What's New: Working with Instructions for Agents in Business Central

Overview

The video explains how to write instructions for agents in Business Central. The guidance is “less is more”: outline only the most important steps, use role-based prompting to set context, and keep the process description in the instructions rather than repeating it in each task. Instructions are part of a larger platform prompt and take priority over task messages.

A demo Accounts Receivable agent processes a sales return complaint about damaged items. The platform sends PDFs and images to Azure Document Intelligence, which extracts text only. The agent fills a credit memo, the user reviews it and continues the task, and the agent composes an email. The video also covers timeline substeps, task chaining, user intervention and review tools, the response tool, agent memory, page-specific instructions, instruction history and bulk download.

Key points

• Keep instructions short: outline the most important steps, not every step. If adding instructions lowers accuracy, consider splitting the agent into several agents. Tasks that are different enough can share one agent.
• Instructions take much higher priority than task messages, so put the process description in the instructions and do not repeat it in tasks. Use task messages for what varies between tasks.
• Document Intelligence extracts text from PDFs and images only. It does no machine vision, so it cannot identify visual patterns on a photo.
• The agent review experience shows agent-filled fields with explanations and lets the user submit feedback. In the demo, guidelines tell the agent not to post draft credit memos before user review.
• In the current platform, the drafted email cannot be sent automatically. Use the SDK to actually send it.
• Agent history is kept automatically, but page state is not. Tell the agent which fields to memorize; they are stored as key-value pairs, viewable on the troubleshooting page.
• Page-specific instructions use parenthesis notation with the page ID and apply only when the agent opens that page. Instruction edit history allows reverting, and several instructions can be downloaded as a zip.

Features

A status with a roadmap link comes from the Microsoft 365 roadmap feature this part of the video covers (matched by Haiku; links Opus dropped are not used); other statuses need a status word in the video itself.

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• other “accounts receivable administrator” at 3:21
• other “sales order agent” at 4:58
• other “Paris guest chair” at 11:52
• other “Berlin guest chair” at 11:52
• page “troubleshooting page” at 21:22

Not found in BC28-30: page “troubleshooting page”.

Quotes

• 1:13 “Today because the models became much better. The rule that we are using is that less is more.”
• 1:24 “You do not need to outline every specific step that the agent needs to do. It is sufficient to outline the most important steps”
• 1:55 “instructions are a part of the bigger prompt so everything that you write the platform is going to take it and”
• 4:11 “based prompting it helps setting the context for the agent because if it knows who it is and which task it is supposed”
• 7:44 “Agent is going to be able to read this document because platform is able to send PDFs and images to Azure document intelligence and”
• 8:39 “The platform is only extracting text. It is not able to do the machine vision. So it will know that there is a scratch”
• 13:24 “currently within the current platform it is not possible that this happens automatically. You would need to use the SDK if you want to”
• 14:39 “instructions are always going to win over tasks because platform is giving a much higher priority to the instructions compared to the tasks”
• 14:53 “you should outline the process description in the instructions because there is no need and it’s not a good practice that you repeat a”
• 17:23 “there is no silver bullet or a rule that fits all. Try it out. see what works and if adding the additional instructions is”
• 20:15 “when it uses the response tool the task is going to stop until the new message arrives”
• 21:04 “If you would like to store the state of the page then you need to instruct it specifically which fields and which data it”
• 22:25 “If you add the parenthesis like this and you specify page ID, then these page specific instructions will be available to the agent only”
• 23:30 “instructions are necessary and keep in mind they are part of a larger prompt. So platform is going to protect you from injection attacks”
• 23:47 “Try to write as little as possible of instructions to get the task executed with high accuracy”

Disclaimers in the video

• 13:24 not-in-this-release: currently within the current platform it is not possible that this happens automatically. You would need to use the SDK if you want to actually send the email

Presenters (as heard): Nicolola Kukria.