Update: Explore more Sales Order Agent capabilities announced with this update: Capture more sales with enhanced Sales Order Agent.

Copilot in Business Central enhances your creativity and productivity with AI in key application scenarios. It gives you guidance and assistance when working with the product and helps you find the right data.

With this release, you can use AI to orchestrate and automate business processes with AI agents. Agents work on their own to perform tasks, respond to different events and inputs, reason over the state of data, and fix errors based on user input and the context of the Business Central user experience. Agents need little to no intervention from users but bring users in when circumstances require their attention. Agents can act for a company, department, or team, not just a user.

To enable this capability in Business Central, we're introducing our first out-of-the-box agent, Sales Order Agent, to automate the process of capturing sales orders from email messages.

The agent manages the entire process:

Receives item requests from customer emails in a shared company mailbox.
Identifies the customer from those registered in Business Central.
Drafts the sales quote with the requested items.
Verifies item availability.
Forwards the sales quote to the customer for approval.
Receives confirmation, converts the quote into a sales order, and shares the order with the customer via email.

The agent works from the included instructions and your configuration. It uses AI to identify and run the steps needed to complete this task in the Business Central environment. The agent asks for your help when specific situations come up. For example, it asks for your help when it prepares outbound communications or when it needs business approval for key operations.

Sales Order Agent can access only the parts of the product that it needs to perform its duties. It comes with predefined permissions and role (profile) that the agent automatically gets when you activate it. 

The agent has a simple configuration experience. You define the agent name, the channel for receiving requests for sales quotes and orders (shared company email), and the steps you want to include or exclude in the process for taking orders from customers.

Configuration page for setting up Sales Order Agent

When you activate the agent, it’s ready to perform the process of capturing sales orders on its own. An internal email processor in Business Central starts the agent. You configure the processor to monitor the company mailbox that the agent uses in its configuration.

You can review all actions that the Sales Order Agent performs, including navigating Business Central pages, creating and modifying records, and calling actions, in the Copilot pane. The actions include the agent's user ID. They appear in the same places and in the same way as actions from other users, such as in list views, history, posted documents, and notifications.

Task timeline view of Sales Order Agent

Business Central users maintain full transparency and control over changes that the Sales Order Agent makes by using other experiences. These experiences enable users to:    

See notifications from the agent. For example, the agent sends notifications when it needs help or when the process requires human review, such as for all inbound and outbound messages, approvals, and adding missing data.
Understand the task's context and history in the timeline view, including the key steps shown in the Copilot pane.  
Review each entity the agent creates, such as sales quotes or sales orders. You can review all changes and suggestions the agent makes for a specific task. You can adjust these changes and approve the task.
Discard the steps the agent performs, adjust the quote or order, and ask the agent to continue with the flow.