Be a Better version of YOU with Copilot for Business Central

Video from DynamicsCon Virtual 2024

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Event NameDate
DynamicsCon VirtualNovember 2024

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Transcript of Content (Disclaimer – Auto Generated):

0:02 please welcome Microsoft MVP Shawn dward today he will showcase premiering content via better you with co-pilot for

0:09 business Central please stick around after Sean’s session for a live [Music]

0:23 Q&A well hello there everyone and welcome to Dynamics con virtual

0:31 2024 my name is shawn dorward welcome to this business Central session being a better you being a better version of you

0:38 using co-pilot for business Central I am really really excited to share all these cool things about uh co-pilot today in

0:45 business Central we’ll get into that in just a minute a little bit about myself I am the vice president uh of service

0:51 and Delivery for our SMB business at sa Global so I’m a consultant I work with GP business Central uh pretty much you

0:58 name it I do uh take some time and share my tips and tricks if you will or life hacks at life hacks 365.com where I am

1:06 recently sharing a brand new Journey um about being the world’s okayest shawn is

1:12 what I’m calling it and that’s about me using co-pilot every single day to be a better version of me and this session is

1:20 part of that Journey where we start to use co-pilot um in business Central not

1:25 just in other ways where we’re using AI um I’m also the managing director at re logic so if you’re interested in

1:31 requisition for business Central hit me up I’m a Microsoft MVP which pretty much means that I have a strong passion for

1:37 what I do every day um I’m appreciative of this entire community and let’s get into this content right uh QR code up

1:44 there if you’re interested in in uh contacting me after this session so our agenda very brief but to

1:51 the point what is co-pilot so I get this um a lot you know people ask they or

1:57 they say they hear about copot all the time but they really want to try to saying what it is and what it means so we’ll talk about that I have some some

2:03 kind of uh knowledge base in here for us on on some facts for business Central co-pilot we’ll talk about business

2:10 Central co-pilot or co-pilot for business Central what’s inside of BC and then some cool things outside of BC that

2:17 are still using our BC stuff um we’ll talk a bit about those very very cool mystical things called agents if you’ve

2:24 heard of those and maybe some musing or thought musings or thoughts on on the future for co-pilot in general certainly

2:30 we’ll have some time for Q&A at the tail end of this uh hit me up in the chat which way is the chat let’s see it’s

2:36 over there it’s over there hit me up in the chat let me know that you’re here say hello if you have questions please

2:42 kind of put them in all caps so it’s easier for me to find I’ll be able to answer them at the end let’s get right

2:48 to it so first agenda item what is co-pilot and co-pilot first and foremost

2:55 you must understand that co-pilot is simply a brand it’s the brand name of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence now

3:02 artificial intelligence is not what my wife describes me using um well she does

3:09 but that’s not really what we’re talking about today artificial intelligence is that engine that runs in the background

3:15 that significant uh technology that helps uh replicate the human uh

3:21 intelligence into our into our lives and we use AI every day in more ways than we

3:26 could possibly even fathom we don’t even realize it we’re going to start using Co pilot more and more every single day in

3:34 our professional life just like we do in our personal life whether it’s an um a

3:39 digital assistant like from Amazon or Google those kind of things uh we’re going to start seeing this Evolution

3:46 we’re already seeing it today actually for uh artificial intelligence in our work I use it every single day we’ll

3:52 talk about that more in a minute um the current co-pilot tool is designed as a

3:59 conversational chat single modal you have to enter some text to get some results um so it’s not like uh some of

4:07 the previous digital assistants from Microsoft so one of the ones the Wayback ones the OG if you will clippy um if you

4:15 remember that give a shout out to clippy in the in the chat the clippy was text

4:21 uh conversational as well but it was more circumstantial and inserted into the things that we were doing and then

4:29 that kind of went away and down the the road of the future came Cortana and Cortana was more voice interaction and

4:36 you could use that on your windows or the or the smart speaker but co-pilot today uh at least in this moment in time

4:42 wink wink is a conversational chat so um what that really means is it’s keyboard

4:48 interaction right now now you’re going to see this Everywhere by the way if you’ve used chat GPT um you might be

4:55 thinking well that’s artificial intelligence co-pilot’s artificial intelligence as well well the similarities are robust because

5:01 Microsoft is using that coold pilot engine in a kind of confined space under Microsoft system so it’s um it’s

5:08 privatized that way but it is the same kind of um the same kind of AI engine in

5:13 the background using the lmm you’re going to see this everywhere if you think you see it everywhere now just wait it’s literally going it’s going to

5:20 blend into the background we won’t even realize um this this is there because it’s going to become part of our habits

5:26 and our day to our daily uh functions but just because you see co-pilots

5:32 everywhere doesn’t mean that they’re all the same now conceptually the brand it means that they’re the same but it

5:38 doesn’t mean that they do the same thing so I want to kind of cut out some of that to rip Cortana I saw that in the

5:43 chat um it doesn’t mean we need to get we don’t want to get confused over what

