Why SMEs Are Turning to Microsoft Copilot in Business Central for AI Success

If you’re reading this, you’re already part of the AI moment — whether that’s a quick ChatGPT prompt or AI suggestions in the apps you use every day. Generative AI adoption has accelerated exponentially: Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that use of generative AI nearly doubled in six months, with 75% of global knowledge workers now using it.

Microsoft research shows roughly 41% of business leaders expect to redesign business processes around AI over the next five years, with AI agents coordinating routine workflows.

For sellers and operations teams, the effect will be profound: Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 Business Central can automate order capture from emails, generate concise summaries of records, and prepare quotes or transaction drafts — so people spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on high-value decisions.

Microsoft is backing this transition by building these capabilities with Responsible AI at the core (fairness, reliability & safety, privacy & security, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness).

Below, we’ll unpack what Copilot brings to Business Central and the gains you can expect.

The shift from on prem to cloud computing to AI- what changed?

Over the past decade, Microsoft’s commitment to transform their global enterprise network services internally has equipped and enabled them to capture the full benefit of cloud networking.

• From datacenters to the cloud

Microsoft’s IT landscape once revolved around physical servers, storage, and networks—managed by specialized teams and governed by structured frameworks. While stable, this model was slow to adapt and limited agility.

• Early cloud adoption

The first step toward change came with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), moving on-prem workloads into Azure virtual machines. This “lift-and-shift” approach mirrored old processes, offering limited efficiency gains.

• Acceleration through disruption

When the world pivoted to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that digital transformation doesn’t always follow a predictable path. The sudden need for resilient, scalable, and accessible systems accelerated cloud adoption worldwide.

• Azure maturity and decentralization

As Azure matured, Microsoft shifted to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), enabling business groups to own and manage their solutions directly. This brought agility, self-service capabilities, and the gradual retirement of physical datacenters.

• Adapting roles for a cloud-first world

With cloud computing fully underway, Microsoft faced the next challenge: redefining IT roles within its engineering organization. This shift embraced DevOps practices, automation, and continuous integration/continuous deployment, aligning teams to a more business-focused, service-driven model.

• Cloud-native and ready for AI

Today, with 98% of its infrastructure running on Azure, Microsoft operates in a cloud-native, automated environment—one that not only supports global collaboration but also sets the foundation for innovations like Copilot.

The trend in 2025

According to Microsoft’s recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. But until recently, AI has been a commodity that few SMEs could truly invest in.

While most leaders agree AI is a necessity:

• 79% of leaders agree their company needs to adopt AI to stay competitive, but 59% worry about quantifying the productivity gains of AI.

• This uncertainty is stalling vision: 60% of leaders worry their organization’s leadership lacks a plan and vision to implement AI.

The opportunity ahead for leaders is to channel employee enthusiasm for AI into business transformation. This will look different for every organization, but one way to get started is by utilizing the AI-powered assistant in Business Central – Copilot to your utmost benefit.

Let’s break it down further below!

The role of Microsoft Copilot in BC

Copilot is the powerhouse AI assistant that helps spark creativity, boost productivity, and eliminate tedious tasks for users. Fun fact: Copilot in Business Central is the world’s first AI-powered assistant across all lines of business. 

Unlike point solutions that target a single workflow, Copilot in Business Central surfaces AI across core lines of business, i.e: finance, sales, purchasing, inventory and customer service—so SMEs can empower staff with intuitive tools that reduce friction and save time.

At a time when 9 our of 10 people want simpler ways to automate daily tasks, Copilot helps to free time so employees can focus on their most meaningful work. Copilot does this by using AI in key application scenarios and providing guidance along the way.

As a built-in system feature of Business Central, Copilot isn’t a simple global on/off switch. User administration is deliberately granular to protect data and control behavior. 

Administrators can:

• Understand which Copilot and agent capabilities are available to your environment.

• Deactivate individual capabilities.

• Grant or deny access to individual users for each capability.

• Data governance controls.

5 things you can do with Microsoft Copilot

1. Complete bank reconciliation

Business Value: SMEs need to import bank statements and reconcile transactions with their bank ledger entries, making sure all transactions are accounted for. 

