Key takeaways_

• New AI, reporting and purchasing tools can help teams spend less time on everyday admin.
• Some capabilities are available now; others, including Copilot chat and Expense Agent enhancements, remain in preview.
• Focus your rollout on business priorities, with people in control and older integrations reviewed.

An expense claim that starts with a receipt rather than a spreadsheet. A question about your business answered without hunting through menus. Reports that are easier to produce and share. These are the everyday improvements that make a release worth paying attention to.

Business Central 2026 release wave 2 began in October, bringing new and updated capabilities across AI, finance, reporting and operations. The opportunity is not simply to install an update, but to find the changes that help your people spend less time on administration and more time on the work that matters.

This wave combines improvements available now with preview capabilities that show where Business Central is heading. We have included brief availability notes so you can see both the immediate opportunities and the developing picture.

See Microsoft’s release overview for the feature-by-feature availability position.

Expense Agent: less chasing, less typing_

Expense claims are a small task that can create a surprising amount of work. Employees collect receipts, finance teams check details and someone has to turn it all into a record. Expense Agent brings those steps closer together inside Business Central.

Employees can capture receipts through the web or mobile app, or send them to an expense mailbox. The agent extracts details such as the merchant, date and amount, suggests categories and prepares expenses for review. People check the results and submit their reports for approval. The benefit is a simpler journey for employees and less re-keying for finance.

What this wave adds, currently in public preview:

• More help with approvals. AI-assisted policy evaluation can help reviewers identify claims that need a closer look, alongside the rules your business configures.
• More flexible mileage. Date ranges and vehicle types give you more ways to reflect your company’s mileage arrangements.
• VAT and duplicate checks. Preview enhancements add VAT calculation and reporting from expense reports, alongside improved duplicate prevention — helping finance bring more of the expense process together.
• Wider reach. Additional countries and languages, and controls around assigned projects in the web app, broaden the scenarios worth exploring.

Expense Agent brings receipt capture, policy checks and approvals into a more connected experience. Employees spend less time preparing claims, while finance has a clearer view of the information behind them. The experience is currently a production-ready preview.

Explore Microsoft’s Expense Agent guide.

Copilot chat: turn business information into insight_

The new Microsoft Copilot experience brings Business Central data into a familiar AI conversation. Finding a record is only the starting point: you can ask follow-up questions, compare information and draw out patterns without navigating through a series of pages.

Ask which customers received the most discounts, which open orders need attention or which items have seen little recent sales activity. Then build on the answer: ask for a comparison, a concise management summary or a report-style explanation of the findings. These are illustrative ways to turn information surfaced from Business Central into something your team can use, rather than simply receiving a list of records.

The experience also brings the wider Copilot toolkit into the conversation, including model choice and working with files where available in your Copilot setup. Saved conversations let you return to information already surfaced and develop the discussion further. Fresh access to Business Central context and records currently starts from Copilot within Business Central.Access to wider work information through Work IQ requires a Microsoft Copilot licence.

The result is a shorter path from a business question to an explanation you can share. This chat experience is currently in preview and has read-only access to Business Central. It can retrieve, analyse and explain data, but cannot create, edit or delete ERP records. It can help draft a report from the findings, which is different from changing a saved Business Central report or transaction. Action-taking through configured agents is a separate capability, covered below.

Explore working with Business Central data in Copilot.

Payables Agent: a better fit for real-world purchasing_

Purchase invoices rarely arrive in a perfectly tidy stream. The practical value of automation is how well it helps your team handle the detail, not simply how quickly it reads a document.

Improved purchase order matching in Payables Agent is generally available in this release wave. For accounts payable teams, it offers a more connected way to work with invoice drafts and orders, with less manual matching and more time for the exceptions that need their expertise.

The wave also makes working with agents more visible: a dedicated task pane brings agent tasks together, generated content can be reviewed directly on pages and agent permissions are easier to manage. These generally available improvements help people see what needs attention and stay in control as automation becomes part of daily work.

MCP Server: connecting AI agents to the heart of your business_

This is where the AI-ERP story becomes bigger than a chat window. Model Context Protocol, or MCP, gives AI applications a standard way to connect to Business Central data and business functions. Agents built with Copilot Studio or other compatible AI tools can use that connection to bring ERP information into a wider workflow.

The new data query tools extend what those agents can investigate. They can find relevant tables, understand how records relate and build and run read-only queries for questions not covered by an existing API. That opens up more flexible, on-demand analysis rather than requiring every question to have its own report or prebuilt integration.

For a frontier firm — a business building its operating model around people working with AI agents — the opportunity is to connect insight with everyday work. Illustrative scenarios include:

• A clearer picture of customer demand. An agent could bring customers, orders and order lines together to summarise buying patterns and help a sales team prioritise its next conversation.
• More useful inventory insight. An agent could combine sales activity with stock information to highlight slow-moving items and prepare an explanation for the purchasing team.
• Connected business workflows. A custom agent could use permitted APIs to update a record or carry out an approved business action, linking a conversation to a process rather than leaving someone to repeat the information manually.

These are possibilities to design around your business, not ready-made agents included with the release. MCP starts with read-only access; configured API tools can also support creating, modifying or deleting records and executing actions, within the operations and user permissions your administrator allows. The data query tools themselves remain read-only.

The release overview includes the data-query enhancement, while its detailed configuration guidance still labels Data Query Tools as preview. The distinction is between exploring more data and granting an agent permission to act on it. MCP provides the connection; the agent and your process design turn that connection into value.