5:49 um um what this co-pilot does or that co-pilot does so let’s take away some of that confusion a little bit as we go

5:55 along just some quick stats here you know I got this from Microsoft you can fact check them if you want 75% of

6:02 people are already using AI at work um 85% of folks saying it helps them focus

6:08 more and 79% of leaders agree that uh we need to adopt AI uh to stay competitive

6:15 um I would venture that that number is increasing by the minute but let’s go back to the first one 75% of people are

6:23 already using AI at work and when I first saw this I immediately felt that can’t be true I work with businesses all

6:30 over the globe and I feel certain that they’re not using Ai and then I really started to dig into it but before I

6:36 share that thought what do you think what is the most common thing you think people are doing at work using Ai and

6:43 let’s leave um let’s leave the fun stuff out but what do you think people are using how are they using it uh

6:49 interesting to think about really if it’s 75% what are they using like I said

6:55 you’re going to see co-pilot everywhere today’s session is a diving in for business Central but you can see the

7:01 power and the commitment that Microsoft has put in to this particular space starting first and foremost with the

7:07 Microsoft 365 or the Office 365 people still call it um everywhere embedded

7:14 there I use uh copilot so much for Microsoft teams I don’t know how I could

7:19 live without it quite honestly it is so incredible um but the Power Platform if you’re a Power Platform uh fanatic like

7:26 I am you know that everywhere you turn co-pilot is increasing in relevance and

7:32 success along the way making those jobs that were already low code um enabled

7:38 even more accessible and then most certainly what brings us to the Forefront in our operations is the

7:45 Dynamics 365 and where we see that um co-pilot being embedded and ingrained as

7:51 we go down this timeline of maturity with co-pilot so didn’t get a chance to look at writing emails I see write some

7:58 stuff they don’t want to write summarizing team meetings I love that those are great use cases most certainly

8:04 I think hands down when that where that number comes from predominantly are things like teams what we tend to do

8:11 with artificial intelligence is as soon as we understand it or we kind of compartmentalize it we give it a name

8:18 and we forget that it’s AI so think of your Google home or your Amazon the a

8:23 word um because I have one in my office here we give it a name or uh and we forget that it’s AI

8:30 but what people forget is all these tools have ai built in it you know right now I’m using AI to blur my background

8:37 um in teams if you have a background that you put as your background and it does the human recognition that’s AI

8:44 That’s not just accidental cutting out your silhouette so um certainly for

8:49 Outlook is very very common teams is the is the go-to in my book for now but

8:54 here’s a link you’ll get this slide deck most certainly uh by the way if you’re watching on YouTube thanks so much those

8:59 comments are below uh comment below but if you’re live here the comments are to the side um here’s some links to these

9:06 facts and we’ll talk a bit about these but and I’ll try to paste them in the chat before we’re through here but

9:11 people are always asking is there a minimum I need to buy with copilot I see this M365 co-pilot license is 35 or $30

9:20 a month I think it is is co-pilot free for business Central well the truth is if you have a business Central license

9:27 co-pilot today is included now I don’t know what it’ll look like down the road but right now it is included so all the

9:32 things we’re going to see today you have if you have business Central you have um some other good questions I get is can I

9:39 develop my own co-pilots for business Central the answer is absolutely and I think there’s some great ones out there

9:45 in the space how does co-pilot use Azure AI I get this a lot from it folks so these links will be there for you really

9:52 important this is all from Microsoft you can find that direct out there um in the

9:57 uh docs website so let me drop that link here real quick into the chat for everybody to take a pakie at that now

10:06 before we move on uh one of the other things I want to mention here is how does co-pilot approach AI safety please

10:12 take a minute to look at that there’s some really cool facts here that I wanted to share as well in conjunction

10:18 with the previous slide so when a user interacts with co-pilot it uses their permission so if I ask for information

10:25 using copilot business Central can I see something I’m not supposed to see no the

10:31 answer is no that’s built into the into the co-pilot model Microsoft does not

10:36 read your prompts believe me they probably have better things to do and they don’t use your data to train the AI

10:42 models without your permission so that’s an admin thing so if you give the permission then it can be used to train

10:47 the model otherwise it’s not um which is great for customers that in the E within

10:54 the EU data boundary data doesn’t move outside the boundary and also last one here and I’ll put this link in here I’ll

11:00 try to get this link um if I can get it uh into this chat but I get ask this a

11:06 lot is co-pilot available in my region at sa Global we’re a global

11:11 organization so I work with businesses all over the globe and as co-pilot rolled out you know there was some there

11:17 was some folks who weren’t didn’t have this or didn’t have that that link is availability by Geo excuse me and that’s

11:24 not just for co-pilot for business Central that’s for all things so you’ll be able see by your location what came

11:31 out when it came out or when it’s planned hopefully that link is helpful as well I’ll be sure to get that to you

11:37 now within business Central just do a quick search in your environment for co-pilot and you’ll see co-pilot and AI

