What's New: Setting Up Copilot in Business Central - Tips for Admins (2024 release wave 2)

Overview

The video explains what administrators need to know to manage Copilot in Business Central. Copilot is included with Business Central online licenses at no additional cost and is ready to use in new sandbox and production environments without complex setup.

It then walks through the Copilot and AI capabilities page, where admins see each feature, its publisher and whether it is generally available or in preview, and can activate or deactivate features per environment. It covers language support, geographic availability, the data movement switch for regions without a local Azure OpenAI Service, feature-level permissions, and the security and privacy position.

Key points

• Copilot is included with Business Central online licenses at no additional cost and works out of the box in new sandbox and production environments, free trials, and upgrades (unless switched off).
• The Copilot and AI capabilities page lets admins see publishers (including third-party extensions), whether each feature is generally available or in preview, and activate or deactivate features per environment.
• New Copilot features are active by default. Deactivating a feature requires a reason, takes effect immediately, and applies to all users in all companies of that environment.
• Features marked as preview are labeled production ready previews, described in the video as safe to use in production.
• Copilot is available in all Business Central languages, but only a verified subset is supported. Each feature defines its own supported languages, and unsupported languages may give lower quality.
• Features not available for an environment’s country localization do not appear in the Copilot and AI capabilities list (for example, chat is absent in the German environment shown).
• In regions without a local Azure OpenAI Service, admins have a switch to allow data movement to another region (for example Sweden or Switzerland). Only the prompt and response are moved, not the database. US, India, Australia and UK environments have no switch because data stays in region.

Features

Quotes

• 0:47 “co-pilot is currently included with your business Central online licenses at no additional cost”
• 0:47 “co-pilot is just ready to use out of the box no complex setup required”
• 1:27 “as soon as you deploy a new Sandbox a new production environment co-pilot is ready to use”
• 2:20 “features in preview as well and these are clearly labeled as production ready previews and what that means is it’s actually safe to use”
• 4:21 “only a subset of those only some of those languages have been rigorously verified and tested by Microsoft those we call the supported languages”
• 6:39 “there isn’t an Azure opening eye service in that same region uh so for co-pilot to operate to function uh it needs to actually”
• 7:39 “it’s only a small amount of data and it’s the prompt and the response that you’re using while you’re interacting with co-pilot”
• 8:39 “co-pilot runs under the user’s same context which means all the data governance controls for security for privacy”
• 8:59 “control that um down to every single feature it’s not every feature that has that permission”
• 9:20 “we don’t use the data from co-pilot to train the AI models to the benefits of others”

Disclaimers in the video

• 2:20 preview: some features in preview as well and these are clearly labeled as production ready previews
• 4:41 subject-to-change: when you do that with an unsupported language um it may not perform as expected and quality may vary

Presenters (as heard): Mike.