Business Central 2026: AI agents and e-invoicing

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the reference ERP for the SMEs we support: complete enough to run finance, purchasing, sales and stock, light enough not to crush a 20-to-250-person organisation. The 2025 and 2026 release waves injected two major changes — agentic AI and e-invoicing — that deserve a business owner’s attention. Here’s the essential, without the marketing gloss.

Copilot agents: from assistant to autonomous agent

Until now, Copilot in Business Central was an assistant: it suggested, you validated. The 2025-2026 shift is the arrival of agents — automations that execute end-to-end tasks under supervision, not just on demand.

• Sales Order Agent: it reads quote and order requests received by email, identifies the customer and items, checks availability, prepares the quote or order, and submits it for human validation. For an SME entering orders by hand, that’s hours recovered each week.
• Financial agents: assisted bank reconciliation, period-close help, anomaly detection on entries.
• Customisable agents: the platform now lets you scope agents to specific business processes.

The point we hammer in advisory work: an AI agent is not magic. It’s only as good as the data quality and the rules framing you give it. Deployed blind, it automates errors at scale. That’s where structured support — thinking through governance, scope, human validation — makes the difference between a gimmick and a real gain. It’s the same principle as for any enterprise AI agent deployment.

E-invoicing: the deadline that structures 2026

This is THE regulatory topic of the year for any French company. The e-invoicing reform sets a timeline:

• From September 2026: all companies must be able to receive electronic invoices, and large companies and mid-caps must issue in electronic format.
• From September 2027: the issuing obligation extends to SMEs and micro-businesses.

Concretely, domestic B2B invoices will no longer travel as a plain PDF by email: they’ll go through accredited platforms, in structured formats (Factur-X, UBL, CII). Business Central natively integrates e-invoicing management and connects to the platforms — but it requires advance configuration: formats, mandates, issuing and receiving flows, archiving.

Our message to SMEs: don’t wait for 2027. Even if your issuing obligation is late, the receiving obligation arrives in September 2026 for everyone. A properly configured ERP turns a regulatory constraint into a productivity gain (less data entry, automatic reconciliation). Poorly anticipated, it’s a wall in September.

Other useful evolutions

• Higher performance and limits: Business Central handles larger volumes, useful for growing SMEs.
• Reporting and analytics: finer integration with Power BI, ready-made analytical data models.
• Industry verticals: for retail and fashion, the K3 Fashion vertical connected to Shopify POS remains our reference architecture (size/colour matrix, wholesale, multi-store).
• Auto-update cycle: the April and October release waves enforce a discipline of testing customisations before each version bump. We industrialise it for our clients.

What we recommend

For an SME on Business Central — or considering migrating to it — the 2026 roadmap we draw:

1. Map e-invoicing: platform choice, formats, timeline, receiving tests this year.
2. Evaluate Copilot agents on a high-volume process (orders, reconciliation) before generalising.
3. Lock down data governance: a clean ERP is the prerequisite for any useful AI.
4. Master the update cycle so you’re never caught off guard.

We run these projects as delegated project management, with the publisher or an integration partner and your business teams. If Business Central is (or will become) your backbone, discover our ERP support or start the conversation through the contact form.