11:44 capabilities these are the list of features that are coming out or have come out uh and what’s their status in

11:51 your system so if you go back to your office or if you’re in your office and you flip over and you try to do one of these today and you don’t see it it’s

11:58 quite possible that they’re just not active in your system yet that’s okay there’s probably good reasons that your

12:04 team wants to kind of hold off on rolling things out or what have you but if you want to Tinker with this you could just use a Sandbox um to give co-

12:13 pilot a shot by the way my feedback my recommendation is that you start part of

12:20 the world’s okay a Sean journey is just that committing to trying to use co-pilot um often because without a

12:29 doubt this is this is the movement this is the this is the cell phone of 12

12:34 years ago this is the internet in the late 8 this is a a time in our lives

12:40 where this new technology is just starting but it is undoubtedly going to continue to grow and Thrive and it is

12:48 important there I say essential that we all get acclimated to using AI in

12:54 aspects of our day-to-day not just in our inbox not just in our collaborations through teams but in other ways to to to

13:02 lower the floor of what we do to be able to to add to save time to add more time

13:08 to be doing those more valuable things um and we’ll talk about that in a little bit too so make sure you’re trying these

13:14 out as we go now chat with co-pilot um as I mentioned co-pilot is um it’s a

13:22 conversational chat that’s how we’re going to interact with this AI it’s on a sidebar on the right hand of your screen

13:28 um this gives us the ability to go into the system find data in our system or

13:33 even or even give us um information on how to do something or explain something

13:39 so with that uh we’ll talk we’ll actually do this in in uh in demo mode

13:44 here in a minute but um there are lots of different types of co-pilots and part

13:50 of the reason why I bring this up is it gets confusing I’ve tried this

13:56 myself so I know initially if you don’t have an understanding of what this layout looks like it’s confusing so

14:02 there’s co-pilot for Windows or at least that’s what I call it that’s what you have embedded in your browser or in your

14:08 Windows desktop that’s that sidebar that you see on my screen we used to call

14:14 that a blade somebody told me they call it a side car now I don’t know but that that bar on the right hand side that if

14:20 you ask that to show records for a customer that is going to be it’s going

14:26 to search out into the web that’s not the co-pilot for business Central that’s

14:32 the co-pilot for Windows so that’s looking at the entire environment what we really want is this coold pilot up

14:39 here from within the business Central um ribbon that’s the one we want okay now

14:46 when we open that up it gives another sidebar so we’ve got the sidebar over there for co-pilot for the world um and

14:54 then we have co-pilot here for business Central so real important that when you you see this that you’re using the right

15:00 co-pilot for the right things so if you ask the co-pilot on the right there to

15:06 give me records for Alpine it’ll give you something but it won’t be what you’re looking for um real important to

15:13 knowe within that sidebar within business Central it gives us kind of this how to here’s the find uh explain

15:21 and guide and these are really designed to show uh show us documents to look up

15:26 documents to help us understand and and how do I so let’s take a look over here

15:31 in my environment and notice I have here my windows co-pilot kind of nicely on my

15:37 right hand side and I’m going to turn that off I’m just going to hit the co-pilot and I’m going to turn that off

15:43 and I’m going to turn on my co-pilot in business Central saving that real estate for me um here so let’s do this so we’ve

15:51 got F explain guide we can also use these view prompts to give us a little bit more information or suggestions in

15:58 this process so I can find things I can explain things Etc now here I’ve gone

16:03 and asked show recent invoices for Alpine and yes I did a few of these things ahead of time because well that’s

16:10 how demoing works we want to just make sure that we’re not wasting time here but you notice what this did in my

16:16 business Central is it gave me the recent invoices for Alpine and I can simply click them and be taken right to

16:22 the document so that’s keyboard interaction into that chat now sure I could have gone into vendor I could have

16:29 gone to purchase in posted purchase invoices filtered Etc but I did this now I can search also here team I can search

16:36 using show me invoice 123 if that’s a match I can also search for other things

16:42 very particular in that way and note that it gave it took me right to this

16:48 window now in this example here I’ve asked help me understand standard cost

16:54 so if I’m in the middle of uh implementing a new module or I’m reconciling something I’m reconciling my

17:01 inventory value and I want to understand what is driving these business rules I

17:06 simply ask and it’s going to give me some information and some references for me to keep going down that path remember

17:12 this is in my business Central co-pilot my chat there uh what else did I ask for

17:19 here uh field direct explain field direct posting so let’s just ask

17:27 that playing field direct posting now this is going to go gather the information and plop it in here for me

17:34 if I don’t ask an intuitive enough question it’s going to say I couldn’t find it specifically because it didn’t

17:40 know exactly what I meant for direct posting there’s many different areas and

17:46 we’ll get to that in just a minute so is it going to give you everything you want no but you have to learn how to interact

17:53 or what everybody calls prompt with with the co- pilot to get the information you need so that’s One Way um pretty cool

18:01 let me know if you like that it does save me a little bit of time um I love that finally a practical use case I

18:06 absolutely love it how here’s another case so I’m in I’ve posted my journal entry and like the knucklehead I am I

18:13 posted it too quickly and I posted it backwards my debits and credits were swapped boy I bet nobody in the chat has

18:20 ever done that so now I want to reverse it now instead of me going out to Google looking at 13 different articles trying

18:26 to figure out which one is right my current version I could just simply ask copot how do I reverse a journal entry

18:32 so let’s just try it let’s put it to the desk how do I reverse a journal entry

18:38 and what I’m going to get hopefully fingers crossed is information step by step on how to do this while that’s

18:45 running I’m going to jump over here and say how do I set up a new payment term

18:50 because we don’t do this often we don’t do this often so it’s not in the Forefront of our mind it’s in the

18:56 Forefront of coal pilot so right here to reverse a journal entry uh choose the light bulb and the journal entries

19:02 window select the entry that you want on the reverse stepbystep information uh

19:07 for us there uh folks in the chat what do you think about that pretty cool nice

19:12 little tip and how we can use um how we can use co- pilot one of the other ones

19:18 I love if you’ve come to my life hack session you’ve probably learned this already but is there a keyboard shortcut

19:25 for what do we call that thing um tell me me tell me for tell me so instead of

19:31 me going up and hitting the magnifying glass every time I’m going to be told by CA sure there’s a keyboard shortcut for

19:38 alt Q so anytime I hit alt Q uh it’s going to pop up to tell me so not only

19:44 can I find records and then can I find pages and can I find dollar amounts um but I can also be a better version of Me

19:51 by learning new tips learning how to use new functionality now that’s the sidebar but

19:57 where else can we use co-pilot and business Central now this is where I

20:03 think it gets a little fun um right within each particular window you

20:08 probably aware that every field you can click on and be given a brief sentence

20:14 or two at most about what this field is but now in each of those you can click

20:19 on the ask co-pilot button and be taken it creates The Prompt for us team and

20:25 puts it into the sidebar chat and goes and gets that information so we’re staying within business Central

20:31 we’re not being distracted and going out to the doc site because that takes us out there and then I know you’re going to Tik Tok or Facebook um maybe not your

20:40 boss is probably watching but this is keeping us right in there so that we can stay focus on what we’re doing I love

20:46 this I use this daily um I definitely do there’s so many fields in business Central it’s impossible to keep up so

20:53 we’ve talked about the window sidebar um and not to confuse that with the business Central co-pilot sidebar that’s

20:59 the conversational chat um we explored the in Windows co-pilot to mimic the

21:05 sidebar uh prompts and now now we’re going to get into the co-pilot functionality that’s in the product with

21:12 specific functionality so if you take a step back co-pilot is this big robust

21:18 can do a lot of stuff tool and we start to Z hone in a little bit and get a tiny

21:25 bit more focused and we have co-pilot for business Central and that’s pretty

21:30 broad within business Central as well and now we’re going to get a little bit even more focused and look at actual

21:36 functionality in the system and how we can take advantage of business Central here now the one of the very first

21:43 co-pilot functionality that came out was the marketing text generator and this is great for folks who who publish items

21:51 for sale on things like Shopify or maybe your your item Master records are used

21:56 to p uh to populate information for your Amazon sales or your own website um or

22:03 you’re going to pull information for for actual campaigns and what’s happening is

22:09 co-pilot works in the background we’re going to come into our items co-pilot works in the background and does that

22:15 fancy schmancy stuff that we’ve learned from co-pilot excuse me from chat GPT

22:20 that’s what the chat GPT you know what its initial Fame came from because

22:25 everybody wanted to help get uh help cut back on the time it took to write stuff

22:32 whether it’s write a blog write a paragraph write so embedded in the product here I have my Athens desk um

22:38 and I’m just going to do draft with co-pilot now this is going to create a heading and a paragraph of marketing

22:44 text Force I’m not going to read this let me zoom in a little bit using my control Plus on my Mouse um here it

22:51 is uh here’s my um elevate your workspace Etc now I can regenerate this

22:57 I don’t like this I can give it another shot I could change my tone I want to make this a little more upbeat maybe or

23:03 formal depending on where I’m sending this off to um I can make those change I can change my format if I want it to be

23:09 brief let’s just do a brief see that was a whole paragraph maybe we want something a little bit more bullet like that let’s go back and regenerate but

23:17 also we could take this one step further and say let’s let’s change the emphasis let’s make this uh let’s make this with

23:24 a power so transform your office into a hub of productivity let’s switch to power and see what our first one

23:30 says discover the Perfect Blend of sophistication and functionality so you get the sense that co-pilot is putting

23:38 these kind of tweaks into the outcome of this marketing text and from here what

23:43 maybe you didn’t notice is some other cool things we can format this we can even even see the iterations of our

23:52 co-pilot inquiries so we can compare them and pick excuse me and pick which

