Dynamics 365 Business Central brings the power of AI to small and medium-sized businesses to help companies work smarter, adapt faster, and perform better. AI in Dynamics 365 Business Central improves the way work gets done, enabling you to:

• Get answers quickly and easily using natural language.
• Save time by automating tedious, repetitive tasks.
• Spark creativity with creative content ideas.
• Anticipate and overcome business challenges.

Reclaim time for important work

In a small or medium-sized business, there is often a lot to do and not many people to help get it all done, so it’s important to make the most of your limited resources to accomplish your goals. Everyday activities like tracking down documents and bringing new employees up to speed can drain your valuable time. What if you had an AI-powered assistant ready to help you find exactly what you need without the hassle?

Available in early 2024, conversational chat using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central helps you answer questions quickly and easily, locate records faster, and even learn new skills—all using natural language. Save time and effort by navigating to documents without having to use traditional menus, and rapidly onboard new users with answers to questions on how, when, or why to do things. Copilot is your everyday AI companion, helping you to speed through tasks, build momentum, and free time for your most impactful work. 

Streamline month-end tasks with enhanced bank reconciliation

Reconciling bank statement transactions with your financial system has often been a tedious monthly chore. Meticulously matching every line item to new or existing accounting entries takes time (and isn’t the most exciting way to spend an afternoon.) In the past, Business Central helped by auto-matching many of the simple one-to-one transactions, but the logic wasn’t able to decipher more complex scenarios such as when multiple charges were paid in a single transaction.

Now, Copilot in Business Central makes bank reconciliation even easier by analyzing bank statements that you import into Business Central, matching more transactions, and proposing entries for transactions that weren’t auto-matched. By comparing and interpreting transaction descriptions, amounts, dates, and patterns across fields, Copilot can help you improve the accuracy of your bank reconciliation while reducing manual effort.

Unlock creativity with marketing text suggestions

Copilot in Business Central helps product managers save time and drive sales with compelling AI-generated marketing text suggestions. Using key attributes like color and material, Copilot can create product descriptions in seconds tailored to your preferred tone, format, and length. Once you’ve made any adjustments, you can easily publish to Shopify or other ecommerce platforms with just a few clicks. Discover how Copilot can help you banish writer’s block and launch new products with ease.

Boost customer service with inventory forecasting

Effective inventory management is crucial in a competitive business environment as it can significantly influence a company’s success and customer retention. This process involves balancing customer service with cost control. Maintaining low inventory reduces working capital, but risks missing sales due to stock shortages. Using AI, the Sales and Inventory Forecast extension uses past sales data to forecast future demand, helping to prevent stockouts. Once a shortfall is identified, Business Central streamlines the replenishment process by generating vendor requests, helping you keep your customers happy by fulfilling their orders on time, every time.  

Reduce risk with late payment prediction

Managing receivables effectively is vital for a business’s financial wellbeing. 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. For instance, if a payment is anticipated to be delayed, you could modify the payment terms or method for that customer. By proactively addressing potential late payments and adapting accordingly, you can minimize overdue receivables, reduce risk of non-payment, and ultimately improve your financial performance.

Improve financial stability with Cash Flow Analysis

Powered by AI, Business Central can create a comprehensive Cash Flow Analysis to help you monitor your company’s cash position. Cash flow is a critical indicator of a company’s solvency, and cash flow analysis is an important future-focused planning tool that helps you maintain control over your financial health and make proactive adjustments to meet all your financial commitments. With insights from Business Central, you can pivot quickly to safeguard your company’s fiscal wellbeing, such as obtaining loans to cover cash shortfalls or cutting back on credit when you have surplus cash.

Work smarter with Copilot in Business Central

Copilot in Business Central gives your company an edge with AI-powered innovations that are a catalyst for unleashing human potential, fostering creativity, and driving efficiency in ways previously unimaginable. The integration of AI into everyday business processes is not just about staying ahead in a competitive market, it’s about redefining what’s possible in the workplace. With Business Central, your company is empowered to navigate today’s complex business environment with agility, precision, and a renewed focus on what truly matters.

The post Transform the way work gets done with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Throughout history, the right tool, in the right hands has always sparked transformation. From moving water across hundreds of miles via ancient aqueducts to putting the world’s knowledge at our fingertips with the advent of smartphones, these tools change our lives. And now we’re seeing the potential of the next great shift: the new era of AI.

This shift isn’t coming a few years down the road, or even in a few months. Your opportunity to lead in this new era of AI is right now. It’s one of the most exciting shifts of our generation, and we’re just starting to see the impact.

We believe leaders will see this impact take shape across three key dimensions—for individuals, for business functions, and for entire industries.

Transforming productivity for every individual

AI is fundamentally changing how we as individuals relate to and benefit from technology. Our own natural language is now the key to unlocking value—we think of it as having a copilot to navigate any task.

A copilot is an AI-driven partner guided by an individual to amplify creativity and accelerate results. As tasks get more complex, a copilot can deliver even greater value. But an individual is always in control—it’s a copilot, not an autopilot. Individuals determine, guide, and approve the output.

We recently announced our vision for Microsoft Copilot, a digital companion for your whole life. And to be your AI assistant at work, Microsoft 365 Copilot works across calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more. It’s already being used by tens of thousands of enterprise users in our Early Access Program including customers at companies like Visa, General Motors, KPMG, and Lumen Technologies, and will be generally available on November 1, 2023.

And we know productivity looks different for specialized roles, like developers. With GitHub Copilot, developers can get guidance and suggested code right in line, simply by describing what they want using natural language. At General Motors, developers are using GitHub Copilot to get up to speed faster, so they can start collaborating with more seasoned peers right away. New developers don’t have to spend as much time on structure or formatting—instead, they can focus on adding value and contributing check-ins.

In today’s world, we have access to more data and information than ever before. But how do we make sense of it all? That’s where AI can help. When we don’t need to spend as much cognitive energy on figuring out what happened in that meeting, getting caught up on email, or finding that document from that chat last week, we can spend more time on the substance of our work.

Using AI effectively means augmenting human capability and accelerating everyone’s innate ingenuity. For individuals, AI clears the space for human creativity to flourish. 

Transforming work with Microsoft Copilot

Designed to help you be more productive, spark your creativity, and to meet the everyday needs of your business.

Explore AI solutions

Shifting what success looks like for every role and function 

Nearly every leader is looking to optimize their core business functions. They’re looking for cost savings, increased efficiency, modernized operations, topline revenue growth, or market growth. Today, AI is becoming the catalyst that can accelerate these outcomes across every business role and function.

Take sales, for example. Sales leaders have many highly specific priorities, including optimizing seller time with customers, ensuring data quality and pipeline hygiene, and shortening the sales cycle so they can deliver revenue faster. However, traditional sales technology often gets in the way. Sellers are juggling highly manual and disjoined processes spanning email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) software. It’s no wonder that 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make everyday tasks easier.¹

With Microsoft Sales Copilot, we’re already seeing organizations like global security services provider Securitas empower their sellers to spend less time on data entry and focus more of their energy on customers. Philip Eklund, Vice President of Client Engagement Platform at Securitas, says, “Opportunity summary in Microsoft Sales Copilot is a huge and important leap in our direction to save more time for our sales personnel.”

Let’s consider another critical business function: security. For security professionals, AI is the game-changer we’ve been waiting for. It’s not just about defense, it’s about taking the initiative, learning from the environment, and adapting faster than the threats can evolve. Asset management firm Bridgewater, one of the organizations currently previewing Microsoft Security Copilot, claims that this leap forward is so momentous that security operations from 2021 may seem “prehistoric” by December 2024.

These core business functions are undergoing a fundamental shift, with AI redefining what success looks like and how organizations can deliver value.

Envisioning a new future for every industry

Every industry is facing unique challenges, opportunities, pressures, and constraints, and the effects of generative AI will be felt in radically different ways depending on whether you’re in the energy sector, financial services, manufacturing, or any other industry. But one thing is clear—the potential for impact is incredible.

This potential is perhaps most evident when we consider healthcare. AI can help reinvent care delivery with more personalized patient experiences, increase the productivity and efficiency of care practitioners to address industry challenges like clinician burnout, and unlock predictive insights that help to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare services. We’re proud to partner with industry leaders like Epic to bring together Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare with Epic’s deep healthcare expertise. Capabilities like Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Nuance DAX Copilot, and our partnership with Epic are revolutionary for the healthcare industry—take a look at how our AI-powered solutions can help clinicians reduce administrative burden and enable them to spend more time focused on direct patient care.

Another industry in which AI will have an incredible impact is retail—in fact, McKinsey estimates that generative AI could deliver increased revenue of up to $660 billion each year for the retail and consumer packaged goods sectors through increased revenue, greater customer loyalty, or operational efficiencies.² We’ll see this transformation take shape with more personalized customer experiences, conversational commerce, analytics, customer service, more productive store associates, and new supply chain efficiencies, just to name a few.

One retail use case gaining traction is frictionless shopping. Facing narrow profit margins and a labor shortage impacting much of the world, retailers are looking for ways to drive down operational costs while continuing to delight their customers—and AI is putting autonomous, frictionless shopping experiences within reach for retailers large and small. Choice Market, a small but growing convenience chain, is using Microsoft Cloud for Retail to better understand its customers so they can offer the right product, at the right price, in the right place—including their best-selling breakfast burrito.

Our responsibility to shape the future together

As we transform productivity for every individual, shift the definition of success for every role and function, and envision new futures for radically different industries, considering AI safety is not an optional feature. It’s a requirement, and it can’t be an afterthought. 

That’s why Microsoft is committed to responsible AI, an approach to developing, assessing, deploying, and using AI systems in a way that aligns with human values and does not cause harm to individuals, communities, or society. We are committed to sharing our learnings around responsible AI as we’ve developed and deployed our own AI solutions, and offering tools and resources to help our customers approach AI responsibly for their own organizations.

And as you chart your path in this new era of AI, we are committed to supporting you with guidance, resources, and information you can use.

We’ve worked with customers, industry experts, and Microsoft leaders to identify five critical factors for AI success that you should consider as your organization looks to the future. You can also explore some of the top use cases we’ve seen deliver impact across industries, as inspiration for how you can get started.

The opportunity before all of us to shape this new era of AI is simply extraordinary, and it’s one of the most significant shifts of our generation. We’re excited to partner with you on this journey.  

Sources

¹ How Sellers Can Use AI to Better Engage with Customers

² The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, McKinsey Digital

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