Drive business efficiency with AI in Dynamics 365 Business Central

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern business has become an essential component to foster productivity, enhance decision-making and provide personalized customer experiences. The influence of AI is especially remarkable in Microsoft’s powerful enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Dynamics 365 Business Central. This blog explores the integration of AI within Dynamics 365 Business Central, highlighting its benefits and the revolutionary features that are shaping the future of business processes.

Implementing AI within Dynamics 365 Business Central promises a monumental shift in the way we approach business processes. Powered by next-generation AI, Microsoft Copilot blends perfectly with Business Central’s existing robust features to boost process efficiency and enable data-driven decision-making. Functioning as a backdrop to the user-interface, Copilot works in conjunction with Business Central to provide users with AI-powered assistance within their familiar operational setup. From enhancing bank reconciliations to providing intelligent conversational assistance, Copilot ushers in a new era of streamlined business management that’s accurate, efficient, and personalized.

The inclusion of AI within Business Central brings a multitude benefits such as:

• Improved decision making: With its real-time business analytics, insights are available at your fingertips, enabling you to make swift and informed decisions.
• Increased efficiency: Automation of tasks results in greater productivity, allowing you to focus more effectively on growing business.
• Enhanced data insights: AI can draw meaningful insights from vast, complex data sets faster and more accurately than a human could.
• Risk management: AI can anticipate problems before they happen and offer predictive analytics to enable proactive decision making.

Reconciling bank accounts has traditionally been a time-consuming and laborious task. Manually matching every transaction from bank statements to accounting entries is not only tedious but can also lead to inaccuracies. Copilot, an AI feature in Business Central, simplifies the process by analyzing bank statements you import into the system, matching more transactions, and proposing entries for those not auto-matched. Copilot’s intelligent processes not only improve the accuracy of your bank reconciliations but also significantly reduce manual effort.

Bank account reconciliation with Copilot offers the following key benefits:

• Improved transaction matching: Copilot’s AI algorithms intelligently match transactions based on dates, amounts, and descriptions, addressing the limitations of traditional automatch features. For example, if a customer pays multiple invoices in a lump sum, Copilot can reconcile the single bank statement line with the multiple invoice ledger entries.
• Suggested General Ledger accounts: For transactions that cannot be matched to any ledger entries, Copilot identifies the most likely general ledger account to post to by comparing transaction descriptions with G/L account names.
• Flexibility in reconciliation process: Copilot can be used to start a new reconciliation on a bank account or supplement an existing reconciliation, providing users with multiple ways to access and benefit from the AI-assisted reconciliation process.
• Review, save, or discard proposed matches: After running Copilot, you can review the detailed results in the ‘Reconcile with Copilot’ window, including any proposed matches. This allows you to inspect and decide whether to save or discard proposals before they are saved, ensuring accurate and tailored reconciliation decisions.

By leveraging Copilot’s AI capabilities, businesses using Dynamics 365 Business Central can streamline their bank reconciliation process, minimize errors, and free up valuable time for other essential tasks.

Compelling and engaging product descriptions are crucial for driving sales in online stores. However, creating unique and captivating content for a multitude of products can be time-consuming and challenging, even for experienced marketing professionals. Copilot in Business Central solves this problem by generating AI-assisted marketing text suggestions tailored to your product attributes such as color, material, and size. With customizable parameters like tone of voice and format, Copilot empowers businesses to create and publish product content that best represents their brand on various eCommerce platforms.

Users leveraging Copilot’s AI-generated marketing text functionality can expect the following benefits:

• Accelerate product launches: Simplify the entire process, from uploading a product picture to generating marketing copy based on product attributes and publishing the content to your online store.
• Overcome writer’s block: Generate engaging and creative content based on AI-assisted suggestions, helping users find inspiration and produce more captivating product descriptions.
• Tailor content to your brand: Customize AI-generated suggestions by adjusting language parameters, tone of voice, format, and attributes, ensuring marketing text aligns with your overall brand identity.
• Publish seamlessly to Shopify: With Business Central’s Shopify integration, easily transfer AI-generated marketing text, along with product data and images, to your online store, saving time and effort in the publishing process.

By incorporating Copilot’s AI capabilities into the content creation process, businesses can streamline their marketing efforts, drive sales, and showcase products effectively on e-commerce platforms.

Making the most of your time and resources is crucial in the fast-paced business environment, especially for small to medium-sized enterprises. Everyday tasks such as locating documents or onboarding new team members can significantly consume time and effort that could be better utilized elsewhere. This is where AI comes into play, offering new possibilities to enhance efficiencies. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces a conversational chat feature that simplifies your navigation through the system, answering queries and guiding your learning—all accomplished using plain, everyday language.

The revolutionary chat with Copilot offers immense value for business performance and scalability:

• Accelerating data retrieval: Reduce time spent on searching for documents by letting Copilot locate and retrieve records based on your natural language prompts. An example command could be: “Show me the latest sales order for Adatum.”
• Guided learning: Understand Business Central’s concepts or task management better with Copilot’s guidance, derived from its extensive online documentation. For instance, seeking help to save list filters could be as straightforward as asking: “How do I save my list filters so that I can use them again later?”

By integrating Copilot in Business Central, routine tasks are made quicker, data retrieval becomes effortless, and learning about the system is a breeze—all through the convenience of an AI-powered chat. This leaves you with more time to focus on growing your business and accomplishing more impactful work.

AI brings a wealth of possibilities to revolutionize various aspects of businesses, resulting in better profits, customer satisfaction, and financial stability. In Dynamics 365 Business Central, the AI advantage extends beyond the features outlined above, offering extensive solutions for inventory forecasting, receivables management, and cash flow analysis. Additionally, developers have the opportunity to further customize AI functionality through Copilot, creating tailored experiences for users.

Additional AI-empowered features in Business Central include:

• Inventory forecasting for superior customer service: The AI-powered Sales and Inventory Forecast extension uses historical sales data to predict future demand, ensuring adequate supply to meet customer needs. By identifying potential stock shortages, Business Central aids in streamlining the procurement process.
• Late payment prediction for risk management: With the Late Payment Prediction extension, you can reduce outstanding receivables and refine your collections approach by forecasting if outstanding sales invoices are likely to be paid on time.
• Cash flow analysis for financial stability: AI in Business Central creates comprehensive cash flow analyses. This future-focused planning tool enables businesses to maintain a strong hold over financial health, guiding decision-making such as securing loans or cutting back on credit when necessary.
• Extending Copilot with custom capabilities: Equipped with a set of developer tools, Copilot can be enhanced to deliver powerful, generative AI experiences across various roles and industries. It allows you to safeguard your customer data and simplifies coding against Azure OpenAI Service.

The integration of AI technologies like Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365 Business Central marks a turning point in the management and operation of businesses in this digitally driven era. The range of AI-powered features outlined in this blog, from Copilot’s advanced bank reconciliation to its generation of marketing text, conversational assistance, and beyond, sets the stage for a revolutionized business landscape where decision-making becomes sharper, efficiencies are improved, and businesses become more agile.

To learn more about AI capabilities in Business Central, or to optimize your system, contact Rand Group today.