23:58 one we want to keep so I’m going to keep this

24:04 one and now that is my marketing text in here I can edit this manually or I can

24:10 redraft it again that’s pretty cool I know initially there was a lot of tongue and cheek moments with this but let me

24:16 just be honest I’ve worked with businesses who integrate this uh their to sales venues whether it’s eBay and

24:21 Amazon and other places or Shopify for Marketplace storefronts and this is

24:27 fantastic and let me just tell you those two three seconds that would have taken someone easily several minutes or longer

24:34 to to get that starting point of a rough draft in fact I’ve heard somebody say from a marketing team the hardest part

24:40 is changing it from a blank piece of text to something going from nothing to something so there it is one of the

24:46 great functions marketing now bank reconciliation um this came out last

24:53 year fall last year I’ve used this a few times I’m trying to to move this forward

24:59 at my customers I think this is a big timesaver and as we evolve in our

25:04 journey with co-pilot this is going to be more and more impactful and that Telemetry data that Microsoft is going

25:09 to use is going to be powerful so all we’re doing is we take our we have our transactions in our system and a

25:15 download from our bank we’re connecting it whoops we’re connecting it to our

25:20 system let’s go ahead and do this we’re importing it in we’re dragging it in in

25:26 this case and what it does now we can reconcile our bank and we’ll have auto match and you probably were of auto

25:32 match already but then this is one step further this goes beyond Auto matches so you have auto match results and co-pilot

25:40 match results so let’s take a peek at that so we’ve auto match two of eight but co-pilot match four of eight and

25:46 there they are down below we can keep those we can see exactly what the proposal is to apply it to what to these

25:53 documents Etc now this is using the true AI in the background to make this connection for us I absolutely love this

26:01 I would encourage you to give it a shot um this is taking it one step further are you going to be click click done I

26:07 don’t think so let’s be honest because no different I think of co-pilot like a colleague I think of co-pilot like a

26:14 colleague depending on the tasks that I’m asking of it to do depends on the amount of validation that I’m putting

26:19 behind that and based on their experience I’m also applying that validation to that as well so in this

26:25 case I would definitely I would definitely review it and probably going to be left with a few things at the end

26:30 for me to do manually but still save me all that time uh on the front another

26:36 area where co-pilot can make you a better version of You by Saving you time that is embedded in the product is

26:42 creating the product information faster so we could suggest um variance unit and

26:47 measurements substitutions and dimensions uh for items using co-pilot

26:54 so this is in the item card we’re going to go into variant let suggest it and

26:59 very easily all it’s going to do is use the engine the background to compare and contrast and make some decisions and

27:05 make this recommendation that these are the variants that you may want to use this I’ve seen used in real time in real

27:13 in real world cases very great starting point um is it perfect again I I I would

27:19 I would say no but neither am I when I enter this in in uh in manually so keep

27:25 that in mind another really cool area here and I don’t see folks that use this enough let me know in the chat do you reuse number series year-over-year um or

27:32 do you create new ones um this is a great way to using co-pilot to automatically create your number Series

27:40 so you just simply ask co-pilot in number Series so we’re just going to go in the number series let’s do this let’s

27:46 do it let’s try it let’s see if we can Break Stuff let’s go in the number

27:52 series and we’re going to create

27:59 my screen there we go create that’s generate and we’ll say what am I asking on the slide here let’s cheat create

28:04 number series for the new year create number series for the new year and we’ll

28:11 generate now what that’s going to do if I did that right is it’s going to go out it’s going to look at all my modules

28:16 that I’m using and it’s going to create a proposed code a number Series code with the description and the number

28:22 series range with an effective date for the new year in this case uh I think my work date at the 24 so I should see

28:30 2025 and naturally these are not hard commits to our system these are commits

28:35 uh these are uh proposed commits so we can edit them is the point of that uh

28:40 that’s number series hopefully let’s see if this takes just one or two more seconds while I quickly check the chat

28:45 how we doing over here chat uh was that an info link added please add to chat uh yes I all the

28:53 slides will have info links uh on them as well I’ll try to add them at the end of our session here as well so that’s

28:59 taking a little bit longer than I wanted uh but that’s okay we will move on to

29:05 sales suggest lines now here’s another really great area I think this is this is a glimpse into the future I really do

29:11 uh sales suggest lines and I’ll I’ll talk about that more in a moment you can simply type in what you want in the

29:18 suggest lines we’ll talk about that so let’s do this um or you can now that’s still going we’ll come over and we’ll go

29:26 into a sales invoice let me tuck away the co-pilot sidebar

29:31 and I’m going to come into my sales invoice now here I have a I think this is a blank sales invoice let’s turn off

29:37 my fact box for a moment and come down here perfect perfect perfect so I want

29:44 to I can either look up my items here maybe my maybe my customer emailed me and I want to add that way um so I can

29:52 just go up here to co-pilot and say suggest lines and I’m going to say I want three

