Business Central Sales Order Agent: How It Works, What It Costs, What Changed in 2026

Most B2B companies still take orders the same way: a customer emails “please send 40 of the blue ones, same as last time,” someone in sales reads it, finds the customer, looks up the items, checks stock, builds a quote, sends it, waits, and converts it to an order. The Business Central Sales Order Agent does that sequence for you, and a person approves what goes out.

It has been generally available since November 2025. In July 2026 Microsoft shipped the biggest update so far: multiple agents per company, much better item matching, relevance filtering and larger attachments. This guide covers how the agent works today, what it costs, where it falls short, and what changed in 2026.

How the Sales Order Agent handles an order

The flow Microsoft documents, and what we see in live tenants, goes like this:

1. Customer emails the monitored mailbox. The agent’s background dispatcher picks up the message from the configured folder and opens a task.
2. Relevance check. The agent checks whether the email is actually a sales request (more on this below). Newsletters, supplier offers and discount requests are filtered out.
3. Incoming review (optional). Depending on your settings, a user confirms the incoming message before the agent continues. By default this applies to the first message in a conversation from known senders and to every message from unknown senders.
4. Customer identification. The agent matches the sender’s email address against the E-Mail field on contact cards and then finds the linked customer. It only works with quotes and orders that belong to that customer.
5. Item matching and availability. It finds the requested items, quantities, units of measure, requested delivery date and the customer’s PO number, then checks availability. If you turn on Include capable to promise, it also calculates realistic shipment dates for items that aren’t in stock.
6. Sales quote. It creates the quote in Business Central and drafts a reply with the quote attached as a PDF.
7. Outgoing review. A user reviews and confirms the email. This step is always required.
8. Customer confirms or asks for changes. If the customer replies with changes, the agent finds the existing quote and updates it. If they confirm, the agent converts the quote into a sales order and drafts the confirmation email, which again needs a user’s approval.

Why always a quote first? Sales quotes don’t affect planning, reservations, availability or cash flow forecasts. That makes them a safe place for AI-created data. If you don’t want customers to see quotes, turn off Send quotes for confirmation and keep Make orders from quotes on. The agent then converts the quote internally and the customer only receives the order.

Human control and audit trail

The agent runs under its own user account (for example SALES ORDER AGENT - CRONUS) with its own permission set (SOA - EDIT) and profile. Everything it does shows up as that user, so you get a normal audit trail: who created the quote, who changed which field, what was posted.

You control how much it does on its own:

Outgoing emails to customers always need a person’s approval, and there’s no setting to turn that off. For pricing that the agent can’t handle (special discounts, project pricing), a common pattern is to turn on quote review and turn off sending. The agent does the reading, matching and quote creation, and your salesperson finishes the pricing and sends it.

What you need to get started

• Business Central online. The agent is part of the SaaS product and isn’t available on-premises.
• Copilot Credit billing set up for the environment in the Business Central admin center. The agent consumes Copilot Credits per AI interaction; cost depends on how complex each email is. You do not need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license for it.
• A Microsoft 365 mailbox, either a shared mailbox or a user mailbox. The person activating the agent needs Full Access and Send as rights on it. Exchange can take a few hours to propagate those permissions.
• Permissions in BC. Creating an agent requires the Configure All Agents permission (the AGENT - ADMIN permission set grants it). Users who review tasks need Manage Agent Tasks, which comes with Essentials and Premium licenses.
• Clean contact emails. For security, the agent identifies customers only by the sender’s address on the contact card, never by name. A contact without an email, or with an old one, means manual work on every request.

Activation happens from the Sales Order Agent icon on the role center. If the icon isn’t there, turn the capability on from the Copilot & agent capabilities page, where it’s listed as generally available.

Languages

The agent was English-only in its first release. Microsoft now validates it in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Spanish and Swedish. It will run in other languages, Romanian included, but Microsoft doesn’t guarantee quality there. If your customers write in Romanian or Polish, pilot it on real emails before you trust it. The agent uses the language set on the customer or contact card for outgoing emails.

What changed in 2026: multiple agents and smarter item matching

The July 2026 update (generally available July 8, 2026, rolled out automatically to online tenants) fixed most of what early adopters complained about.

