Microsoft Copilot in Business Central

Copilot in Business Central is not an extra licence you have to buy. It comes with BC online, and several of the features are already available in your environment. The question is not whether you should use it, but where it actually saves time, and where it is just a fun demo.

What is Copilot in Business Central?

Copilot is Microsoft's collective name for the AI features built into Business Central that run on Azure OpenAI. Some are assistants that help the user on a specific page, for example bank reconciliation or item descriptions. Others are agents that work on their own and submit the result for approval, such as the Sales Order Agent and the Payables Agent. What they have in common is that they use your own BC data as context, and that a person approves before anything is saved.

Key features today

• Bank reconciliation: Copilot suggests matches between bank statements and entries. This is where the accounts team notices it most in daily work
• Item descriptions: text generated from the item's attributes. A good starting point for a webshop, but read it through
• Sales lines from an email or a document: the customer sends a shopping list, and Copilot drafts the sales lines
• Analysis assistant: filter and group lists in plain language instead of exporting to Excel
• Agents such as the Sales Order Agent and the Payables Agent: read a shared mailbox and create drafts for quotes, orders and purchase invoices

Early users report 30–60% time savings on tasks such as bank reconciliation and creating product descriptions, without extra integrations.

Activation and licences

• Business Central online only. Copilot does not exist on-premises
• The administrator switches individual features on and off on the Copilot & agent capabilities page
• Environments in the EU process data within the EU Data Boundary. That requires Allow data movement to be switched on
• The assistant features come with the BC licence. The agents are billed per use in Copilot Credits. Set a cap before you switch them on

Governance and data security

Copilot does not use your data to train the models, and suggestions are not saved until a user approves them. That does not mean you can switch everything on and forget about it:

• Decide which features are switched on. Not all of them make sense for your business
• Teach users to read the suggestion through. A wrong bank match is still a wrong posting
• Use the change log on the fields where AI suggestions can end up, for example item texts and customers
• Give the agents the same narrow permission sets you would give a new employee

Getting-started checklist

• Find the two or three tasks where the accounts team spends the most time on routine work, typically bank reconciliation and entering purchase invoices
• Try the features in a sandbox with a copy of your own data, not Cronus (Microsoft's demo company)
• If you already use Continia Document Capture, compare it with the Payables Agent before you switch. One is not automatically better than the other
• Measure before and after: minutes per bank reconciliation, invoices per day
• Expand only when the first users are actually using it