the rest: it identifies matches by analyzing dates, amounts, and descriptions, handles one-to-many matches (like a lump-sum payment covering multiple invoices), and suggests G/L accounts for transactions that can’t be matched. It does not post anything automatically — everything runs through your review first.
  • Chat with Copilot – A conversational side panel that lets users ask questions about BC data, processes, or specific fields without leaving the screen. “What’s the outstanding balance on vendor X?” or “how do I reverse a posted journal entry?” — useful for both new users learning the system and experienced users doing quick lookups.
  • Sales Line Suggestions – When creating sales orders or quotes, Copilot can suggest line items based on natural language input or by referencing a previous order. “Same as last month’s order for this customer” is a legitimate prompt. It searches across item numbers, descriptions, barcodes, and item attributes — handling the cases where what you type and what’s in the system don’t exactly match.
  • Analysis Assist – Copilot can shape and group data in list views based on natural language prompts — without exporting to Excel. “Group by customer and show me totals by month” is something you can ask directly in BC now. Useful for quick ad-hoc analysis that previously meant a detour to another tool.
  • Map E-Documents – Automates matching of electronic invoices to purchase orders. This is particularly relevant for organizations with e-invoicing requirements — it reduces manual mapping effort significantly.
  • Payables Agent (2026 Wave 1) – This is the big one for AP teams. The Payables Agent reads incoming vendor invoices, matches them to vendors and accounts, and prepares them for approval — end to end, with human oversight at the approval gate. It’s positioned as autonomous AP, and it’s included in Wave 1 rolling out through September 2026.
  • Sales Order Agent (2026 Wave 1) – Interprets natural language or email-based order requests and transforms them into structured sales documents in BC. The vision is that an email from a customer gets processed into a sales order without manual re-entry. Still early, but the use case is real.
  • PREVIEW – Number Series Suggestions, Marketing Text, Sustainability Journal Assist – A handful of more specialized Copilot features are in preview, including AI-generated marketing text for item descriptions and Copilot-assisted sustainability emissions entry. These are narrower use cases but demonstrate the platform’s direction.

The Bank Rec Story — Because It Deserves More Detail

I want to spend a moment on bank account reconciliation specifically, because it’s the Copilot feature I hear about most often from BC accountants — and it’s a good example of how Microsoft is thinking about AI in ERP.

Traditional automatch in BC is rules-based. It works well for clean, one-to-one matches. Where it falls short is the messy reality of actual bank statements: lump-sum payments covering multiple invoices, transactions with slightly different descriptions, fees and charges that don’t map to anything in the system. That’s exactly the backlog that used to sit on the accountant’s desk waiting for manual review.

Copilot handles this by looking at date proximity, amount proximity, and transaction descriptions. It won’t always be right — Microsoft’s own documentation recommends reviewing every match before keeping it — but it dramatically reduces the pile of manual work. And for the transactions that can’t be matched at all, it suggests G/L accounts based on description analysis. “Fuel Stop 24” gets mapped to Transportation. That’s genuinely useful.

The Payables Agent: What “Autonomous AP” Actually Means

The Payables Agent is the most significant new capability in Wave 1 for finance teams, and I want to be precise about what it does and doesn’t do. It reads incoming vendor invoices (via the e-documents framework), extracts the relevant data, matches vendors and accounts, and queues the invoice for human approval. It does not post invoices autonomously without review.

That “human in the loop” design is deliberate — and, frankly, the right call. Automated posting without oversight in a financial system creates audit exposure that most organizations aren’t ready to accept. The agent is doing the matching and preparation work; the accountant is doing the approval. That’s a reasonable division of labor.

For organizations that are on BC online and running high invoice volumes, this is worth a serious look. Even getting 60-70% of invoices processed without manual touchpoints changes the AP team’s day significantly.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Copilot and agents are available only to BC online customers — not on-premises or private cloud deployments. If your organization is still on BC on-prem, this entire discussion is a roadmap conversation, not a current-state one.

Also worth noting: some agent capabilities use consumption-based billing (Copilot credits). The base Copilot features are included with your license, but agents like the Payables Agent may introduce usage-based costs depending on volume. Microsoft’s documentation on this is still evolving, so check with your partner on the specifics for your environment.

📚 Go Deeper — Microsoft Resources

Where to Start

If you’re a BC customer and you haven’t touched Copilot yet, my recommendation is to start with bank reconciliation — activate the feature, run a real reconciliation, and see where it saves time versus your current process. That gives you a concrete benchmark before you start planning bigger changes around the Payables Agent or other agentic capabilities.

Chat with Copilot is also a great low-risk starting point for new users or for teams doing process documentation — it’s always on, requires no additional setup, and provides immediate value for routine questions.

Coming up in Post 4: We go deeper on AI-powered AP — both in BC and F&O — and what “touchless invoice processing” actually looks like in practice.

BB

Bobbi Bricker

ERP Capability Lead & D365 Functional Architect at Centric Consulting. Former controller. Practical by nature, curious by default. Writing about D365 F&O, Business Central, and now AI in ERP — because someone has to translate the tech into something finance teams can actually use.

Thank you for reading!

Interested in learning more about Microsoft ERP? Below are some of my latest blogs:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *