Best Practice using Copilot in Business Central

It has been a while since we were introduced to the Copilot features in Business Central.

My two favorite features are Chat with Copilot and Copilot in Analyze Mode. I want to share some key takeaways from using these features and showing them to our customers.

Let’s start with Copilot in Analyze Mode. Back in the “old” NAV or BC days, you had to know how filters worked. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an advantage to know how to use them, but more and more users are coming to Business Central without knowing them or having problems using them. And to be honest, if you don’t do it on a regular basis, it’s hard – like everything in life.

Analyze Mode

So let me show you how to use Copilot with natural language. For example, we want to know which item sold the most last year.
So without analysis mode the filter would look like this:

So in the result – no sums, no groups. Still needed to export to Excel for example and continue. With analysis mode:

Looks better since we have some sums and groups. But how to achieve this without thinking about how to create the groups and sums with the filter set as it is? Simply done with a prompt:

If we look at the filters set by Copilot:

Pretty much what we wanted. All in natural language. Let’s try another one:

With this single prompt, you can perform a simple cash flow analysis based on your customer ledger entries.

Chat with Copilot

Looking forward to the next great feature – Chat with Copilot
Since Business Central 25.4 it is available worldwide – more languages will be added later.

One of the key features is to support the user by explaining processes – for example

When you ask Copilot how a process works, you get a simple step-by-step guide on how to do that process – awesome!

You can also ask Chat questions about your data in Business Central:

So from the chat we can create an analysis tab. And another one:

In this case, no Analysis tab has been created, but we can still see the information we need.

Conclusion

As P!nk once sang, you gotta try, try, try… Don’t think about filtering terms or anything like that – just use the Copilot features as if you were talking to a colleague. Yes – it is that simple. And if the result does not fit or Copilot has made something up, just try again. The quality of the results has improved a lot in the last few months and continues to do so.

And as always a short video: