If you handle customer orders by email, this will be a process that is familiar to you:
An order comes in. Someone reads it. Tries to work out what’s actually being asked for. Checks item codes. Checks pricing. Checks stock. Then manually enters everything into Business Central. If anything’s unclear, it goes back to the customer. Then back again. Then back again.
It is a process that works but it takes time. Plus, the more orders you process, the more that time adds up. This is why the Sales Order Agent, one of Business Central’s first AI agents, is revolutionising the way businesses process their orders.
Manual order processing doesn’t just slow things down, it creates pressure in a few predictable ways.
It is a repetitive process and therefore it is easy for people to switch to autopilot when doing it. That’s usually when mistakes creep in, whether it’s a wrong item, a missed detail, or a simple typo that causes issues further down the line.
At the same time, the process doesn’t scale particularly well. So, as order volumes increase, the workload increases. More emails mean more admin and more checking. As a result, more time is spent on low value-add tasks. This means that your team has less time to focus on customers, improvements, or anything more strategic.
AI agents in Business Central are designed to step into repetitive processes, such as order processing, and handle much of it automatically. Rather than someone picking up each email and working through it step by step, the agent monitors a mailbox in the background. When an order comes in, it reads the message in the same way a person would, even if the wording isn’t perfectly structured. It then works out who the customer is, identifies the requested items, and builds a sales quote in Business Central.
Following that, it can respond to the customer, follow up if more detail is needed, and adjust the quote based on the conversation. Once everything is confirmed, it can convert that quote into a sales order.
What the Sales Order Agent is doing is not just copying data into the system. It’s working through the same steps your team would normally take, only without needing to be prompted each time.
Once the new AI agent-led process is up and running, you will notice a shift in how order processing feels day to day. Instead of spending time manually entering each request, your team is freed from that repetitive admin. Orders are already being built in the background, giving team members more time to focus more on reviewing and making decisions rather than doing the legwork.
Your customers will benefit as well. Responses come back more quickly, and there’s less delay between sending an order and receiving confirmation. At the same time, because everything is based on your live Business Central data, there’s less reliance on manual input, which naturally reduces the risk of errors.
Most importantly, the process starts to scale differently. An increase in order volume no longer means a proportional increase in manual effort. Thus, taking some of the pressure off as the business grows.
There’s often a concern that automation like this takes control away from the team. In practice, it’s the opposite.
Your team can still review outgoing emails before they’re sent. They can also choose where approvals are needed. If the agent comes across something it doesn’t understand or isn’t confident about, it flags it so someone can step in.
The best way to think about it is as an extra pair of hands. AI agents, like the Sales Order Agent, deal with the routine work and ask for help when needed. This leaves your team to focus on the areas where human judgement matters most.
This approach tends to have the biggest impact in environments where orders are coming in via email and the process is already well understood but time-consuming.
If your team is handling a steady flow of similar requests and spending a large part of the day entering or checking orders, the opportunity for improvement is clear. It’s particularly useful where volumes are increasing, or where accuracy and turnaround times are becoming more important.
You will not be changing everything you do. Just taking an existing process and adding an AI agent to make it work better.
If you’d like to see how the Sales Order Agent would work in your Business Central environment, we can walk you through it using your own processes and data.
Get in touch to see what this could look like in practice.