29:59 um three desks and two chairs um that are under

30:08 $500 and let’s generate so rather than me going and looking and filtering Etc

30:14 so here’s my three desks this is my proposal again it’s not throwing it into my sales invoice and I don’t get to do

30:20 anything with it and I can either discard this and start over or I can insert and I can just insert this in

30:26 there notice that was just natural language um I might even be on the speaker phone with a client when they’re

30:32 saying these kind of things um and just type it in there for easy and notice what it did is it just put it in each

30:38 line I didn’t have to tab tab tab pick the number tab pieces tab TX I didn’t have to do all that it just put it in

30:43 and said hey we’re ready for the next one so I’m going to get rid of these for just a second because I want to show you

30:49 something else here and that is that we can also this other one here suggest lines from a file actually before we do

30:56 that let me go back to suggest lines because I forgot this um um no no I was

31:03 right I was right let’s go back and do suggest lines from the file so I’m just going to pick a file so in this case I

31:08 have a sales file maybe my customer emailed me a file or perhaps I have an

31:15 export from a sales venue for this customer that you may have in the past had to build an integration for um so

31:23 wink wink on that I think there’s definitely room here for us to to to to debate whether or not we need to build

31:29 custom Integrations for things like this now so what this did is it looked at my simple file and it said hey it looks

31:36 like these are the inventory items that you want and the quantities and I can I can choose I could change my my matching

31:43 type I can also view the confidence of this I like this a lot because if it’s a true match we can get a high confidence

31:49 or if there’s some fuzzy match going on we can see that lower confidence where maybe I need to put a little bit more of

31:55 my attention to but just like that I’ve imported this into my system now let’s

32:03 go back and do this a different way right from suggest lines and I’m just going to attach that file rather than using the import and here’s what we get

32:09 to see that match happen so here’s my column mapping so I can change like if

32:14 my if my if co-pilot didn’t map the files properly or map the file to our system properly I can change that on the

32:22 fly so here’s where I kind of think you know do we need these custom Integrations for bringing sales

32:27 information and on a big scale perhaps on a small scale maybe not so I think this is pretty cool all we have to do is

32:33 generate and insert these into our document and there we go boom beautiful

32:39 thank you co-pilot for the win uh next up on our list oh don’t forget you can

32:45 also bring in um use co-pilot to bring in uh sales lines from other documents

32:50 from other posted invoices um from the from this customer’s last posted invoice if you just want to cheat and say

32:57 they’re reordering almost exactly the same as they did last time boom real easy to do and that’s clicking on this

33:04 icon here on the prompt guide or you could just simply type copy from the latest posted invoice in there and it

33:10 will do it for you you’re welcome uh next up on the list is eent matching so

33:15 we’ve got purchase orders in our system and we get a file from our vendor electronic file and we want to

33:22 match those up and now we’re doing it manually but we can use co-pilot to go ahead and do that I’ve got a few links

33:29 here for you again I’ll share this in the chat for you to look at this video on E doent matching but very very cool

33:36 we’re gonna we’re assuming we get the file already we’re going to choose e doent matching look we’ve got Auto

33:41 matched co-pilot match gets us even further to closer to the finish line and

33:47 it’s a beautiful world when we’re able to use that technology uh basically this is real simple the existing process just

33:53 gets uh interrupted with co-pilot in the middle uh same as Bank R which I think is pretty cool uh you want to be sure to

34:01 check that out now most certainly my favorite I think to date well it’s debatable

34:07 because there’s so many new cool things coming out more to come in this session so stay tuned there’s um analyzing lists

34:14 so we have our lists in business Central and what I mean by lists are you know lists the stuff that we look at all the

34:21 time this is a list um maybe we want to look at uh customer Ledger entries

34:28 um let’s do that let’s see uh let’s go into the customer oops I’m not in

34:33 customers that’s why let’s go into customers and then

34:39 we’ll look at uh customer Ledger entries so here in customer Ledger entries this is a pretty significant list uh I’ll

34:45 remove my filter here too uh this is all of our customer Ledger entries this is something we can export to Excel and we

34:52 can do some pivoting in Excel um to get some information ad hoc analysis

34:58 um which I know we all love to do and um kind of we kind of assume it has to go to excel I’m I’m like that a lot trying

35:05 to break that Hab because it doesn’t need to go to Excel and that’s what analyze list is all about and we simply

35:10 can use natural language to get some of these results now what this really is saying is this list is our typical

35:17 business Central list and we can switch this uh to go over into analyze analysis

35:23 mode and here we can build these lists we can build new lists we can try to get

35:29 let’s see I want a list that gives me all ledger entries for customers and I’m

35:34 already spacing out because there’s fields in here now I could do this but it’s going to require some Focus but but

35:42 if I just simply if I just simply ask co-pilot instead with natural language

35:49 so I’m just going to say show amount remaining pivot this by due date year

35:55 due date month and group by customer number you can could argue that’s not absolute natural language and I don’t

36:00 disagree but this is the architecture of this co-pilot analysis build show me the

