As of April 2026, Microsoft production deployment for wave one for Dynamics Business Central started within production environments and made available to online customers while existing tenants were notified so administrators could schedule the update by end August 31 2026.[1] The release has expanded how users work with AI agents in Business Central, with Microsoft describing its Payables Agent as capable of automating accounts payable from end to end. The agent is now capable of reading inboxes, opening documents, matching findings against data and providing completed transactions that just need human approval.
In addition to Payables Agent, the system includes Sales Order Agent that can, among other things, create a sales quote, manage clarification e-mails and convert an approved quote into a sales order; and Expense Agent, expected for release in late 2026, that helps employees capture receipts, submit expense reports and more.
For the CFO or head of finance, it is an adjustment from hands-on to hands-in-the-loop, and it changes risk. Enabling an AI suggestion within the system is a low-risk productivity gain that relies on human judgment to assess whether or not the AI has understood the data or its mandate correctly, but enabling an agent capable of reading supplier invoices, matching vendors and accounts or preparing invoices for approval is a financial control decision.
It introduces a new question to the business. Should the finance function permit AI-enabled workflows capable of interpreting documents that could create financial obligations? Should it be allowed to associate that document with a supplier or potentially a PO? Microsoft describes the intended safeguard as human oversight because the Payables Agent prepares invoices for approval rather than independently authorising payment, but the change requires a rethink of oversight, approaches and the use of AI. Should finance leaders allow agents into the business, and how they should decide which categories of work an agent can prepare and which must still be decided by a person?
Until these changes to Business Central, the practical ceiling on its capabilities was the interface. Microsoft Copilot could suggest a bank reconciliation, for example, but a person still opened the record and decided on next steps. These agents have moved the ceiling, and none of their increasingly impressive array of capabilities requires that you invest in a new licence.
The change introduces a very clear line between how deeply an AI agent is integrated within the business and how companies benefit from it. Most finance leaders are used to the assistive support of Copilot that keeps the human as the author, but agent-prepared work runs in the background, completing multi-step tasks without supervision. This change in authorship matters because human oversight becomes significantly more important, and you need to decide whether this new mechanism becomes a genuine form of control or a formality.
There are several steps finance leaders can take to put these controls in place and mitigate risk before deepening your relationship with these agents.
- Confirm you are on Business Central online. Agents do not run on-premises or in a partner-hosted deployment. If your business is online, you have access to Copilot and Business Central’s built-in agents at no extra cost.
- Check your updated version. Update 28.0 began rolling out to customer environments on 8 May 2026 and is what carries the Payables Agent, Sales Order Agent and Agent Designer as generally available. Administrators can schedule the update within a defined window, so confirm where your tenant sits.
- Open the agent task pane before you switch anything else on. See what, if anything, is already running in your environment, and get your finance team comfortable reading it.
- Map your existing approval matrix against agent-prepared documents specifically. Decide whether the same person who approves a manually captured invoice should approve an agent-prepared one, or whether agent-prepared work needs a different, more senior sign-off.
- Set a rand-value or vendor-risk threshold above which an agent-prepared invoice requires a second approval, regardless of what the agent recommends. Routine, low-value, repeat-vendor transactions are the reasonable candidates for a lighter touch. New vendors, first-time transaction types and anything above your materiality threshold are not.
- Test the stop-all-tasks control before go-live, so your team has actually used it once, under no pressure, before the day they might need it under pressure.
- Turn on and actually use the page-level review of agent-generated content. A checkpoint nobody reads is not a checkpoint, it’s a risk.
- Check your vendor master data and GL mapping tables are clean. An agent matching duplicate vendors or stale account mappings will prepare confident, wrong invoices just as fast as it prepares correct ones.
- Write down, explicitly, which categories of finance work stay fully human-decided regardless of agent capability. Related-party transactions, anything touching VAT or tax treatment, write-offs above a set value and first-time counterparties are reasonable starting candidates.
- Put this list on the same six-month cycle Microsoft uses for release waves. What you decide to keep human-controlled in wave one should be revisited when wave two ships new capability.
This checklist doesn’t make your finance function compliant or secure; the controls exist within the product, and your policies or approval thresholds are the key to determining what the product can do.
Braintree supports your journey through Business Central with a structured Agent Readiness Review that confirms what you have live in your tenant, which agents are enabled and the behaviour of your current workflows when an agent has prepared the document. The company works through your approval matrix with your finance lead to set specific thresholds and exception categories that should remain human-in-the-loop, and it tests the controls, the task pane, the stop function and the page-level review with your teams before agents touch any live transactions.
The result is a confident and secure awareness of how Business Central agents operate within your business and how deeply it has been integrated within your systems. The goal is to lean into modern capabilities without putting your systems or your reputation at risk, and this is where Braintree offers the insight you need to make the right choices for your business. Book a Business Central scoping call today.
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