AI coworker in Dynamics 365 Business Central: native to Microsoft's cloud ERP

Business Central is no longer Dynamics NAV

Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft's cloud ERP for the mid-market, the successor to Dynamics NAV. For organizations making the switch, the biggest difference isn't functionality, it's how the ERP wants to be accessed. No more C/AL code customizations, but extensions. No more on-prem integration servers, but a standard REST API. And two major releases a year that you can't freeze.

That makes Business Central ideal for AI coworkers. The BC Web API is stable, documented and standardized. What we do in AFAS through GetConnectors or in SAP through BAPIs, we do in BC via /api/v2.0 with an OAuth token tied to a service user. Every action by the AI coworker shows up in the BC change log at the user level.

Native integration through the Business Central Web API

The AI coworker receives its own BC user, with roles assigned through your standard User Groups and Permission Sets. Access scopes per environment: sandbox for validation, production for actual postings. Token management runs through Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), so your IT team applies exactly the same governance it would to a human colleague.

What we connect via the Web API:

• Sales and purchase documents: quotes, orders, invoices, credit memos.
• Vendor, customer and item master data, including price lists and customer agreements.
• General ledger entries, dimension codes and VAT postings.
• Jobs, resources and timesheets for project administration.
• Warehouse and inventory movements for WMS integrations.

Relationship with Copilot and Power Platform

Microsoft has put Copilot inside Business Central as an in-app assistant, and Power Automate builds flows between applications. Good tools, but they play a different role from an AI coworker. Copilot helps a human working in BC move faster. Power Automate runs a fixed sequence of steps. An AI coworker takes the full process, from email to posted document, including exceptions and decisions within agreed boundaries.

In practice we use both alongside our own agents: Power Automate as a trigger layer for events in Teams or SharePoint, Copilot for the end user inside BC, and our AI coworker as the autonomous process executor behind them.

Common processes in BC

Invoice processing with matching against purchase orders and receipts, posted straight into BC. Order processing from email or EDI into sales orders. Intercompany postings with paired documents in both entities. Project administration, with mails from subcontractors turning directly into jobs and job journal lines. And master data governance, with duplicate, chamber-of-commerce and VAT checks before a new vendor is created.

Upgrades and future-proofing

Business Central ships two major releases a year. Because our AI coworker runs on the standard Web API and not on custom extensions, the integration stays stable across releases. Upgrades that introduce risk for custom extensions remain a non-event on our side. Plan a Quick Scan to see which process in your BC setup fits best.