Learn more about Business Central’s MCP Server and its configuration and capabilities.

Reporting: useful information, with less preparation_

Not every valuable change needs an AI headline. Reporting improvements can make a real difference to the time between having the data and putting it in front of someone who needs it.

• Automate report outputs. Reduce repetitive report preparation and build a more consistent reporting routine.
• Return to useful views. Bookmark list views and analysis tabs so the work you put into finding a useful perspective is easier to reuse.
• Keep business documents consistent. Report themes and the updated Word add-in support a more consistent look across document reports, rather than maintaining every design separately.
• Manage layouts more deliberately. New report-layout lifecycle controls give teams more structure around how layouts are maintained.

These reporting improvements are generally available, giving teams more ways to produce consistent outputs and reuse useful analysis. The value is less time assembling reports and maintaining layouts, and more time understanding what the numbers mean.

Shopify and electronic documents: more connected working_

For businesses selling through Shopify, the release includes generally available improvements to B2B companies, catalogues and pricing, plus more control over sales document creation. Support for order changes, exchanges and refunds helps keep the webshop and the back office aligned. Synchronising tariff numbers and countries of origin also strengthens the information available for cross-border trade.

For your team, that means less duplication between systems and a more connected way to handle returns, order changes and trade-customer pricing. The back office can work from a clearer picture of what is happening in the webshop.

Electronic data interchange, or EDI, document exchange is also arriving in public preview. For businesses whose trading partners use structured electronic documents, it points towards more connected document flows, with support shaped by the formats and services involved.

Operations and the tools behind the scenes_

Manufacturing and distribution teams have their own reasons to explore the wave. Improvements around subcontracting, quality tests and inspections, and warehouse-enabled direct transfers focus on the work between purchasing, production and moving stock.

The value comes from the hand-offs between teams: purchasing knows what production needs, inspections sit closer to the workflow, and warehouse teams have more ways to manage stock movements. These are the kinds of improvements that can make a familiar process work more smoothly, depending on your configuration.

Technical teams also gain stronger tools for supporting the business. Page Scripting is generally available, alongside improvements to automated testing, debugging and performance analysis. These behind-the-scenes changes give partners and developers more ways to maintain reliable processes and build on Business Central as your needs evolve.

What is here, what is developing and what to watch_

The release overview is your starting point for what Microsoft has delivered. The AI at Work roadmap is where to watch the developing picture. New Business Central capabilities are now disclosed there, while existing Release Plans remain available for historical reference. Business Central still follows a six-month release-wave cycle, supported by monthly updates.

• Available to explore now. Purchase order matching improvements, agent review and task-management tools, reporting enhancements and the Shopify changes are listed as generally available in the release overview.
• A view of what is developing. Copilot chat, Expense Agent enhancements and EDI exchange are in preview, giving a clearer picture of the next generation of connected working.
• Follow the next opportunities. The Business Central roadmap filter brings relevant announcements together as the platform evolves. Roadmap dates are estimates and can change.

For smaller teams, keeping up with every announcement can be a job in itself. A regular release review helps turn the roadmap into a short list of opportunities for your business, rather than another long list to read.

One practical point to plan for: older SOAP connections_

Alongside the new functionality, review any older integrations that use SOAP — a method of exchanging data between systems. Microsoft has deprecated this approach and recommends moving towards purpose-built APIs, the interfaces designed for system-to-system connections.

The timing needs care. Microsoft’s newer feature-key guidance states that support for exposing Microsoft UI pages as SOAP services will be removed in 2027 release wave 1, rather than this release wave. Older documentation and some partner articles still refer to removal in 2026 release wave 2. Check the current guidance and the behaviour of your own environment rather than assuming that every SOAP connection has already stopped working.

Ask your partner to identify the endpoints you use, agree a supported replacement and test it before the relevant update. A standard Business Central API is the preferred starting point; where it does not cover the requirement, a custom API or another supported design may be needed. SOAP services based on codeunits or extension pages need their own assessment.

See Microsoft’s updated SOAP feature-key guidance. This is a manageable planning task, not the headline of the release.

Make the new capabilities work for your business_

The most useful starting point is the work your people would like to make easier. Choose the outcomes that matter to your business and build adoption around them.

1. Give employees time back. Bring receipt capture and expense preparation closer together, so people spend less effort on claims.
2. Turn questions into insight. Use Copilot to explore Business Central information and shape the findings into explanations your team can use.
3. Connect AI to real business work. Use MCP as the foundation for custom agents that bring ERP data and permitted actions into wider workflows.
4. Make reporting more repeatable. Reuse useful views, automate outputs and keep document designs consistent.
5. Build on the platform you have. Work with your partner to connect these opportunities to your existing processes, including a supported path for older SOAP integrations.

The summary_

Business Central 2026 release wave 2 offers plenty to be positive about: easier expense handling, a more natural way to find information, better support for invoice processing and reporting tools that are easier to reuse. The bigger opportunity is to make daily work simpler, with people still in control.

This is a step towards an ERP that does more than hold information: it helps people understand it and gives connected agents a foundation for doing useful work. Bring the new capabilities into the processes that matter to your team, and make more of the platform you already have.

Want to see what 2026 release wave 2 could do for your team? Speak to Infinity Group about a practical release review: explore the opportunities, choose your priorities and plan a confident rollout.