What's New: Item Substitution with Copilot (2024 release wave 2)

Overview

The video explains how Copilot extends the existing item substitution function, which lets users define alternative items when a primary item is out of stock. Copilot now proposes substitute candidates from the primary item’s description. An LLM extracts keywords, a search runs over a consolidated table, and embeddings re-rank the results with confidence scores.

A live demo shows the Suggest with Copilot action on the item substitutions page, the three search modes, and prompt adjustment such as adding a color. The session also covers enabling the feature on the Copilot and AI capabilities page, limitations, related features such as sales line suggestion, and Copilot availability and responsible AI standards.

Key points

• The Suggest with Copilot action on the item substitutions page generates substitute item candidates with confidence scores.
• The feature is enabled with the ‘create product information’ toggle on the Copilot and AI capabilities page. The name is a placeholder for a larger feature set, part of which was postponed to a later release after responsible AI verification.
• Search modes: Balance (default, at least one main search term required), Permissive (any search term is enough), Precise (all search terms required).
• Users can edit the prompt to narrow results, for example by adding a color.
• Results depend on a good item description. The consolidated search table is updated periodically, so delays are possible.
• Tested in English only. It should work in other languages but was not tested.
• Copilot features are cloud only, not available on-premise. They come at no extra cost with an existing Business Central license.

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.

• page 5720 “Item Substitutions” at 5:41
• page “Copilot and AI capabilities” at 4:25

Not found in BC28-30: page “Copilot and AI capabilities”.

Quotes

• 1:04 “Existing item substitution functionality is designed for users to be able to define alternative item in case when the primary item is out of”
• 3:02 “we are committed to provide results which should be reliable and that’s why we are using LLM to do re-ranking of the results”
• 4:55 “due to very strict and diligent process of verifying feature against the against the reliable AI standards, we had to postpone one one piece”
• 9:22 “you need to have quite good description of the item so it has a meaning and yeah”
• 11:20 “All these Copilot features are coming with no cost with existing Business Central license”
• 11:30 “copilot features are only available in our cloud version of business central while on premise on prem versions are unfortunately without”
• 12:08 “for item substitution with Copilot, we spent significantly more time going through different reviews and testing than for development itself”

Disclaimers in the video

• 4:39 other: This sentence looks like a bug, but it’s actually not. The initial idea was to deliver more functionalities around item substitution
• 4:55 coming-later: due to very strict and diligent process of verifying feature against reliable AI standards, we had to postpone one piece of this functionality for the future
• 9:39 other: we tested it in English only. It should work on all other languages, but just to mention that we did testing only in English
• 11:30 other: Copilot features are only available in our cloud version of Business Central, while on-premise on-prem versions are unfortunately without Copilot functionalities

Presenters (as heard): Predrag Maricic, Volodymyr Synchuk.