Boost Productivity with Business Central Copilot Chat

Imagine you are working concetraded in a specific task, you are in the tunnel, and then BOOM the Phone rings…”Hello Neo, do you know who this is?”…sorry wrong turn.

SChat with Business Central Copilot
Imagine you are concentrating on a certain task, you are in the tunnel, and then BOOM the phone rings…”Hello Neo, do you know who this is?”…sorry, wrong turn.
So let’s say it’s not Morpheus calling you to save humanity from the machines, it’s “just” a customer who wants his last invoice mailed again.
Normally, you would stop what you’re doing, open the posted invoices, find the customer (because he didn’t give you a number), maybe sort by date, open the invoice and send it. And that takes your focus away from your original task.
But now there is a way to let Copilot do this work for you, and you can still focus on your task. Just click this button to open the chat with Copilot:

If you already work with Copilot, which you should, then this should be familiar:

As in every other Copilot functionality in Business Central, we have some prompt ideas at the bottom, but also a kind of welcome screen at the top. But first, let’s just “interrupt” the work and look for the last posted invoice for Alpine Ski:

And while Copilot is searching, you can continue working in the system. No lock, no forced pause – just keep working. After some time we get our result:

You see some details, and you also get the link to the document, so you can open it and send it by email, for example. Pretty cool. But what else? Let’s take a look at the prompt guide:

Let’s see what Explain can do for us:

Bye bye onboarding questions. Fields can be explained with chat what their purpose is. No more digging through documentation, no more asking a colleague who might know. The same goes for processes – let’s take an example:

We all know the documentation, sometimes we love it, sometimes we hate it, but this feature is huge. And where does the content for the results come from? Right, from the official documentation – just a little more understandable 😉

And Guide?

More tips for working with Business Central. Awesome.

And some data-related fancy analysis stuff? Sure:

So for now, the sources for chat in Business Central are the data itself and the official MS documentation – for now. Coming up in this wave:

“With 2024 Release Wave 1, we introduced Chat with Copilot: a conversational experience where people can get help from Microsoft Copilot to find data, get unblocked, or learn new skills. Most of our customers install one or more ISV add-on applications from Microsoft AppSource to enhance Business Central with industry-specific solutions, localized functionality, or other critical capabilities that meet their needs. Now, Copilot in Business Central can explain and guide employees in using the functionality of these add-on apps, transforming Copilot from a simple “librarian” to an in-house expert who understands your unique Business Central.

No words needed – Chat will also be able to look up documentation from ISV add-ons.

There are some drawbacks. Chat is only available in US environments and only in a sandbox preview for now. This will give you enough time to test it and get familiar with it. Once it is officially released, you will be ready to use this powerful tool.

As always, a short video: