What if the future of Business Central involves spending less time in Business Central?

Microsoft Copilot could change where people go first when they need business information or want something to happen. Following Directions, TVT Sales Manager, Nick Makin, considers what that could mean for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and the future of ERP.

I've just spent a few days at Directions in Paris, surrounded by people talking about the future of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It’s fair to say it’s come a long way, but now it feels like we’re moving towards something completely new.

I, like many people, can get a bit AI fatigued at the moment. Every software announcement seems to have AI attached to it somewhere, and I'm conscious that we shouldn't talk about AI simply because everybody else is.

That being said, some of what Microsoft showed us at Directions did make me think differently. Not because there was another long list of Copilot features. It was more about where all of this seems to be heading.

I think what’s clearer than ever is that Copilot is no longer just a feature. It’s no longer just a little thing that we can show in a nice demo, but something that may become as fundamental to people as using Excel and Outlook.

Business Central has always been somewhere you go to work

Traditionally, if you want to do something in Business Central, you open Business Central. You want to look at a customer account? You go into Business Central. You need to change something? You find the relevant record. You want to understand what's happening with an order? Again, you head into Business Central.

That's completely normal. It's how we've used ERP systems for years.

But some of what Microsoft showed us at Directions starts to challenge that and two very important things are changing.

Your ERP is no longer an island

Back at my desk, a little bleary-eyed on Friday, I spoke to an organisation who are evaluating Business Central as a potential new ERP solution.

I tried but I couldn’t help myself.

Before the usual conversation, I asked them if they use AI internally and, to my surprise, they already had Copilot licenses and use it every day. Now, think about all the information they have across Excel files, documents, Teams chats and Outlook emails.

Microsoft has shown us the new Copilot experience in Business Central, bringing the exact same Copilot capability into Business Central that we’ve all become accustomed to.

The game-changer is that WorkIQ ties all of this information together. All that information you have in your organisation is tied with the information you have in Business Central, all in one central place. Your business doesn’t operate like separate islands or castles surrounded by moats and now, neither do your systems

Your systems can now do more for you

We’ve all become more familiar with “agents” in recent years. Those AI processes that handle very specific processes on our behalf and ask us for input and guidance along the way. The thing around these agents is that they are built for very specific processes, like creating purchase invoices or expenses. What if it could just help you more generally?

One example Microsoft showed was changing a customer's payment terms. Instead of finding the customer, opening the record, finding the right field and changing it, you could simply ask Copilot to do it.

That’s a massive change, rather than having to switch between systems or navigate through multiple pages, within Business Central you can ask Copilot to update something on your behalf and it’s done.

On its own, that's not exactly going to transform your business. But start applying the same principle to lots of day-to-day processes and it gets much more interesting.

What happens if Copilot becomes the interface

This was probably my biggest takeaway from Directions.

Business Central doesn't become less important in this world. If anything, I think the opposite could be true. It remains the place where your data, processes and business rules sit. But it may not always be where somebody starts when they need something from that information.

We talked about this in our recent What's New in Business Central webinar, which I joined directly from Directions in Paris.

Paul Cartwright recalled something Elliot Poulter (SMB Business Lead UK&I - AI Business Process at Microsoft) had said at our TVT User Group last month: Copilot is increasingly the place he starts his working day, rather than Outlook or Teams. That's quite interesting in itself.

But take that idea a little further.

Say an email comes in from a customer and you need to do something in Business Central as a result. Today, you read the email, switch into Business Central, find whatever you need and complete the task.

What happens if Copilot understands the request, has the right Business Central context and can carry out the relevant action for you? You haven't stopped using Business Central. Business Central is still doing an awful lot of the work underneath it all.

You just haven't necessarily opened it.

And I think that's where this starts to become genuinely interesting.

Microsoft showed us something I really wasn't expecting

Probably the most thought-provoking demonstration for me wasn't about using Copilot to work with data at all. It was using Copilot to change Business Central itself.