Multiple agents in one company

Previously you had one Sales Order Agent per company: one mailbox, one set of rules. Companies with several sales teams, divisions or regional inboxes had to share one agent or skip it.

Now each agent instance is independent:

• Its own mailbox and folder
• Its own email signature, display name and initials
• Its own processing rules (review steps, quote vs. direct order)
• Its own KPIs: emails received, quotes created, orders created, time saved

A German team can run an agent on [email protected] while the French team runs theirs on [email protected]. Microsoft’s own example is a shared team inbox with full review, next to an agent on a salesperson’s subfolder for trusted customers that skips quote confirmation. Additional agent accounts are named SALES ORDER AGENT - [COMPANY] 2, 3, and so on. Existing single-agent configurations migrated without any action.

Three-layer item matching

Customers rarely write your item numbers. They write “the blue one, medium” or “the chairs we bought in spring.” The agent now searches in three layers:

1. Exact identifier match: item number, vendor item number, GTIN or item reference. Highest confidence.
2. Semantic attribute matching: AI extracts attributes from the email (color, material, size, variant) and ranks candidate items by relevance.
3. Fuzzy fallback: a broader search across all items that catches misspellings, partial names and informal descriptions.

The search covers item descriptions, Description 2, search description, variants, item references, attributes, categories, item translations, identifiers and extended text. So the quality of your item master decides how well the agent performs. New or changed item data can take up to 15 minutes to become searchable.

Relevance filtering saves credits

Before this update, anything that landed in the monitored folder got processed and consumed credits, including marketing newsletters and supplier offers. The agent now checks every message against a relevance model first, taking the conversation history and the agent’s scope into account. Out-of-scope messages such as offers to sell, discount requests or attempts to pull internal data are filtered out. A separate check runs on attachments: if a customer attaches their terms and conditions alongside a PO, only the PO is processed.

Bigger attachments and clear skip reasons

• PDF limit raised from 10 to 50 pages
• New cumulative limit of about 150,000 characters across all attachments in one email
• Supported formats: PDF, PNG, JPG
• When an attachment is skipped (page count, cumulative length, attachment count, unsupported format), the reason is stored on the Attachments page and in telemetry

This matters most for customers who send their own purchase order as a multi-page PDF, which is the most common failure case we saw with the old limit.

”Try it out” without sending email

The setup page now has a Try it out section. You pick a sender, write a message, optionally attach files, and the agent processes it as if it were a real email. Use sample message generates either a text request or a sample PO PDF built from your own item data (top items for that customer, quantities between 1 and 10). It’s useful for demos, first configuration and testing edge cases.

Unknown senders: three options

When a sender isn’t matched to a contact, you can now:

• Create a new contact, for a genuinely new customer
• Use another contact once: link an existing contact to this task only, without changing master data. Use this for forwarded emails or a purchasing assistant writing on the customer’s behalf.
• Update an existing contact’s email, when the customer changed address

Note on forwarding: if a colleague forwards a customer email to the agent’s mailbox, the agent sees the colleague’s address, not the customer’s. Use “Use another contact once” in that case.

Smaller control improvements

• Mark email as read after processing (on by default)
• Folder selection is mandatory before activation. Pick Inbox if unsure, but you can’t activate in an ambiguous state any more.
• Stricter activation validation with clear error messages instead of silent failures
• Prompts ship inside the extension, which cuts first-task latency. Partners can read them in the Sales Order Agent source code to see how relevance and item-search rules work.

Costs and credit management

The agent has no per-user or per-order price. It consumes Copilot Credits based on interaction complexity, and you track usage in the Power Platform admin center. Two things to watch:

• Credits running out. The agent stops picking up new emails but stays active. When credits come back, at the start of a new billing period or after you buy more, it automatically processes everything that piled up. That backlog can eat a large share of the renewed credits in one go.
• Noise in the mailbox. Relevance filtering helps, but the cheapest email is the one the agent never sees. Point it at a dedicated subfolder and use Outlook rules to move mail from approved senders into it. That gives you a sender allow-list without touching Business Central.

For a pilot, set the daily email limit low, and deactivate the agent before trial credits run out so it doesn’t process a backlog you didn’t intend.

