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How Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central empowers smarter, faster decision-making
Digital transformation is evolving from cloud adoption to the next phase: embedding AI directly into business applications to drive performance, resilience, and value.
Digital transformation has been on every boardroom agenda for years. By strategically integrating digital technology into their business processes, organizations wanted to improve performance, resilience, and value creation. Many companies have already embraced the cloud as part of this journey. Now, the next wave is arriving: artificial intelligence embedded directly into their business applications.
For organizations running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, this next step comes in the form of Copilot; AI that doesn’t just analyze data, but actively works alongside your teams to execute processes, reduce manual effort, and surface insights that drive better decisions.
What is Copilot in Business Central?
Microsoft Copilot is your AI assistant inside Dynamics 365 Business Central. It works natively with your ERP data, understands your business context, and assists with everyday tasks, without leaving the secure Microsoft ecosystem.
Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Copilot in Business Central doesn’t pull random information from the internet. It focuses on your business data, applying intelligence to the processes you already run. This makes it far easier to validate results, maintain compliance, and build user trust.
Where Copilot delivers value today
While AI in ERP might sound futuristic, Copilot in Business Central is already delivering tangible benefits for companies in finance, sales, purchasing, and operations. Here are some of the most impactful use cases that are transforming how organizations work today.
1. Automating financial processes
- Bank reconciliation: Copilot imports and matches transactions, identifies gaps, and resolves mismatches automatically. This means tasks that once required hours of manual work can now be completed in just minutes.
- Vendor invoice recognition: AI scans and extracts invoice details, integrating them with approval workflows to reduce manual entry and errors.
2. Streamlining sales and purchasing
- Batch updates: Need to add a fuel surcharge or environmental fee to every sales order for a specific region? Copilot can find those orders and apply the change in one step.
- Sales order creation from emails: Instead of manually reading and processing customer requests, Copilot can draft sales orders based on recognized data in incoming emails, ready for human validation.
3. Improving data quality
- Copilot automatically checks what a user enters (like data, numbers or text) against the company’s rules or logic and warns or corrects when something doesn’t fit. This helps eliminate small mistakes that can have big downstream impacts.
- Better data means more reliable reporting, planning, and forecasting.
4. Supporting new users and enforcing best practices
- Built-in prompts guide employees through processes, helping them follow ERP best practices and shortening the learning curve for new team members.
Beyond time savings: the bigger picture with Copilot
Time savings are a given with AI assistance. But that’s just the surface. The real strategic value for organizations lies in how Copilot transforms decision-making, strengthens processes, and equips organizations to move faster in a complex, competitive landscape:
- Better decisions: Copilot can highlight anomalies, gaps, or inconsistencies that deserve leadership attention.
- Standardized processes: By guiding teams toward best practices, Copilot reduces complexity and makes processes more predictable.
- Lower operational costs: Less manual work, fewer errors, and fewer customizations mean a leaner, more efficient system.
- Increased agility: With tedious tasks handled by AI, teams can react faster to new opportunities and challenges.
AI as a catalyst for sustainable transformation
At 9altitudes, we don’t see AI as a gadget, but as a catalyst for lasting business transformation. To deliver real impact, AI needs the right foundation: the cloud, digitalized processes, and a pragmatic adoption strategy supported by change management.
Cloud migration is a crucial first step. Without the cloud, many of the latest AI capabilities simply aren’t available. But moving to the cloud is more than a technical upgrade. It’s an opportunity to streamline processes, reduce legacy customizations, and position your company for continuous innovation.
Once that foundation is in place, AI can truly enhance digital processes. Copilot in Business Central, for example, automates routine work and flags anomalies for review. It’s a powerful assistant, but not infallible. Users should always validate results to ensure decisions remain sound.
Finally, successful AI adoption is about people as much as technology. The most effective projects start small, deliver quick wins, and then expand step by step. This pragmatic approach helps teams build confidence, embrace the technology, and unlock its full potential over time.
What’s next: the road ahead for Copilot
It’s clear that with Copilot we’re only seeing the beginning of what AI can do. Many users are asking where Microsoft will take this next. One thing we can say is that Microsoft is investing heavily in AI agents – prebuilt workflows that handle multi-step processes without manual intervention.
Upcoming capabilities include:
- Supply planning agents: Combining demand forecasting and purchasing logic for smarter replenishment decisions.
- Purchase approval agents: Automatically routing and validating purchase orders before they go to vendors.
Beyond Microsoft’s roadmap, Copilot Studio will allow companies to build their own copilots, tailored to unique business needs. This opens the door to AI that doesn’t just support processes, but actively drives them forward.
Conclusion: from efficiency to strategic advantage
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central is already changing how companies work. By automating repetitive tasks, improving data quality, and guiding users toward best practices, it creates a foundation for faster, smarter decision-making.
For leadership teams, the question isn’t whether AI belongs in ERP, it’s how quickly you can leverage it to gain a competitive edge. With 9altitudes as your partner, you can move confidently from your first AI use case to a fully integrated, intelligent ERP environment. The future of ERP is intelligent. And with Copilot, the future starts now.
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