Copilot reduces the cumbersome bookkeeping effort by matching more transactions and suggesting G/L accounts to post the remaining transactions. 

Feature details: Copilot enhances the bank account reconciliation feature with: 

1. AI-powered transaction matching

2. Al-empowered G/L account suggestions

3. Built in-demo data

2. Create product information

Business value: Companies need to quickly update the portfolio of products they sell in today’s landscape. E.g. Whether it’s adding new products, changing existing products, or adding entire new product lines and categories- it takes time to create and manage product information. 

Copilot helps to reduce this effort and accelerate the time to market for new products. 

Feature details: Copilot assists users to add items by reusing information from similar items. For example: 

1. Substitutions 

2. Dimensions

3. Variants

4. Units of Measure 

3. Create sales line

Business value: Creating sales documents can now be improved with AI reducing manual data entry and drive operational efficiency.

Copilot speeds up the process of creating sales documents and reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks and lookups. It understands the input and uses it to create sales lines. 

Feature details: Copilot helps create and suggest sales lines on sales documents, such as sales quotes, orders, invoices based on structured input or natural language. 

1. Versatile input methods

2. Intelligent processing

3. Find product

4. Find document by reference

4. Use sales order agent to automate sales order taking

Business Value: Sales order agent uses AI in key application scenarios to provide guidance for user’s productivity. 

This agent 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. E.g: When it prepares outbound communications or when it needs business approval for key operations.

Feature details: Sales order agents can work on their own to perform tasks, respond to different events and inputs, fix errors based on user input etc. This can automate the process of capturing sales orders from email messages. 

Below are some of the capabilities the agent manages:

1. Receives item requests from customer emails in a shared company mailbox

2. Identifies the customer from those registered in Business Central

3. Drafts the sales quote with the requested items

4. Verifies item availability 

5. Forwards sales quote to customer for approval
   

6. Receives confirmation, converts the quote into sales order and shares order with customer via email 

5. Experience enhancements to analysis assist

Business value: Copilot helps you identify trends and anomalies in your business data by enabling users to express your analysis as a simple sentence, without leaving Business Central.

For example, users can describe: “Show me all vendors by location sorted by number of purchases”- you immediately get insights, where you can take steps to make better business decisions. 

Feature details: Copilots goal is to boost creativity, improve productivity and eliminate tedious tasks. Some updates to the latest preview are:

1. Availability for more users

2. Flexibility

3. Improved control 

What lies ahead

This wave expands on Microsoft’s use of Copilot capabilities, enabling customers to orchestrate and automate business processes with help from AI agents. 

The great feature about these agents is that they can autonomously perform tasks, respond to events, analyze data, and handle errors using both user input and data from the Business Central environment. 

The convenience of being able to use Microsoft Copilot within Business Central without any administrative setup enables users to boost creativity, improve productivity and eliminate tedious tasks. 

New users are able to use Copilot capabilities as soon as the environment upgrades, and administrators can easily switch to opt out of data movement across geographies.

That being said, Copilot includes a constantly expanding set of capabilities that help users in different roles and tasks.

In a world where security can be compromised, customers can trust that their data is safe. 

Users have no need to worry as the application follows Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles, where world-class security, privacy, and compliance controls protect their data.

Transform the way you work with Microsoft Copilot

The integration of AI into everyday business processes is beyond holding a competitive advantage, it’s about redefining what’s possible in the workplace. 

Copilot gives businesses practical productivity gains while protecting data, permissions, and compliance. As such, SMEs have great incentive to unlock the full potential of AI to drive growth and innovation. 

The future of sales is bright with the power of AI, and those who learn from the past will be best positioned to lead the way and succeed.

If you’re unsure or new to this, incentives such as the PSG Grant can also lower the barrier to adoption — helping you move from exploration to impact faster.

Contact Aristou today to learn more about Business Central and Copilot or find out if you’re eligible for the PSG Grant for Business Central here today! Start now — unlock the efficiency and creativity your teams need to lead in the AI era.