What nobody tells you

Your item master decides the outcome. In every rollout we’ve seen, the difference between “impressive” and “useless” came down to item descriptions, attributes and cross-references. If your catalog is item numbers plus 20-character descriptions, fix that first. The agent searches exactly what’s in Business Central.

Contact emails are the real prerequisite. Customers who order from three different addresses, or from a personal Gmail, will hit the unknown-sender flow every time until you clean up contact cards.

It’s great at routine orders and needs help with the rest. Standard re-orders, clear quantities and catalog items go through well. Configured products, project pricing, split deliveries with special instructions, or emails that mix a complaint with an order still need a person. Treat the agent as a fast assistant for most of your volume, not a replacement for the sales desk.

Pricing logic stays with you. The agent applies Business Central’s standard price and discount logic. Anything your salespeople decide case by case needs a review step.

Beyond sales orders: building your own agents

The Sales Order Agent runs on the same agent runtime Microsoft uses for the Payables Agent and that you can use yourself through Agent Designer, which lets consultants and power users build custom agents with natural-language instructions. A typical next step after sales orders is a “shipper” agent that checks availability and releases orders to the warehouse. We cover what that tool can and can’t do in our Agent Designer guide. On the purchasing side, the Payables Agent guide covers the counterpart for vendor invoices.

Rollout checklist

• Business Central online environment with Copilot Credit billing configured in the admin center
• Dedicated Microsoft 365 mailbox or subfolder, with Full Access and Send as delegated
• Outlook rules routing approved senders into the monitored folder
• Contact cards cleaned: correct email address on every ordering contact
• Item descriptions, attributes, categories and item references reviewed
• Agent language set; pilot on real emails if customers write in an unsupported language
• Review settings chosen per instance (quote review, send quotes, make orders)
• Daily email limit set for the pilot
• Users added with the right access (work with tasks vs. Can Configure)
• Tested with Try it out and sample messages before going live
• Separate instances planned for teams, regions or trusted-customer flows

Frequently asked questions

What does the Business Central Sales Order Agent do?

It monitors a Microsoft 365 mailbox for customer requests, identifies the customer by the sender’s email address, finds the requested items, checks availability, creates a sales quote, and drafts a reply with the quote as a PDF. When the customer confirms, it converts the quote into a sales order and drafts the order confirmation. A Business Central user reviews every outgoing email before it is sent.

Do I need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to use the Sales Order Agent?

No. The agent is billed on consumption: it uses Copilot Credits for its AI interactions, and billing has to be set up for the environment in the Business Central admin center. Users who work with agent tasks need the Manage Agent Tasks permission, which is included in Essentials and Premium license entitlements.

Which languages does the Sales Order Agent support?

Microsoft validates it in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Spanish and Swedish. It can run in other languages, including Romanian, but Microsoft doesn’t guarantee quality there, so plan for heavier review.

Can I run more than one Sales Order Agent in the same company?

Yes, since the July 2026 update. Each instance has its own mailbox and folder, email signature, processing rules, display name and KPIs, so different sales teams, regions or product lines can each have their own agent. Existing single-agent setups carry over automatically.

How does the agent match vague item descriptions to my catalog?

It works in three layers: an exact match on item number, vendor item number, GTIN or item reference; then AI-based matching on attributes such as color, size or material; then a broader fuzzy search across all items. The quality of your item descriptions, attributes, categories and references directly affects how well it matches.

Can the Sales Order Agent create orders without sending a quote to the customer?

Yes. It always creates a quote first internally, because quotes don’t affect planning or availability. If you turn off Send quotes for confirmation and keep Make orders from quotes on, it converts the quote straight into a sales order and the customer only receives the order.

What attachments can the Sales Order Agent read?

PDF, PNG and JPG files. Since July 2026, PDFs can be up to 50 pages, with a cumulative limit of about 150,000 characters across all attachments in one email. When an attachment is skipped, the reason is recorded on the Attachments page.

What happens when we run out of Copilot Credits?

The agent stops picking up new emails but stays active. When credits become available again, it automatically processes the backlog, which can burn through renewed credits quickly. Set a daily email limit (default 100) and deactivate the agent if you don’t want that automatic catch-up.

Want the Sales Order Agent working on your real order emails? We set up mailboxes, clean the contact and item data the agent depends on, and configure one or several agents per team. Talk to us or see our Business Central implementation services.