Microsoft’s 2026 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Business Central started reaching production environments on 1 April 2026, and by early May the update that carries the headline change, Update 28.0, was rolling out to customer tenants. The headline change is this: Business Central now ships with AI agents that do not just suggest a next step. They read an inbox, interpret a document, match it against your data, and prepare a finished transaction for someone to approve.
For a CFO or Head of Finance, that is a different kind of decision to the ones Copilot has asked of you so far. Turning on a suggestion feature is low risk. Turning on something that reads a supplier’s email, matches it to a purchase order, and prepares the invoice for posting is a control decision, not a productivity setting.
This is not a hypothetical. It is shipping now, inside a product most South African mid-market businesses already licence.
The short version is this
Business Central’s Payables Agent and Sales Order Agent are generally available today, working end to end inside your existing tenant if you are on Business Central online. The Expense Agent itself is in public preview, and approval-process support for it is scheduled to reach public preview only in September 2026, with no general-availability date yet confirmed by Microsoft. None of them post a transaction without a human checkpoint, but the checkpoint only works if someone is actually reading what they approve. The task in front of finance leaders right now is not whether to allow agents. It is deciding, in writing, which categories of work an agent may prepare and which must still be decided by a person, not just rubber-stamped by one.
What changed, and why a CFO should care
For years, the practical ceiling on Business Central’s automation was the interface. Copilot could suggest a bank reconciliation match or draft a sales line, but a person still opened the record, typed the detail and decided what happened next. That ceiling has moved.
The Payables Agent now reads incoming vendor invoices from a monitored inbox, extracts the line-item detail, matches it to the correct vendor and general ledger account, and prepares the purchase invoice for approval, with a human only expected to step in for exceptions. It is available in all countries and regions, though document validation is currently English-only. The Sales Order Agent does the equivalent job on the revenue side: it reads a customer’s email, matches the items requested against your catalogue, and drafts the sales order, and from July 2026 a single company can run multiple Sales Order Agents at once with sharper item matching.
The Expense Agent is a step behind on the maturity curve. It entered public preview on 8 May 2026, starting in the United States and English only, with mobile capture following in July. Approval-process support for the Expense Agent is scheduled to reach public preview only in September 2026, and Microsoft has not yet published a general-availability date for it. If a rollout plan assumes expense approvals will be agent-ready in production this wave, that assumption is ahead of what Microsoft has actually committed to. Worth flagging plainly: Microsoft’s own release-plan pages carry a standing caveat that delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not ship as described, so confirm any date on this list against the current release plan before you build a calendar around it.
None of this requires a new licence. Copilot and Business Central’s built-in agents are included with an online Business Central subscription, at no additional cost. They are not available on-premises or through a partner-hosted deployment, so the first real filter on this whole conversation is simply whether your environment is Business Central online.
Assistive Copilot and agent-prepared work are not the same governance question
It helps to separate two things that get lumped together under “AI in Business Central.”
Assistive Copilot suggests, and a person decides from a blank slate. Bank reconciliation matching, sales line suggestions and inventory forecasts fall here. The person is still the author. The AI shortens the search for an answer, but every keystroke that commits a transaction is still theirs.
Agent-prepared work is different in kind, not just in speed. An agent runs in the background, completes a multi-step task without anyone watching it happen, and hands over a finished document with a request to approve it. The person is no longer the author. They are the checkpoint. Business Central’s own release notes call this out directly, describing agents as helping with document interpretation, categorisation and approval workflows “while maintaining control and compliance.”
That distinction matters because a checkpoint is only a control if the person staffing it is actually reading the document, not clicking approve because the system has never been wrong before. Business Central gives you the mechanics to support a real checkpoint: a dedicated task pane that shows everything every agent is currently doing, a page-level review of agent-generated content before it posts, and a control to stop all active tasks for a given agent immediately, all generally available from 1 April 2026. Whether that mechanism becomes a genuine control or a formality nobody reads is a decision your finance team makes, not one Microsoft makes for you.
