How Finance Teams Can Leverage AI in Business Central
In today’s article, Conor Flanagan, ERP Team Lead at Storm, explores how finance teams can harness the power of AI in Business Central to streamline reporting, unlock data insight, and enhance financial processes.
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48% of CFOs are currently using AI in finance and procurement processes, while 100% are planning to invest in AI in the next year, according to the 2025 Strategic CFO Report. These numbers highlight a key fact – CFOs need to start incorporating AI into their strategy, or risk falling behind competitors.
Helping businesses incorporate AI directly into their financial processes, D365 Business Central provides built-in AI-driven automation through Agents, and an AI-assistant, Copilot, at no extra license fee. This means that if your business already runs Business Central, you may have access to AI features that you are not even aware of or simply do not yet know how to use.
Copilot in Business Central
Copilot in Business Central is your AI-powered assistant, designed to boost productivity, simplify tasks, and unlock insight, all from directly within the ERP platform. Copilot provides natural chat-style assistance and task-specific features seamlessly embedded within Business Central like:
Bank reconciliation
Data analysis
Marketing text generation
Number series suggestions
Sales line suggestions
This fully integrated functionality means you can ask Copilot to guide, find data, analyse, summarise, or propose actions without even switching between systems. This means improved efficiency, greater productivity, and enhanced data insight for finance teams.
Agentic AI in Business Central
What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI refers to the use of autonomous systems, called AI agents, that not only assist but can carry out even more complex tasks with minimal human input. Autonomous agents can interpret, decide, and execute tasks intelligently, even learning from past outcomes. Currently available in preview, Business Central will include agentic AI features including:
Sales Order Agent: This built-in agent autonomously handles sales order intake from emails, recognising details, engaging in follow-up conversations, checking inventory, and producing formatted quotes. By essentially automating the processing of sales quotes and orders, businesses can manage and process customer orders much more quickly and efficiently.
Payables Agent: This agent helps process vendor invoices by monitoring mailboxes, analysing received invoices, and showing invoice drafts to agent supervisors for review. With the ability to flag anomalies and suggest adjustments during reconciliation, the Payables Agent helps improve the accuracy of financial operations.
So, What Does This Mean for Your Business?
Time savings - Manual tasks like interpreting emails, processing documents, analysing data, and creating quotations can be done automatically, with greater speed, agility, and accuracy.
Scalability - As AI agents learn or adapt, you can scale them across various functions beyond finance, such as sales and invoicing.
Less manual oversight - Agents reduce overhead and let your team focus on more valuable tasks like strategy and customer relationships.
Business Central’s AI enhancements represent a fundamental step forward for the world of enterprise resource planning. Copilot equips teams with smart, conversational help, while AI Agents bring things a step further by executing tasks autonomously and turning your ERP system into an active, intelligent partner. To see Business Central’s Copilot and Agents in action, check out our on-demand webinar ‘Reimagine Finance: Harnessing AI to Transform Business Processes.’
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