Microsoft demonstrated asking Copilot, in natural language, to make a change to Business Central and then create and publish an extension.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we suddenly don't need Business Central developers. And I certainly don't think the answer is to let everybody create whatever modification they fancy and push it straight into their live system. That could get interesting quite quickly, and not necessarily in a good way.

What I was much more curious about was the potential for prototyping. A customer might be sitting with one of our consultants and say, "Could we add something here that does this?"

Today there's a process between having that conversation and the customer actually seeing what the idea looks like.

What if we could prototype it there and then? You can look at it together. Decide whether you've understood the requirement properly. Change it. Throw it away if it doesn't work. Or, if it does work, take it forward and develop it properly.

You would obviously still need the proper review, source control and governance before anything went anywhere near a production environment. But as a way of exploring an idea with a customer and getting to the right requirement more quickly, I can see some really interesting possibilities.

Exactly what that looks like in practice, we'll have to see.

Is Business Central becoming less of an application and more of a platform?

Paul Cartwright put this quite nicely during our webinar when he talked about Business Central becoming more of an ERP platform, rather than necessarily always being the place people go to do things.

I think that's an important distinction.

We tend to think about a new Business Central release by looking at the features. What's new? What's changed? What can I do now that I couldn't do before?

And, of course, that still matters.

But after Directions, I think there's another question we need to be asking:

“What role does Business Central play in the wider Microsoft ecosystem?”

If Copilot increasingly becomes somewhere you can ask questions, find information and initiate business processes, then the value of Business Central isn't only about what somebody can do inside the BC interface. It's also about the data, processes and business rules sitting behind it and how they can be used by the other tools people work with.

For me, that's potentially a much bigger change than any individual feature.

We’ve had a similar conversation very recently

It dawns on me that we’ve all had similar conversations over the past 10 years, “Should we implement Business Central as a SaaS system or should we continue On-Prem as we always have done?”

This AI conversation feels very similar. You could absolutely implement Business Central without implementing AI: you just wouldn’t get all of those benefits. Exactly the same as the SaaS vs On-Prem conversation. On-Prem was always an option but you’d miss out on those additional benefits you get with taking full advantage of what Microsoft have built.

It’s important not to get carried away

This is probably the bit worth saying after a few days at a technology conference.

It's very easy to come back from Directions having seen some really impressive demos and imagine that everyone is suddenly going to start working completely differently.

They're not. We'll go into customers where people in warehouses are using handheld devices to do a very specific job. They're not necessarily going to put those down and start having a conversation with Copilot, nor should they if the process they already have works for them.

There are lots of jobs where a purpose-built interface is exactly what somebody needs. That’s why I don't see this as Copilot replacing the Business Central interface. Instead, I think it's another way into the same business system.

For some people, particularly knowledge workers, that could start to change where they go first when they need information or need something to happen. For others, very little may change.

How quickly all of this happens, I don't know. But I do think there's enough here that we should be paying attention.

So, are we actually going to spend less time in Business Central?

For some people, I think that's entirely possible. And strangely, I don't think that's bad news for Business Central. If anything, it could make having a well-structured, connected ERP platform underneath the business even more important.

AI is only useful in a business context if it's working with the right information and the right processes. Something still needs to hold that information, apply the business rules and provide the structure underneath.

Business Central is increasingly being positioned to play that role.

I'm still wary of some of the hype around AI. A really good demo at Directions is one thing. Seeing that same technology make somebody's job easier or help a business work better is another. That's the bit that actually matters.

I did, however, come away from Directions considerably more interested in all of this than I expected to be. Not because I think the future is simply "more AI". Rather, I think what's more interesting is the possibility that we're starting to see a different relationship between people and their ERP system.

If we get that right, the fact that somebody spends a bit less time actually looking at Business Central might turn out to be a very good thing.

Nick Makin is Sales Manager at TVT. He has more than a decade of experience working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central. His background spans product, customer success, account management and commercial roles, giving him a practical perspective on how technology can help businesses work better.