New Features to Get Excited About in the 2025 Release Wave 2 for Business Central
As the summer starts to wind down, it’s time for businesses using Dynamics 365 solutions to prepare for the new features and functionalities that come with the annual wave 2 release.
For Business Central, Microsoft is focusing its efforts on improving Copilot agents, automating processes, and boosting efficiency for manufacturing companies. Small to medium-sized businesses can expect more improvements to the core functionalities they are likely already using as well as some new features to streamline processes.
Note: These features are expected to go into preview and be released for general availability between now, October 2025, and beyond. Stay tuned to the 2025 Release Wave 2 plan documentation for updates.
How to Prepare for the 2025 Wave 2 Release
Before we dive into new features and functionalities, let’s talk about what you need to know about preparing for and using new tools:
- Test new features in a sandbox environment: Get a feel for new features and tools before using them on live data. This will ensure you and your team are ready to use them without the risk of mismanaging data.
- Manage extensions: If you already have Business Central, some of these enhancements will be added as an extension in AppSource that you will have to download. Any Business Central implementations that happen after a feature goes live will have them by default.
- Enable Copilot Capabilities: If you are expecting to see a Copilot feature in your environment but can’t find it, you might need to enable it manually.
- Ensure your Copilot licensing is in order: Not all Copilot capabilities in Business Central are automatic, as some require consumption licensing. If you use these capabilities but don’t have the proper licensing, you could be subjected to consumption charges.
Top New Functionalities for Business Central Users in Wave 2
Let’s take a look at what you can expect over the coming months for Business Central:
Improvements to Copilot in Business Central
The primary enhancement for Copilot in Business Central is an expansion of how much data Copilot can access in the system. The bulk of the new or expanded features listed below are possible because Copilot can now reach more data within your system. These improvements give you greater control over AI and automation in your system.
Let’s look at some of the specific features:
Enhancements to Sales Order Agents
Sales Order Agents have been a game-changer in helping you harness the power of AI in your Business Central system. In the 2025 Wave 2 release, Microsoft is introducing new features that will significantly enhance its autonomy and flexibility in handling diverse sales inquiries, reducing manual intervention, and accelerating response times.
The agent now interprets natural language input, allowing users to guide or correct it without disrupting the workflow, making operations smoother and more responsive.
Key capabilities introduced in this release include:
- File-based quoting: Extracts quote details from attached files (e.g., PDFs, images) and builds quotes from unstructured formats
- Ship-to address recognition: Identifies correct delivery locations from customer-provided emails with multiple address options
- Availability assurance: Provides “capable-to-promise” quotes using built-in planning tools to suggest deliverable timelines
- Trusted customer automation: Processes emails from known customers instantly with auto-processing toggled on
- Instruction-based resumption: Allows natural language guidance mid-task so users can nudge or resume agent operations seamlessly
Additionally, starting October 2025, you can use sales order agents to automate sales-order taking. With this out-of-the-box agent, you can automate the entire sales process:
- Receives item requests from customer emails in a shared company mailbox.
- Identifies the customer from those registered in Business Central.3.
- Drafts the sales quote with the requested items.
- Verifies item availability.
- Forwards the sales quote to the customer for approval.
- Receives confirmation, converts the quote into a sales order, and shares the order with the customer via email.
The agent works from the included instructions and your configuration and uses AI to identify and run the steps needed to complete this task in Business Central.
Context Protocol (MCP) Server
The introduction of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in Business Central paves the way for seamless integration between ERP systems and intelligent agents built on platforms like Azure OpenAI and Copilot Studio. By exposing core business entities—such as customers, items, and sales orders—via a standardized API, businesses can tap into powerful AI-driven automation and orchestration. This simplifies user interactions with ERP data and accelerates decision-making and workflow efficiency.
