Your ERP Has Been Holding Out on You
A CFO at a mid-sized SA manufacturer asked us recently: “We spent millions on Dynamics. Why are we still building reports manually?”
Fair question. The answer wasn’t that the technology couldn’t do it. The answer was that nobody had shown them what was already switched on in their licence.
This is more common than anyone in the Microsoft partner ecosystem wants to admit. Dynamics 365 — both the enterprise suite and Business Central — has been shipping AI features for over a year. Copilot capabilities are live. Automated forecasting works. Intelligent workflows exist. Most customers are running a Ferrari in first gear.
What’s already live in Dynamics 365 (and you’re probably not using)
Copilot in Business Central can draft bank reconciliation suggestions, generate marketing copy for products based on item attributes, and produce cash flow forecasts. These aren’t preview features sitting behind a flag. They’re GA. If you’re on Business Central online, they’re in your environment right now.
AI-powered demand forecasting uses your historical sales data to predict future demand by product, location, and time period. If your supply chain team is still forecasting in Excel, they’re doing manually what the system can do automatically. The catch: it needs at least 12 months of clean transactional data to be useful. More on that shortly.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales summarises email threads, generates meeting preparation briefs, and drafts follow-up emails based on CRM context. Your reps can ask Copilot to “catch me up on this opportunity” and get a summary of every interaction, email, meeting note, and activity in seconds. For a sales team managing 50+ active opportunities, that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s a time machine.
Copilot in Customer Service generates case summaries, suggests knowledge base articles to agents in real time, and analyses customer sentiment during interactions. If your service team handles volume, the reduction in average handle time is measurable from week one.
Intelligent order promising in Supply Chain Management checks available inventory, production capacity, and lead times across multiple sites to give customers accurate delivery dates. If your order desk is still calling the warehouse to check stock, this feature alone justifies a conversation about what you’re missing.
Why most organisations aren’t using any of this
Three reasons. First, nobody told them. The features ship as part of platform updates that most users don’t read. They’re in release notes that run to 200 pages and are written for consultants, not CFOs. If your implementation partner didn’t proactively walk you through the new capabilities, you’d never know they existed.
Second, some features need configuration. AI-powered demand forecasting doesn’t just switch on. It needs historical data, configured time series parameters, and someone to validate the initial outputs before the business trusts them. Copilot in Sales needs your email and calendar connected properly. These aren’t hard setups, but they’re not zero-effort either.
Third — and this is the one Craig Fidler brings up every time — the data isn’t ready. Copilot can generate a brilliant bank reconciliation suggestion, but only if your bank feed import is running correctly and your chart of accounts is clean. Demand forecasting can predict next quarter’s orders, but only if last year’s transaction history wasn’t corrupted by a botched data migration. The AI features are only as good as the data underneath them.
The Business Central mid-market reality
There’s a perception in the South African mid-market that AI features are enterprise-only. That they’re for the banks and the retailers and the big four consultancies, not for a distribution company in Gauteng with 85 users.
That perception is wrong. Avril Howes has worked with mid-market Business Central customers for years, and the AI features shipping in 2025 and 2026 are specifically designed for this segment. The Copilot capabilities in Business Central don’t require a separate AI licence. They’re included. The automated workflows don’t need a team of developers. They’re configuration, not code.
The mid-market gap isn’t technology. It’s awareness. The features exist. The licences are paid for. The only missing piece is someone showing the finance team, the ops manager, and the service desk what the buttons actually do.
What to do next
Step one is embarrassingly simple: ask your partner (that’s us) which AI features are live in your current Dynamics 365 or Business Central licence. Not which ones you could buy. Which ones you already own.
Step two: pick the one that solves a real problem. Not the flashiest feature. The one where your team currently spends hours doing something the system can do in seconds. Bank reconciliation. Sales opportunity summaries. Demand forecasting. Customer sentiment analysis. Pick one, pilot it, measure it.
Step three: if the data isn’t ready, fix the data. Not next quarter. Now. Because Microsoft is shipping new AI capabilities every month, and every one of them depends on the same foundation: clean, governed, trustworthy data.
Braintree runs AI readiness workshops for Dynamics 365 and Business Central customers across South Africa. We’ll show you what’s in your licence, what’s switched on, what’s not, and what it would take to light up the features you’re already paying for.
Your ERP has been holding out on you. It’s time to have that conversation.
