Copilot for Dynamics 365 Business Central: Features You Can Use Now
Dynamics 365 (D365) Business Central (BC) comes equipped with powerful Copilot features designed to simplify work and enhance decision-making. But are you making the most of what’s available? In this blog, we will walk through the core features you can use right now, along with new capabilities that may not be on your radar, to help you get more value out of your BC environment.
Copilot Features in BC: Practical Tools You Can Use Today
D365 BC continues to evolve with a growing set of Copilot-enabled features designed to simplify common tasks, enhance decision-making, and support everyday business processes. These AI-powered tools are built directly into the platform, requiring no custom development or complex setup. Whether you’re reconciling accounts, generating summaries, or getting suggestions on sales lines and number series, Copilot is quietly working in the background to make your work faster and more accurate. Below is a look at several of these built-in capabilities and how they can support smarter, more efficient operations.
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1. Analysis Assist: Interactive Data Insights Without Leaving BC
Analysis Assist brings powerful, built-in analysis capabilities to BC list pages. Instead of exporting data to Excel or relying on external reporting tools, users can now summarize, group, and explore data directly within the system. Using natural language prompts, you can ask questions or describe the analysis you need, and Copilot will shape the data accordingly, making it easier to uncover trends, answer questions, and make quick, informed decisions right from the workspace.
2. Autofill: Smarter, Faster Data Entry
Autofill uses Copilot to suggest values for editable fields based on your past behavior and patterns in your BC data. It learns how you work, like which salesperson you typically assign or what values you often select, and offers suggestions using a simple “Suggest a Value” icon. While not available on list pages, worksheets, or assisted setup pages, this feature helps reduce repetitive entry and keeps your workflow moving with fewer clicks.
3. Bank Account Reconciliation: Smarter Matching with Copilot
The Reconcile with Copilot feature enhances bank reconciliation by automatically suggesting matches between your bank statement transactions and BC records. It extends traditional ledger mapping by also recommending the appropriate general ledger accounts, reducing manual effort. Instead of relying solely on matching rules, Copilot analyzes the data and surfaces suggested applications in a dedicated pane, giving you a strong starting point for faster, more accurate reconciliation.
4. Chat with Copilot: Ask Questions, Get Real Answers
The Chat with Copilot feature gives you a direct, conversational way to interact with your BC data. Whether you're asking about posted amounts, how a process works, or what a specific field means, Copilot provides helpful, context-aware responses, plus follow-up guidance when needed. This built-in side panel offers both step-by-step support and instant data insights, helping new and experienced users alike get quick answers without leaving the page.
5. Map E-Documents: Streamlining Invoice Matching
The Map E-Documents feature helps automate the matching of electronic invoices against purchase orders. It creates a unique record for each e-Document, highlighting any significant discrepancies with clear color coding, so you can quickly spot issues before posting. This capability supports more accurate and efficient three-way matching, reducing manual checks and speeding up the invoice approval process, especially useful as digital transactions become increasingly common.
6. Marketing Text Suggestions: Simplifying Item Descriptions
Marketing Text Suggestions was one of the first Copilot features introduced in BC. It uses AI to generate item descriptions automatically, making it easier to set up and import data without manually crafting every description. This capability is especially helpful when converting or loading data that lacks detailed descriptions. Beyond just descriptions, it showcases how AI-generated content can be extended to other areas within BC to improve data quality and streamline processes.
7. Sales Line Suggestions: Smarter Product Selection
Sales Line Suggestions streamlines adding lines to quotes, orders, and invoices by intelligently recommending products. It searches multiple sources, including the item table, item references like barcodes, and item attributes, to find the best matches. This feature can also reference prior orders to suggest relevant items, making the process faster and more accurate. Essentially, it acts like an advanced product selector, reducing the effort needed to find and add the right products. This approach not only improves efficiency but also hints at future capabilities, such as similar suggestions for purchase lines.
8. Suggest Item Substitutions: Smarter Alternatives Made Easy
Building on the sales line suggestions feature, Suggest Item Substitutions uses similar capabilities to search BC for alternative items. It leverages item data like attributes and barcodes to find suitable substitutes. What sets this feature apart is the ability to customize prompt details, letting you specify your substitution preferences for more relevant results. This makes finding alternatives quicker and more intuitive, improving user experience with a simple, natural language approach.
9. Suggest Number Series: Getting Your Document Numbers Right
Number series setup is critical for smooth business processes, sorting, lookups, and external references all depend on it. Getting your numbering right from the start avoids headaches later, like running out of sales order numbers or messed-up sorting. With Copilot, you can use natural language to get smart suggestions for number series setup, tapping into best practices from experienced implementers. You can also refine prompts to make these suggestions more precise and complex. This feature saves time and ensures your numbering system works correctly from day one.
10. Summarize: Instant Insights in Your Factboxes
The Summarize feature enhances BC’s factboxes by adding AI-driven summarized data right where you need it. Instead of clicking through multiple screens, you get quick, meaningful insights about a record, like customer purchases or account details, directly in the factbox. You can explore the data further, regenerate summaries on demand, and personalize whether this summary appears for specific roles. Partners can also extend the summaries to tailor them precisely for your business needs. This quality-of-life improvement reduces clicks and makes data exploration faster and more intuitive.
11. Sales Order Agent: The Future of Business Automation
This is the big game-changer. The Sales Order Agent represents the next wave in business systems automation. Using AI-powered autonomous agents, it can manage the entire order entry lifecycle with minimal human intervention. The agent monitors an email inbox, creates quotes, converts those quotes into orders, and interacts with customers to handle order-related requests, all automatically.
Imagine having a smart assistant that never sleeps, handling routine customer inquiries, order processing, and quote management directly from your email. This frees up your staff to focus on more strategic work while ensuring fast and accurate order handling.
This agent-driven automation isn’t just a vision; it’s happening now, with early deployments showing powerful results. Beyond BC, Microsoft plans to expand this agent model across their ecosystem, turning AI agents into an essential part of how companies operate, automating repetitive tasks, improving efficiency, and scaling your team without adding headcount.
At Stoneridge, we’re already leveraging agents for tasks like purchase order follow-ups, demonstrating how agents can not only process transactions but also streamline communication across tools like Teams and Outlook, where your team already collaborates.
Welcome to a future where your business system isn’t just software, it’s a smart, proactive member of your team.
Want to Learn More?
Interested in unlocking the full power of Copilot in D365 BC and beyond? Our team at Stoneridge Software has the expertise and experience to help you leverage AI-driven tools to boost productivity and streamline your business processes.
Whether you're looking for personalized training, implementation guidance, or strategic advice on integrating Copilot across Microsoft 365 applications, we’re here to help.
Visit our website to sign up for the M365 Flight Plan program or contact us directly to discuss how we can support your AI journey and help you get the most out of your BC environment.
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