New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2: Use Copilot With Agent Capabilities To Automate Sales Order-Taking

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2.

The 15th of the new functionality in the section is use Copilot with agent capabilities to automate sales order-taking.

We’re at a crucial juncture for AI in the workplace. Just as we now look back at the pre-PC era with astonishment, we’ll soon wonder how work was ever done without AI. Workers, overwhelmed by digital debt and workplace stress, are turning to AI for relief. Leaders can harness this momentum for tangible returns on investment. Copilot in Business Central is already enhancing users’ creativity and productivity by using AI in key application scenarios and providing guidance along the way. AI will gradually transform every aspect of work, achieving real business impact, and companies that proactively embrace this challenge will excel.

Using the Sales Order Taker custom copilot acting as an agent that works independently under your direction drives efficiencies and cost savings, and helps manage heavy workloads. The agent focuses users’ attention on critical tasks, increasing motivation and job satisfaction across the business function to which it is applied. Microsoft studies have shown that over the next five years, 41 percent of business leaders expect to redefine business processes with AI, orchestrating and managing AI agents while prioritizing ethical AI use.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Dec 2024
General Availability: Jun 2025

Feature Details

Copilot in Business Central is already enhancing users’ creativity and productivity with AI in key application scenarios, providing guidance and assistanceinworking with the product and finding the right data.

With this release, Microsoft are expanding the use of AI to enable customers to orchestrate and automate business processes using custom copilots with agent capabilities, or agents. Agents can work autonomously, perform assigned tasks, respond to different events and inputs, reason over the state of data, and overcome errors based on user inputand the context of theBusiness Central user experience. Agents requireminimalto no intervention from users, while bringing them in if circumstancesrequire their attention. Agents can act on behalf of a company, department, or team, not just a user.

To enable this capability in Business Central, Microsoft are introducing their first out-of-the-box agent, the Sales Order Taker agent, to automate the process of taking sales orders.

The agent is configured to manage the full process:

1. Receive item requests from customer emails in a shared company mailbox.
2. Identify the customer from those registered in Business Central.
3. Draft the sales quote with the requested items.
4. Verify item availability.
5. Forward the sales quote to the customer for approval.
6. Receive confirmation, and convert the quote into a sales order.

The agent operates based on the included instructions and user configuration, and uses AI to identify and carry out the necessary steps to complete this task within the Business Central environment. It seeks user intervention when specific situations arise. For example, when it prepares outbound communications or to provide business approval for key operations.

The Sales Order Taker agent can only access the parts of the product it needs to perform its duties. It comes with predefined permissions and role (profile), which it’s automatically assigned when you activate the agent.

The agent will have a simple configuration experience, where you can define the agent’s name, the channel for receiving requests for sales quotes and orders (shared company email), and select the steps you want to include or exclude in the process of taking orders from the customers.

When activated, the agent is ready to perform the process of capturing sales orders autonomously.The agent is started by an internal email processor in Business Central, which is configured to monitor the company mailbox provided in the agent’s configuration.

The agent will analyze and process received emails, engage in multiturn email correspondence with the prospect to clarify their request, send the sales quote with requested items (after a person approves it), and convert the quote into a sales order if this step is configured by the agent owner.

Actions performed by the Sales Order Taker agent, including navigating Business Central pages, creating and modifying records, and calling actions, are fully transparent so that you can review them. The actions show the agent’s user ID and will show up in the same places and in the same way as other users in list views, history, posted documents, notifications, and so on.

Business Central users maintain full transparency and control over the changes made by the Sales Order Taker agent by using additional experiences, which enable the users to:

• Discover notifications from the agent. For example, when it requires help, or when the process demands human review (such as all inbound and outbound messages, approvals, and adding missing data).
• Get a better understanding of the task’s context and history (“timeline” view), including the key steps.
• Get a detailed review of each entity the agent created (such as sales quotes or sales orders). You can review all changes and suggestions the agent makes for a specific task, so you can adjust these changes if needed and sign off on proceeding with the task.