With MCP support in Business Central, developers can easily sync real-time actions with data between agents and backend systems. It also ensures consistent and interoperable connections to various data sources and operational tools. The benefits of this include:
- Streamlined agent development
- Reduced manual upkeep
- Smarter and more responsive processes that evolve with minimal friction
Autofill with Copilot
The enhanced autofill with Copilot feature in Business Central minimizes data entry workload and reduces errors for both occasional and power users. By suggesting relevant field values, Copilot speeds up workflows and eliminates repetitive typing. Building on the 2025 Wave 1 release, this version improves suggestion accuracy and expands support to 20 more languages, while leveraging Bing search for smarter field predictions.
These updates deliver more intuitive automation and boost productivity when the feature is enabled.
Enhancements to Summarize with Copilot
The enhanced Summarize with Copilot feature helps users quickly understand the key state and history of any record—like a customer profile or a large order—without manually scanning every field. By generating more sophisticated summaries, Copilot streamlines insight gathering and boosts productivity across roles. Improvements in this release include:
- Deeper page insights, especially on frequently used views like the Customer card
- Recent modifier details, showing who last updated the record
- Agent activity highlights for changes made by autonomous processes
- Expanded language support for 20 additional languages
- Faster summary creation, so insights appear more quickly upon record access
You can also add other summary extensions to other tools and add-ins available throughout the system.
Use AI Resources for Your Copilot Extensions
If you use the development toolset in Business Central, you will now have the ability to create your own AI agents and Copilot utilities. These developer tools make AI integration easier by giving AppSource publishers access to Microsoft-managed Azure OpenAI resources. Publishers also benefit from reliable performance, built-in security compliance, and reduced operational burden.
Enhanced Analysis Assist with Copilot
Copilot in Business Central is an AI-powered assistant that enhances creativity, productivity, and efficiency. It allows users to analyze business data by simply describing the insights they want, like “show me vendors by location sorted by number of purchases,”—saving time and effort. This conversational approach helps uncover trends and relationships, such as identifying warehouse suppliers, enabling smarter decisions around supply chain optimization, and vendor negotiations.
With this release, the analysis assist feature becomes generally available, including key enhancements:
- A system permission in the Copilot System Features permission set is used to manage access.
- The option to include fields from related tables in your analysis.
Enhanced Chat with Copilot
In many workplaces, communication drives action—whether it's with colleagues, customers, or vendors. Copilot in Business Central brings AI-powered chat directly into the workflow, helping users interact with their data naturally and conversationally. This feature enables employees to use everyday language to uncover insights and solve problems, reshaping how they engage with business systems.
This release builds on the preview of chat with Copilot, delivering key enhancements:
- Support for 20 more languages
- Improved comprehension of multi-sentence prompts and mixed intents
- Faster performance and greater reliability
Other 2025 Wave 2 Release Updates for Business Central
Here are some additional enhancements and features in the 2025 Wave 2 release that will benefit your company:
Country and Regional
Some of the new regional enhancements include:
- Comply with Australian Payment Times Reporting bill
- Enable additional countries and regions
- Install UK localization as an extension to the base app
- Submit IRS 1099 forms electronically to IRIS in the US localization
- Get UI improvements for Unreliable Payer for Czechia
Even if these specific regional updates don’t pertain to you, it expands the user-base of Business Central, which has a positive effect for users everywhere.
Development Enhancements
Under this feature, you can extend Copilot autofill and summary capabilities using the AL programming language. For autofill, you can extend Copilot’s abilities to the unique fields that are most pertinent to your business. This will reduce data entry time and errors for end users.
For Copilot summaries, developers can use AL code to provide more accurate and relevant summaries as Copilot pulls from your expertise and insights.
E-commerce Shopify Enhancements
- Define sell-to and bill-to customer details per company location: The enhanced Shopify connector in Business Central streamlines B2B customer management by allowing flexible mapping of Sell-to and Bill-to fields between systems, enabling seamless order imports and location-based customer exports.
- Enable staff-to-salesperson mapping for Shopify orders: The Shopify POS integration with Business Central enhances sales tracking by linking imported staff IDs from Shopify to mapped salespersons on sales documents through configurable Staff Mapping—available for B2B stores only.
