Business Central AI Agents: A Practical Guide for BC Consultants

If you're a Business Central consultant and you've been treating agents as something for the CRM crowd, it's time to catch up. Agents are now a real, shipping part of Business Central, customers are being billed for them, and partners are already asking about them in interviews. The good news is that BC consultants are better placed than almost anyone to own this work, because agents live or die on how well you understand the customer's processes.

Here's what's actually in the product today, how it works and is paid for, and what I'd learn first.

What's actually shipping

Let's stick to what Microsoft has documented rather than conference keynotes.

Sales Order Agent

The Sales Order Agent watches a designated mailbox for customer requests. It reads the email, including PDF or image attachments if you've configured it to, finds the customer in Business Central, checks item availability and prepares a sales quote with a draft reply. If details are missing it can go back and forth with the customer by email to clarify. When the customer confirms, it can turn the quote into an order. There's also an option to use capable-to-promise to work out delivery dates for items that aren't in stock.

In the 2026 release wave 1 plan, Microsoft added support for running multiple Sales Order Agents per company, with better item matching and relevance filtering, scheduled for general availability on 8 July 2026 (release plan).

Payables Agent

The Payables Agent monitors a mailbox for vendor invoices, extracts the details, matches lines to purchase orders and receipts where it can, and proposes accounts for the rest. It produces draft purchase invoices for a human supervisor to review. Crucially, it doesn't post anything. The invoice still goes through your normal approval workflow.

The wave 1 plan also added a trial mode that lets customers try the Payables Agent without setting up email (6 July 2026) and Known Senders to speed up processing from regular suppliers (7 August 2026).

Expense Agent

Microsoft lists an Expense Agent in preview, with a web app for assigning expenses to projects planned in the wave 1 plan.

Custom agents

This is the part I'd pay most attention to. Business Central now has an AI development toolkit with an in-product agent designer, where you write an agent's goals and instructions in plain language and test it, using the same runtime as Microsoft's built-in agents. It's a preview and the designer runs in sandbox environments only, while the Agent SDK for AL is available in production from version 28.1 (Microsoft Learn).

The MCP server and Copilot Studio

Business Central now has an MCP server, so external agents can talk to it through a standard protocol. The enhanced version went generally available on 1 April 2026 with a dedicated endpoint, OAuth 2.1, Entra ID security, telemetry and auditing. It works with Visual Studio Code, Copilot Studio and registered third party MCP clients (Microsoft Learn).

You can build an agent in Copilot Studio and connect it to Business Central through that MCP server. Worth knowing: the default configuration is read-only, and you need a deliberate MCP configuration to let an agent create, update or delete records (Microsoft Learn).

Microsoft describes its approach as layered: Business Central agents handle well-controlled work inside the ERP, while Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 agents orchestrate processes across systems (Microsoft Learn). That's a useful way to explain it to a client.

How it's paid for

This is the question every finance director will ask you, so know the answer. The Sales Order Agent, Payables Agent, Expense Agent and custom agents all use consumption billing, charged in Copilot Credits. How many credits get used depends on the agent's design, how often it's used and which features it touches. Customers can buy prepaid Copilot Credit packs or go pay-as-you-go, and prepaid capacity is used first. Usage shows up in the Power Platform admin center, and telemetry goes to Application Insights (Microsoft Learn).

In practice that means a consultant who can estimate volumes, set up billing and monitor usage is doing the client a real favour. Nobody wants a surprise bill because an agent got chatty with every email in a shared inbox.

Why this is a consultant's job, not just a developer's

The built-in agents need almost no code. What they need is someone who understands the process:

• Which mailbox should the agent watch, and who else uses it? Microsoft specifically warns that sharing a mailbox between the Sales Order and Payables agents can cause conflicts.
• Who supervises the agent and reviews its drafts?
• What are the posting rules, approval limits and exceptions?
• Is the master data clean enough? An agent matching invoices to purchase orders is only as good as the vendors, items and receipts it's matching against.
• What should the agent never do on its own?

That's classic functional consulting. If you can run a process workshop, you can scope an agent.

The custom agent work sits in the middle. Writing good agent instructions is closer to writing a clear process document than to coding. Developers will still be needed for AL extensions, the Agent SDK and MCP configuration, but a functional consultant who can draft and test instructions in a sandbox is going to be very useful.

What I'd learn first

Here's a practical list you could work through over a few weekends:

• Turn on the Sales Order and Payables agents in a sandbox. Feed them real-looking emails and invoices and see where they get stuck.
• Read the Responsible AI FAQs for each agent on Microsoft Learn. Clients will ask about data, accuracy and oversight, and you want to answer from the source.
• Learn the billing setup. Link a BC environment to a Power Platform environment, look at Copilot Credit capacity and understand prepaid versus pay-as-you-go.
• Try the agent designer. Pick one boring process, like chasing overdue customer statements, and write instructions for an agent to handle it.
• Build a simple Copilot Studio agent that reads from Business Central through the MCP server. Then see what changes when you give it write access.
• Get the Power Platform basics. Copilot Studio sits on Power Platform, and Power Platform shows up in 42% of UK contract ads that mention Dynamics 365 (IT Jobs Watch).
• Write a one page agent readiness checklist you could take to a client: mailboxes, supervisors, data quality, approvals, billing and monitoring.

What a first agent project could look like

If a client asks you to switch on the Payables Agent, here's roughly how I'd run it:

1. Pick the scope. One company, one mailbox, and a set of suppliers who send clean PDF invoices.
2. Check the data. Vendor records, VAT or GST setup, purchase orders and receipts all need to be in good shape, because that's what the agent matches against.
3. Name the supervisors. Decide who reviews drafts, how quickly, and who covers holidays.
4. Run it in parallel. For a few weeks, let the agent draft while the AP team keeps processing as normal, and compare the results.
5. Measure. Track how many drafts needed corrections, how long reviews took and how many Copilot Credits it used.
6. Expand slowly. Add more suppliers, then more mailboxes or companies, once the numbers look sensible.

None of that is rocket science. It's the same careful rollout you'd do for any new process, with a bit more attention on monitoring. Write it up as a repeatable offer and you've got something a partner can sell.

What partners and clients will ask you

Expect questions like these in interviews and pre-sales meetings:

• What does the Payables Agent actually do, and what does it not do?
• How would you stop an agent posting something it shouldn't?
• How are agents billed, and how would you keep costs predictable?
• When would you use a built-in agent, a custom agent in Business Central, or a Copilot Studio agent over MCP?
• What would you check in a client's data before switching an agent on?

If you can answer those clearly, you're ahead of most of the market.

A word on the hype

Agents won't replace BC consultants. Somebody still has to design processes, clean data, set up approvals and look after the thing once it's live. What they will do is change what clients pay for. Less keying, more design and supervision. The consultants who lean in early will be the ones leading those projects. The ones who wait will be explaining to a client why the partner down the road already offered it.

What to do next

• Have a look at Business Central and AI roles on our jobs board.
• Check what BC consultants with Power Platform and Copilot skills earn on our salaries page.
• If you're independent and have agent experience, say so loud and clear in your consultants directory profile.
• Partners building agent practices can tell candidates about it on the employers page.