A release-readiness checklist for finance leaders
Work through these on a Monday morning, in order. Each step ties to a specific Business Central capability, not a theory.
- Confirm you are on Business Central online. Agents do not run on-premises or in a partner-hosted deployment. If you are not sure which you have, that is the first question to answer, before any of the rest of this applies.
- Check your update version. Update 28.0 began rolling out to customer environments on 8 May 2026 and is what carries the Payables Agent, Sales Order Agent and Agent Designer as generally available. Administrators can schedule the update within a defined window, so confirm where your tenant sits.
- Open the agent task pane before you switch anything else on. See what, if anything, is already running in your environment, and get your finance team comfortable reading it.
- Map your existing approval matrix against agent-prepared documents specifically. Decide whether the same person who approves a manually captured invoice should approve an agent-prepared one, or whether agent-prepared work needs a different, more senior sign-off.
- Set a rand-value or vendor-risk threshold above which an agent-prepared invoice requires a second approval, regardless of what the agent recommends. Routine, low-value, repeat-vendor transactions are the reasonable candidates for a lighter touch. New vendors, first-time transaction types and anything above your materiality threshold are not.
- Test the stop-all-tasks control before go-live, so your team has actually used it once, under no pressure, before the day they might need it under pressure.
- Turn on and actually use the page-level review of agent-generated content. A checkpoint nobody reads is not a checkpoint.
- Check your vendor master data and GL mapping tables are clean. An agent matching against duplicate vendors or stale account mappings will prepare confident, wrong invoices just as fast as it prepares correct ones.
- Write down, explicitly, which categories of finance work stay fully human-decided regardless of agent capability. Related-party transactions, anything touching VAT or tax treatment, write-offs above a set value and first-time counterparties are reasonable starting candidates.
- Put this list on the same six-month cycle Microsoft uses for release waves. What you decide to keep human-controlled in wave 1 should be revisited when wave 2 ships new capability.
One honest caveat belongs here. None of this checklist makes your finance function compliant or safe on its own. The controls exist in the product. Whether they hold depends entirely on whether your policies, your approval thresholds and your people’s habits are updated to match what the product can now do.
How Braintree helps
We run this as a structured Business Central Agent Readiness Review, not a workshop that ends in a slide deck. We start by confirming what is actually live in your tenant today, which agents are enabled, and how your current approval workflow behaves when an agent, rather than a person, prepares the document.
From there we work through your approval matrix with your finance lead, setting the specific thresholds and exception categories that should stay human-decided, and we test the controls, the task pane, the stop function, the page-level review, with your team before any agent touches a live transaction.
You come out of it with a short, specific answer to the question this article opens with: which of your finance tasks are safe to let an agent prepare, which need a threshold before they can, and which stay with a person no matter how good the agent gets.
Frequently asked questions
Does Business Central’s Payables Agent post invoices without approval? No. It prepares the invoice by reading and matching the document, then routes it into your approval workflow for a person to review before posting.
Do I need a new licence for Business Central’s AI agents? No. Copilot and the built-in agents are included with a Business Central online subscription at no extra cost.
Can I use these agents on an on-premises Business Central deployment? No. Copilot and agents are available only to Business Central online customers.
When did Business Central’s 2026 release wave 1 become generally available? Production deployment began on 1 April 2026, with features rolling out in phases through September 2026.
Talk to us
Book a Business Central Agent Readiness Review with Braintree, and we will tell you where you stand today, what to fix first, and what it costs, before a single finance task moves from a person to an agent.
Specialists in Business Applications, Modern Workplace and Azure. Let’s grow.
Sources: Microsoft, “Dynamics 365 2026 release wave 1 plan”; Microsoft Learn, “Overview of Dynamics 365 Business Central 2026 release wave 1”; Microsoft Learn, “What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central”.