- Synchronize market-specific prices with Shopify: The Shopify Markets integration with Business Central boosts international sales by syncing localized pricing and currency settings to market-specific catalogs through configurable price and discount mapping.
Financial Management
- Create multiple fixed asset cards: This simplifies bulk asset purchases by automatically generating fixed asset cards from purchase invoices, reducing manual work and improving tracking accuracy.
- Print the Audit Trail report: The Audit Trail report in Business Central strengthens compliance by providing a transparent and detailed record of all transactions using data from the G/L Register and G/L Entry tables.
- Accounts payable role center enhancements: The new Account Payable Role Center in Business Central boosts efficiency by centralizing purchase documents, inbound e-docs, and payment tasks into one streamlined workspace.
Reporting and Data Analysis
Having access to smart reports and easy access to data for analysis are paramount for developing strong business strategies and making smart decisions. Here are some enhanced reporting and data capabilities in the 2025 Wave 2 release:
Financial Reporting
The enhanced Financial Reporting feature in Business Central boosts visibility, flexibility, and efficiency by automating delivery, simplifying report creation, and supporting dimension-wide, currency-aware insights.
For financial report viewers, Microsoft has added two capabilities:
- Run a financial report on a schedule and get the report output in an email or in the report inbox.
- Run a financial report across all values in a dimension.
Report authors can now:
- Demote fields as additional fields in the Options menu for the report definition.
- Autofill the No. and Description fields for row definitions.
- Get a notification to update financial report definitions when you change a name in the G/L.
- Edit row definitions in Excel.
- Move name fields up and add description fields to the card pages in the Row/Column definition UI.
- Support dynamic naming for column headings in column definitions.
- Column definitions support both local currency (LCY) and extra reporting currency (ACY).
Purchasing Analytics
You can now track new key performance indicators (KPIs) and scenarios with updates to the Power BI purchasing app. With access to a better reporting and analytics purchasing area, you can now take advantage of the following capabilities:
- A refactored semantic model that's ready for open source.
- Map visuals that display purchasing data by location.
- Purchasing forecasts you can analyze.
Enhanced Power BI Sales App
New Power BI sales app capabilities will help you track new KPIs and scenarios within Power BI. It also comes with customizable Excel layouts for many sales reports and wider datasets for a more comprehensive analysis. This comes with two new capabilities:
- Use data from projects and the general ledger in your analyses
- Analyze sales forecasts
You can also get modernized versions of several sales reports, including Customer list, Sales Statistics, Inventory Order Details, and more.
Subcontracting Capabilities in Production Processes
If your company maintains in-house control of design, research, and sales while delegating production to external subcontractors, you can now use Business Central for advanced logistics for subcontractors transfers, flexible pricing structures, and streamlined handling of unfinished goods and raw materials.
Sustainability Management
Business Central’s Sustainability Management expands to support growing regulatory needs and customer feedback by offering powerful tools to measure, monitor, and manage environmental data.
Users can capture emissions and resource metrics, track progress with scorecards, access customizable reports, and meet global standards like CSRD and CBAM. Features like Scope 3 tracking, carbon credit purchasing, and Copilot-powered estimates promote transparency, simplify reporting, and boost eco-accountability across the value chain.
Want to Learn More About the Business Central 2025 Wave 2 Release?
Talk to the Stoneridge experts today! We can help you prepare your team and environment for the new features and functionalities so you can further enhance your processes and keep your business running smoothly.
Under the terms of this license, you are authorized to share and redistribute the content across various mediums, subject to adherence to the specified conditions: you must provide proper attribution to Stoneridge as the original creator in a manner that does not imply their endorsement of your use, the material is to be utilized solely for non-commercial purposes, and alterations, modifications, or derivative works based on the original material are strictly prohibited.
Responsibility rests with the licensee to ensure that their use of the material does not violate any other rights.