36:06 remaining amount pivot by due date year due date month and group by customer numbers what is this showing this is

36:12 going to show our amount outstanding our accounts receivable if you will not aged but our accounts receivable so let’s

36:18 take a look at this new analyze list let’s go co-pilot somebody somebody

36:25 kicked the wheel let’s go no whammies don’t let me down how’s everybody doing

36:30 in the chat we still doing okay over there good good good good all right here we go so here is our list remaining

36:37 amount by due date so I’ve got my 2023 and 2024 and I can expand this out I can

36:43 change my order here to go out uh ascending and I’m going to expand this out and see what I’m going to keep this

36:50 by the way because that looks pretty good that looks pretty good but we can we can go down one level here more and

36:57 see okay there’s the customer customer name and here’s some invoice information

37:02 I absolutely love that that saved me tons of time I didn’t have to do it let’s do um let’s do U let’s add some

37:09 Global dimensions in there let’s do another one so let’s add Global dimensions in there create a new

37:14 analysis this one is saying um same thing but uh pivot by global Dimension

37:19 One and Global Dimension two and then group things also give me the ability to drill down to the transaction level

37:25 co-pilot would you please let me do that that we’ll see if it cooperates uh but

37:30 this is the great thing here remember we’re just starting with co-pilot and business Central and this technology is

37:36 evolving at an incredible rate and the faster we adopt to it the faster it will evolve so here look now here’s my 2024

37:43 there’s my Global Dimension One and my Global Dimension values so just like that I can see all the things I need to

37:50 see right here in this list without me having to create this manually and most certainly I could still come in and

37:56 refine and read Define this without using cold pilot but look at how far down the path to success this got me um

38:04 as I mentioned uh so that that that is our complete in the product look of co-

38:09 pilot and so what do you think are those ways that you could you know be a better version of you maybe save some time

38:15 maybe maybe do some uh uh a harder look in the data um as we evolve in in this

38:21 world co-pilot’s going to be creeping successfully into every nook and cranny

38:27 of what we do and that includes into our Erp so my challenge to you is to get acclimated to it start using it every

38:33 day and be a better version of you now we’re not done got a couple other things we want to talk about before we get to

38:39 Q&A so one of the things we in our agenda we talked about was uh co-pilot

38:45 for business central inside business Central which we just covered uh several

38:50 key areas several cool areas there including the conversational chat um and the and the embedded in the product

38:56 functionality now where where we can go from there is how how do we use co-pilot outside of

39:03 business Central but still uh still improve uh still be a better version of

39:09 ourselves with our day-to-days while using our Erp and so let’s look at some of these now here in the bottom we’ve

39:15 got teams Outlook and Excel now there’s much more coming from co-pilot for business co-pilot for finance with teams

39:24 now it’s called Co pilot for finance and we talk about this for excel Outlook and teams but business Central in the

39:30 background is what we’re talking about co-pilot for finance it’s a new product in the M365 Suite it’s uh it’s

39:38 available for finance and operations it’s even available for um products that aren’t Microsoft I think but um more

39:44 importantly most importantly it’s it works with business Central so we’ve got co-pilot for finance currently that has

39:51 an Excel addin and an Outlook addin and we’ll talk about each of those briefly here I’ve got some reference ings for

39:57 you don’t worry on how to use these and what cool functionalities yet to come but here if we look at this particular

40:03 setup in Outlook and I’ll try to um I’ll try to do this real quickly if it’ll if

40:09 my computer will cooperate briefly um but I’m just going to open up

40:14 Outlook and let’s see slide this over here so you could see um so here is my

40:22 Outlook and here I’ve got co-pilot for finance I’ve got this simple email here that says say I’ve received this invoice

40:28 I’m going to dispute it now co-pilot for Finance in Outlook connected to business Central gives us the ability to add

40:34 contacts on the fly it also I think the most significant part about it is it gives us the ability to manage accounts

40:41 receivable so here’s a dispute inquiry because we’re repairing the desk that we sent off I could just simply come into

40:47 that customer right from within Outlook I don’t have to leave and get distracted I can see some sta statistics what

40:53 they’re aging looks like I can even come down and see real documents for this

40:59 customer from business Central y’all in

41:04 Outlook using co-pilot for finance and I can even update the status here say it’s

41:09 disputed and give it a promise to pay date and that will update the record back in business

41:15 Central isn’t that amazing I absolutely love that that and remember remember don’t geek out like I am too much this

41:22 is just the start we are just starting the tip of the iceberg on how co-pilot for Finance connected to business

41:28 Central is going to help us down the road next up on that list was Excel now

41:34 if you’re like me you love Excel and boy oh boy anytime I get into Excel I get into trouble but hey that’s just the

41:41 nature of the Beast um but we could do some fancy things now this particular addin let’s see do I have it open if I

41:47 did my job here I have it open now this guy remember how much did I say this was if we have business

41:54 Central co-pilot and business Central is included and and co-pilot for finance is free at least today um and it’s in

