Why and How to Leverage AI Agents in Dynamics 365 Business Central
With the rise of agentic AI technology, which enables software systems to reason, make decisions, and act semi- or fully autonomously, Microsoft has introduced capabilities that enable Dynamics 365 Business Central users to build, deploy, and manage their own AI agents. With their help, companies can automate and optimize back-office and customer-facing activities in Business Central, including sales, finance, and customer service management.
In this article, experts from Itransition, a UK-based Dynamics 365 Business Central partner, outline the key benefits of AI agents in Business Central and share several tips to help you implement them.
Why implement AI agents in Business Central?
Reducing labor costs
By interacting with the Dynamics 365 Business Central interface in a way similar to human users, AI agents can act as autonomous digital workers and handle many activities traditionally performed manually. This allows companies to automate high-volume, repetitive, and time-intensive tasks, which can help them free up a significant amount of employee work hours and minimize expenses associated with human labor.
For instance, AI agents can perform many of the activities an average sales rep performs. In practice, they can process text from customer emails and create contact records with that data. They can also capture and process customer requests for quotes, convert these quotes into sales orders, and then initiate order fulfillment workflows.
AI agents can also autonomously execute many routine tasks for finance managers. For example, they can automatically process customer and supplier invoices from emails, analyze them for fraud, match them to existing records and purchase orders, and route them for approval. Agents can also generate financial reports, such as accounting statements, retained earnings reports, and cash flow forecasts, and distribute them to employees.
Improving decision-making
Beyond automation, AI agents can also augment employees by acting as intelligent, digital coworkers. Specifically, AI agents can analyze vast amounts of data stored in Business Central, generate actionable insights, and deliver them to employees, improving both the speed and quality of decision-making.
For instance, inventory managers can communicate with AI agents through natural language interfaces and ask them to analyze historical sales data, predict future demand for specific products, and suggest recommendations on when to stock up. Finance managers, in turn, can instruct AI agents to analyze companies’ historical spending trends and then forecast cash inflows and outflows, which can be instrumental for identifying potential cash shortfalls and developing reliable budget plans.
Enhancing customer experiences
As AI agents in Business Central can operate 24/7/365 without interruption, with their help, companies can provide customers with round-the-clock support, which is essential for maintaining high customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. In practice, digital agents can interact directly with customers through live chat or email, process their common inquiries like "Do you offer international shipping?", “Where is my order?”, or "What is your return policy?”, and offer personalized responses based on information from a corporate knowledge base.
AI agents can also be configured to automatically create support cases from customer inquiries that need human intervention. Based on various factors, such as topic, urgency, or sentiment, digital agents can route support cases to a suitable support team, therefore ensuring that a customer receives relevant and timely support. Additionally, AI agents can summarize prior customer interactions, allowing human agents to quickly understand the context and resolve issues more effectively, enhancing customer satisfaction.
How to efficiently operationalize AI agents in Business Central?
Focus on high-impact and low-risk use cases
When defining specific AI agent use cases, it is advisable to select and prioritize activities that are frequent, time-consuming, and effort-intensive, as these offer the highest potential for the most instant and impactful results. It is also recommended to choose non-critical activities, where potential mistakes are either low-impact or are easily reversible, to minimize risk to critical business operations and customer trust.
Test AI agents thoroughly
Before deploying AI agents into production environments, companies should meticulously test them in sandbox environments to validate that agents operate as intended. That necessitates a structured testing strategy that includes:
- Unit testing, to verify that individual AI agent components such as prompt templates, parsing logic, and decision functions work correctly.
- Scenario-based testing, to ensure that digital agents can make proper autonomous decisions and actions within a specific business context.
- Integration testing, to verify correct integration with external APIs and data sources.
- Regression testing, to verify that potential system updates or configuration adjustments do not negatively impact AI agent behavior.
- Human-in-the-loop evaluation, to ensure that agents’ logical flow and communication style are appropriate, as well as to catch errors that automated testing tools can overlook.
Prioritize AI governance
If not managed properly, actions of AI agents in Business Central can pose significant financial, operational, and compliance risks. To mitigate these risks, companies need to develop a robust AI governance framework that defines strict rules and boundaries for AI agent behavior. Is it also advisable to establish continuous monitoring mechanisms and create a cross-functional AI governance council for overseeing agentic AI activities and ensuring alignment with the company's data security and compliance requirements.
Final thoughts
Today, any Dynamics 365 Business Central user can create, configure, and deploy intelligent AI agents directly within the Business Central environment, using either a low-code or code-based approach. With their assistance, companies can automate repetitive processes across sales management, accounting, and inventory control, and beyond.
To maximize the success of AI agent implementation and minimize potential risks, companies can also consider partnering with a Dynamics 365 Business Central partner. Such experts can help you identify processes best suited to agentic AI, define the right implementation approach, develop a tailored project roadmap, and support project execution.