Last week, over 1,100 members of the Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner Ecosystem met in Florida at Directions North America.
Traditionally, Microsoft has given the keynote presentations at this partner-organized event. As in previous years, there was good news regarding Business Central and the Microsoft cloud platform. This included the continued growth in the number of BC customers, international availability and the number of partner solutions. Microsoft pointed out to the implementation partners the benefits of the new AI-based solution package for D365 BC, known as Copilot.
It's a great time for Dynamics 365 Business Central users!
Mike Morton, Microsoft's general manager for the SMB sector, welcomed partners with the news that the number of monthly active users of Business Central is growing by more than 75 percent year-on-year. This is phenomenal continued growth when you consider that the number of companies using BC is already in the tens of thousands. Morton pointed out the trend that, in addition to smaller organizations, more and more medium-sized companies are switching to BC. The number of customers with more than 100 users increased even faster, by 105 percent compared to the previous year.
Advantages for partners & customers
Several Microsoft speakers discussed the competitive advantages the company can offer Business Central partners and their customers. These benefits include:
- The geographical reach (131 countries are already available, 20 more are planned),
- industry specialization of ISV solutions and its unique position,
- the unique position: Business Central at Microsoft with first-party connections to Microsoft 365 tools, Power Platform Services and Dynamics 365 Copilot.
Copilot: The new AI-based solution for D365 BC
One of the main topics for Microsoft at this event was Copilot, the new AI-based solution for the company's D365 BC product. „Microsoft Copilot is a transformative, forward-looking product,“ Mike Morton told the Directions audience. The Copilot brand now covers a large part of the company's software offering.
AI capabilities with different functionalities have been developed for GitHub, Office, Teams, several Dynamics 365 apps and most Power Platform services.
Business Central has now presented a first preview of Copilot in the form of a widget that can automatically generate marketing texts for a product. The output is controlled by the other attributes of the article in combination with the „Large Language Model“ within the Azure OpenAI service, such as length, format and style. The results must be reviewed and updated by a user before they are stored in the commerce interfaces for practical use. A pre-programmed button for the Shopify integration - another element of Microsoft's wider Shopify alliance - can then synchronize this product data with an e-commerce store.
Would you like to know more about how you can benefit from this popular, fast-growing ERP system? And would you also like to find out more about the benefits of Copilot?