Agents in Business Central – part 6 – The conclusion
After a couple of days of blogging about the new Agents feature inside Business Central, we can wrap it up. So, what are my thoughts about this new feature?
The links to the blog post:
Agents in Business Central – part 1 – the architecture – Discover Microsoft Business Central
Agents in Business Central – part 2 – the prompt – Discover Microsoft Business Central
Agents in Business Central – part 3 – limiting the agent – Discover Microsoft Business Central
Agents in Business Central – part 4 – troubleshooting – Discover Microsoft Business Central
Agents in Business Central – part 5 – Creating agent from code – Discover Microsoft Business Central
First of all, in the Microsoft ecosystem you can now create agents in three different ways:
- Copilot Studio
- Pro‑code agents with the Agent Framework
- Agents directly in Business Central
I will exclude the pro‑code agents because most Business Central partners will not invest in that. Most questions I receive are about either Agents in Business Central or Copilot Studio.
So, when should you choose one over the other? Each problem deserves its own solution:
| Feature | Agents in BC | Copilot Studio |
| ALM | Same as any other extension. Fits the processes BC partners already know. | Something new to learn. ALM is available but different. |
| Multiple customers | Easy deployment via appsource | Mostly for single‑tenant deployment. Hard to keep BC and Copilot Studio aligned as dependencies. |
| Integrations | Every new integration must be written in AL. | Many integrations available thanks to Power Platform connectors. |
| UI | Fully integrated inside BC. | Accessible everywhere except inside Business Central. |
| Dialog | Standard BC agent dialog. No chat‑style interaction. | Deployment to many channels. Has chat options, dialogs, and can be triggered from many sources. |
| Knowledge | No external knowledge sources. | Add your own knowledge sources easily. |
| Licenses | Copilot credits + BC entitlements. | Copilot Credits only. |
| Model selection | No model selection. | Choose between GPT and Claude. |
Conclusion
If you want a fully integrated agent inside Business Central, you can now build your own BC agent. ALM is familiar, deployment is easy, and everything fits nicely into existing partner processes.
But in my opinion, the main disadvantages are:
- You don’t get a nice chat interface. Customers cannot interact with the agent directly in a conversational way with minimal delay.
- Triggering the agent requires AL code. In my email example, this required a lot of code.
But agents in Business Central are reliable then Copilot Studio.
Licensing Thoughts
The disadvantage of Copilot Studio is its licensing model. You get paid to build it, but there is no recurring revenue. With Business Central, you can at least have user‑based fees per month.
But maybe we should think differently about licensing:
What about charging based on cost savings delivered by the agent?
With telemetry, you can track usage and invoice based on measurable impact.
The Best of Both Worlds?
Ideally, we would combine the strengths:
- The ALM and deploy‑anywhere model of BC
- A rich chat interface
- Easy integrations
- And full access to Business Central validation and data entry without needing to create APIs
Hopefully, in the future, Business Central will support the agent‑to‑agent protocol. That would open many new possibilities with powerful chat interfaces, simple integrations, and the robustness of BC’s data structure.
Where Are We Today?
For now, if you have large incoming emails or other unstructured tasks that need to end up in Business Central, the BC agents are a great solution. Also, if you are very familiar with BC but not with AI agents, this is a very good way to learn. And you get already easy benefits for your customers.
But hopefully, the feature will evolve in the future 😊.
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