Spring 2026 brings a significant new chapter for Dynamics 365 Business Central. The 2026 Release Wave 1 (known internally as BC28) begins rolling out to production environments on 1 April 2026 and covers the full April to September period. For SMEs running Business Central, this is not just another incremental update. It marks a genuine shift in what an ERP system is expected to do.
The clearest way to summarise it: Business Central is becoming an AI-first ERP, and the evidence runs through almost every area of this release.
From Copilot Assistant to Autonomous Agents
In previous waves, AI in Business Central largely meant Copilot helping users draft text, reconcile bank accounts, or surface insights on demand. Wave 1 2026 goes considerably further. Microsoft is now deploying autonomous agents, AI components that do not just assist but actually carry out end-to-end business processes with minimal human involvement.
The Payables Agent is the clearest example. It reads supplier invoices, matches vendors and nominal accounts, and prepares documents for approval, handling routine accounts payable work that would otherwise consume significant manual processing time each week. The human remains in control at the approval stage, but the administrative groundwork before that point is largely handled automatically.
This shift from assistive AI to agentic AI is the defining theme of BC28, and its implications reach well beyond accounts payable.
What's New: Feature by Feature
AI Agents and the Agent Designer
One of the most forward-looking additions in this wave is the Agent Designer, which allows businesses and their implementation partners to prototype and deploy custom AI agents tailored to specific processes. A finance agent might categorise expenditure based on historical patterns. An operations agent might flag supply chain exceptions before they escalate. The Agent Designer opens the door to building domain-specific automation without requiring deep development expertise.
Microsoft has also introduced a dedicated task pane for managing agent activity. Administrators and users can monitor what agents are doing in real time, review their outputs, interact with results, and stop all active tasks for a selected agent if something is not behaving as expected. In a production ERP environment, that kind of governance control is essential before businesses can comfortably trust autonomous processes at scale.
AI-Generated Content Reviewed In-Page
Users can now review content generated by agents directly within Business Central pages, without switching to a separate interface. This reduces friction, speeds up validation, and makes AI-generated output a natural part of the existing workflow rather than something that requires a detour to check.
Copilot for Sustainability Journals
For businesses with ESG reporting obligations, Copilot can now suggest gas emissions data within sustainability journals. Where emission factors are not yet configured in the system, Copilot can help estimate the carbon footprint, reducing manual research and improving consistency across entries. It is a clear indicator that AI is being embedded into compliance workflows, not just productivity features.
Payables Agent: Smarter Document Handling
The Payables Agent also gains the ability to identify emails that have already been processed, surfacing them for review rather than risking duplicate document handling. In high-volume payables environments, this kind of deduplication intelligence has real day-to-day value.
Finance, Supply Chain and Sustainability
Beyond AI, this wave continues to strengthen Business Central's core functional depth across several areas.
In financial management, the focus is on intelligent automation of bookkeeping tasks, with agents learning from historical patterns to handle categorisation and routine approvals. Tax compliance enhancements reflect the evolving international landscape, with particular attention to electronic invoicing mandates and VAT framework updates across regions.
In supply chain management, Microsoft has prioritised quality management and subcontracting workflows, both areas where growing manufacturers and distributors often encounter friction as they scale. The Shopify integration also receives further refinement, with improvements to inventory visibility across locations and variants, price and discount management, and tax reporting.
The sustainability management module sees one of its most substantial expansions to date. New tools allow businesses to capture environmental data through purchase documents, monitor emissions, water usage and waste intensity across companies and facilities, and report against frameworks including CSRD and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Businesses can now purchase carbon credits directly within Business Central and access Power BI dashboards embedded in the Sustainability Role Centre for at-a-glance reporting.
Governance, Administration and Compliance
This release also delivers meaningful improvements for IT administrators managing Business Central environments.
Customer-managed encryption keys give businesses greater control over data protection and privacy compliance. Partner access scoped to specific environments simplifies multi-environment governance for organisations working with more than one implementation partner. Extended update windows provide more flexibility when scheduling upgrades around business-critical periods. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions and AppSource apps reduces the operational overhead of keeping solutions aligned across environments.
IPv6 support is also introduced in this wave, ensuring connectivity, security and future-readiness for network environments already in the process of transitioning from IPv4.
Electronic Documents
The e-documents framework continues to mature, now supporting a broader range of document types beyond e-invoices, including shipments and transfer shipments. This creates a more scalable foundation for digital document exchange across the business, reducing manual data entry and the risk of processing errors. For businesses operating across multiple jurisdictions, the compliance and audit benefits are significant.
What This Means for Advantage Clients
At Advantage, we have been tracking Microsoft's AI trajectory within Business Central closely. Wave 1 2026 represents the point at which the platform transitions from AI experimentation to AI in operation. The agents arriving in this release are not demos. They are production-ready automation tools that, when properly configured, can materially reduce the manual overhead in finance teams, purchasing functions and compliance workflows.
For clients already live on Business Central, most of these features will become available from April 2026 through the standard update cycle. Some capabilities, particularly those involving Copilot and agents, are available exclusively to Business Central Online customers.
If you would like to understand which of these new capabilities could deliver the most value for your business, or if you are considering a move to Business Central ahead of this wave, our team is ready to help you plan and prioritise.
Talk to Advantage About Business Central 2026 Wave 1
Call us on 020 3004 4600, email hello@advantage.co.uk, or request a conversation with our team.
Related Resources
Dynamics 365 Business Central
Faster, Smarter Financial Control
Supply Chain, Stock and Procurement Control
Operational Efficiency and Automation
Advantage Transformation Sprint
