A practical look at the new Copilot experience, the expense agent, custom agents and Shopify B2B updates as well as what to test in your sandbox first.
Key Takeaways:
- Business Central v29 brings bigger, better Copilot makes it more accessible and useful.
- Streamline expense management for employees who don’t submit expenses often.
- Create new AI agents to automate and improve daily tasks.
- Enjoy better Shopify integration for B2B ecommerce growth.
- Start with one narrow task your team does the same way every week.
- Prove it works.
- Then expand.
You open Copilot in Business Central, get a narrow side panel, and end up back on the list page anyway. Meanwhile, the sales rep who travels twice a year still needs a BC license just to submit receipts, and your Shopify B2B refunds need manual cleanup before they post. Business Central version 29 takes a run at all three of these challenges.
Copilot Becomes Something You Talk To
The biggest visible change in Business Central version 29 is a more unified Copilot experience. You still open Copilot from the same spot, but it now opens a much larger pane. You can resize it to fit the way you work.
That bigger pane matters. It gives Copilot room to show statistics and answers, not just short help tips. The goal is a more back-and-forth conversation with the system. You ask about your data, and Copilot answers in context. Microsoft is also extending the areas of Business Central that Copilot reaches.
For most teams, this is where AI use actually starts. Salesforce found that 75% of small and midsize businesses are at least experimenting with AI. A Copilot pane that's easier to use is a low-risk way for your people to build that habit inside the system they already work in.
The Expense Agent: Expense Reports Without Another User License
The expense agent first showed up in version 28. Microsoft is improving it in version 29, but it is still in preview. It is not generally available yet, though you can turn it on in a sandbox and start testing.
Here's how it works. An administrator sets up an email address for the agent. Employees take a photo of a receipt or upload a document from their phone and email it in. The agent runs it through OCR, categorizes the expenses, itemizes and groups them, and loads the result into Business Central as an expense report. From there, your AP team reviews it, posts the expenses and reimburses the employee.
The licensing angle is what stands out. The people sending in expenses don't need a Business Central license. You pay for the agent's usage through consumption instead. If someone only travels twice a year, there's no reason to have them hold a BC license all year just to file receipts.
It's a good fit if you need a lightweight expense manager, not a full expense platform. It isn't all the way there yet. Test it now so you know if it’s a fit for your process.
Building Your Own Agents
Version 29 also lets you build new agents. Again, this feature is in preview.
These agents are meant for small, repeatable tasks and workflows inside Business Central.
The pattern we see with any new automation is simple:
Agents that try to do too much on day-one tend to create more cleanup than they save.
Shopify Integration Catches Up With B2B
If you sell through Shopify Plus to B2B customers, you've probably felt the gaps. Information didn't always move cleanly between Shopify and Business Central, and your team filled in the difference by hand.
Version 29 updates the Shopify connector to handle that flow better. That includes taxes, order changes, exchanges and refunds. These are the transactions that used to break the sync and land on someone's desk to fix.
This matters more every year. Forrester predicted that more than half of large B2B purchases would run through digital self-serve channels like vendor websites and marketplaces in 2025. When your storefront and your ERP disagree, you end up reconciling two versions of the truth. A tighter integration means fewer of those days.
If you already use the Shopify integration, test it carefully in your sandbox before moving to production. The new features are worth it, but they change how data moves between the two systems.
Preview Means Test It, Not Trust It Yet
Microsoft puts features in preview so customers can try them and tell Microsoft what they need. That's your chance to shape where the expense agent and custom agents go next.
It's also a reason to be careful. Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 because of rising costs and unclear business value. The fix isn't to wait. It's to test in a sandbox, measure the time saved on a real task and decide based on what you see.
Making Version 29 Work for You
Western Computer has spent nearly 40 years and more than 1,750 implementations helping businesses decide which new features are ready for their operations and which ones need more time. Version 29 has a lot to like, especially if you go in with a clear test plan.
To see these features in action, watch the full Business Central version 29 launch event on-demand
