Introducing: AI Consumption Billing for Business Central (2025 release wave 1)

Overview

The video explains how AI features in Business Central are billed. Microsoft Copilot Studio messages act as a common currency across Microsoft products. At the time of the video, the sales order agent is the only capability built for this billing. Every tenant gets a limited preview evaluation capacity to set up and try the agent.

The demo covers the Copilot and Agents capabilities page, with its notifications about AI activation and capacity use. It then covers the billing meters, linking to a Power Platform environment, billing policies, prepaid packs, pay-as-you-go, and allocating capacity to individual environments.

Key points

• Usage is measured in Microsoft Copilot Studio messages using two common meters: generative answers (each email message the sales order agent handles or generates) and autonomous actions (operations on sales quotes and sales orders).
• Only the sales order agent is currently billed under AI consumption billing.
• Every Business Central tenant gets a limited preview evaluation capacity to set up and try the sales order agent. When it runs out, notifications appear and the agent stops processing tasks until billing is set up.
• Billing policies require linking the Business Central environment to a Power Platform environment in the Business Central admin center. In the demo, the linked environment was of the same type and in the same geography. An existing Power Platform billing policy is inherited automatically.
• Pay-as-you-go plans are created in the Power Platform admin center against an Azure subscription, with Copilot Studio enabled as a product. Messages consumed are billed after the month ends.
• Prepaid message packs are a monthly subscription bought from a partner or in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The Copilot Studio trial gave 25,000 messages. The presenters suggest prepaid if you always consume 25,000 or more messages, and pay-as-you-go for variable consumption.
• The two options combine: prepaid capacity is consumed first, and pay-as-you-go covers anything beyond it.

Features

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 “KPIs dashboard” at 0:47
• page “Copilot and Agents capabilities” at 1:36
• page “Copilot pane” at 2:48

Not found in BC28-30: page “Copilot and Agents capabilities”, page “Copilot pane”.

Quotes

• 0:30 “the sales order agent is providing a ton of value to the sales team working with the quotes and the orders”
• 2:12 “at this point of time the sales order agent is the only capability uh which is being u built for”
• 3:32 “Microsoft products and services will use a common currency called the Microsoft Copilot Studio message to measure the usage of AI features and to”
• 4:13 “there are the prepaid copilot studio message packs which are monthly subscription containing x number of messages uh renewable every month. And secondly, there’s”
• 5:49 “we’re going to use a generative answer for the for any message that the agent generates an autonomous action for the operation on sales”
• 7:33 “every tenant in business central environment comes with a very limited preview evaluation capacity that would allow you to set up the sales order”
• 7:59 “if you have any on your tenant, this is what the agent would consume from first.”
• 9:07 “to use billing policies on a business central environment is required that you link it to a power platform environment so that knows which”
• 15:39 “if you always consume 25,000 or more messages, uh that this prepaid pack makes sense for you. If you have variable consumption, pay as”

Disclaimers in the video

• 1:58 subject-to-change: by activating AI capabilities, you understand your organization may be built for its use in the future
• 2:12 preview: at this point of time the sales order agent is the only capability uh which is being u built for

Presenters (as heard): Yast, Dmitri.