42:01 preview mode um and I’m I’m enjoying it in in a major way I absolutely love this so this is the Excel addin for co-pilot

42:08 for finance for business Central the links are in the slide deck don’t worry so you can get it turned on all this is

42:14 this is a download from my bank and this is a download from business Central I don’t need to actually authorize back

42:21 into business Central I can just use the edit uh open in Excel and and create this all I’m going to do now is I have

42:28 my my bank statement and my business Central transactions and I’m going to compare the I’m going to reconcile I’m

42:34 going to reconcile these two and I’m going to uh oh uh oh there we go I’m going to reconcile this data I have to

42:41 tell it which two where where’s the data I got some data on worksheet one in this table data on worksheet two in this data

42:48 in this table um and now I’m just going to hit next and then what this is going to do is going to give us the ability to

42:54 say okay which fields are we going to compare to do we need to add new fields what is our what is our way of measuring

42:59 this and then the AI takes over not only is it going to do the reconciliation for us but it is going to create this

43:05 beautiful report for us and give us our entire reconciliation statement with a

43:10 summary here for us as well that we can include in an email that we send off to

43:16 our controller we could save this as a PDF here’s my transactions from BC here’s my bank here’s the reconciliation

43:23 here’s how much I’m out and away we go that’s co-pilot for Finance don’t sleep on that team it’s really really great

43:30 you’re going to love it La those are agents I would call those agents those are custom functionality specific

43:38 co-pilots uh we’re coming up on our time question don’t worry I’ll leave time for questions but those are Microsoft agents

43:45 that’s Microsoft Finance I don’t know if they would call it an agent or not but that’s the idea of agent is where you take a very particular functionality you

43:52 give it parameters and you define what it needs to look like and you build it for that with co-pilot Studio you can

44:00 you can do that as well not just for business Central but in your entire organization on the graph so um using

44:07 data on SharePoint to compare to this or whatever it’s quite quite complex uh what you can do but not complex on how

44:14 you do it that’s co-pilot studio if you’ve heard of uh virtual agents before that would be the same thing um so we’ve

44:21 come back to the term agent but now we’re calling them co-pilot agents now this agent salesorder agent is a

44:29 Microsoft agent another agent from Microsoft but this is in business Central and this isn’t released yet I

44:36 think it’s going to come out early next year or actually I think I saw December I think it’s right around the corner and

44:42 the idea behind this is that we can create this agent that says hey when we get an email in this inbox from a

44:50 customer that we recognize can we create the order can we alert people that there’s stock we need to buy or

44:56 something we need to build can we can we fulfill it right away can we ship it

45:02 right away and actually let the co-pilot do the work of fulfilling and processing

45:08 the order which is absolutely magnificent all you do is you tell which mailbox you connect to it pretty simple

45:15 you activate it and then basically you get a timeline view monitoring that inbox see on the right hand side there

45:21 these are the activities in that inbox maybe we didn’t do anything with this email maybe we did something with that

45:26 email but you can review each one uh you can respond to the emails using this

45:31 agent right from within business Central so earlier co-pilot for finance we were looking at ways we could not leave

45:37 Outlook now we’re looking at ways we can handle emails without leaving business Central absolutely amazing um and this

45:45 is going to handle those orders for us we can create the message right from within business Central send it off including attaching the PDF if it’s a

45:51 quote or what have you um away you go that’s building uh that’s the mic oft

45:57 agent that isn’t a custom one that you would build that’s going to come out next month but you can build your own

46:03 using co-pilot Studio as well well folks that’s the end of our time uh for our

46:08 for our presentation we’ll open up the Q&A here please if you’ve asked a question before please uh ask it again

46:16 um so that I I don’t overlook that question as I scroll up and down um in

46:21 the chat I hope you enjoyed the presentation and uh um so let’s hear what what kind of questions we we got

46:28 here’s the bank reconciliation link what other links are we look for currently I only see copilot to suggest item

46:34 substitutions it’s advertises create product information for variance Dimensions U and substitutions but I

46:39 only have substitutions in the latest environment so my recommendation I think some of it may have been pulled back and

46:44 delayed to the December release uh so you may want to check that that that may be the case there because um I was not

46:50 able to get variants in mine until I deployed a new a new environment then I was able to

46:56 get variant so I think there um there was a couple little uh stumps along the way and it look for um either a brand

47:04 new release in in an environment with the latest deployment or check um

47:09 December back for December all right I don’t see any questions I’m trying to see here let’s see hopefully everybody

47:15 found that helpful um any questions before we

47:21 close again thank you all very much I hope that was helpful um I see Shirley

47:26 saying I built a agent uh can you edit them with updated information example I made one that had customer benefits and

47:32 one to update have you been able to do this I have not myself um but uh I would imagine you’d

47:40 be able to update them most certainly if not use them as a as a starting point so um for a new one great great question

47:47 great job on trying to create your own agent as well that’s pretty pretty awesome good job

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