What does Business Central's Sales Order Agent not do?

Microsoft publishes the boundary of its own quoting agent in more detail than most vendors publish anything, and this article does nothing except collect it and quote it.

That is worth reading for two opposite reasons. If you run Business Central, this is the shortest route to knowing which of your inbound the agent covers. And if you are evaluating anything that sits beside it, this is the specification of what "beside it" means.

Everything below is Microsoft's wording, from four pages fetched and read in full. None of it is our characterisation.

For the Business Central partner sizing the fit. 8 minute read.

Why a published boundary is a feature

A vendor that documents where its product stops has done something unusual and useful. It lets a partner scope an engagement honestly, and it lets a customer avoid the discovery that matters most — finding out in week six.

Read the list below as engineering decisions, not omissions. A fifteen-line cap and a deliberate refusal to discuss discounts by email are choices with reasons, and Microsoft gives the reasons for most of them.

Intake: one channel, bounded attachments

"The agent reads inbound emails via a shared inbox on Microsoft Exchange… Other ways to receive email aren't supported."

That is the sharpest line in the whole boundary. No Gmail or Google Workspace, no web form, no portal, no file upload, no messaging channel, no EDI.

Attachments are supported and bounded:

"The agent processes the email body and any PDF or image files attached to emails to get the details of the request. PDF attachments must be 20 MB or smaller and contain a maximum of 10 pages."

Large messages have their own outcome, and it is the right one: "Large emails might exceed the number of tokens that can be processed in one request. This condition leads the agent to trigger a request for a human to investigate."

And there is a start-date behaviour worth planning for, because it is about the backlog rather than the reading: "The agent uses the activation date as the starting point for retrieving emails. It doesn't process emails received before this date."

Shape and volume: fifteen lines, items only, no variants

Three constraints that together describe the kind of order it is built for.

"At this stage, the agent supports the creation of up to 15 item lines per sales document. Increasing the number of lines might result in lower-quality output."

"The agent is designed to work with sales lines of type "Item"; other sales line types, such as Resource, Charge (Item), Allocation Account, and Fixed Asset, aren't supported."

"When adding items to a sales document, the use of the item's Variant Code isn't currently supported. It leaves the Variant Code field empty."

The variant constraint is the one to check against your own catalogue first. If you sell in sizes, colours, finishes or bore diameters, the variant is frequently the whole answer to which item the customer means — and an empty variant field on a sales line is a quote that needs a person regardless of how well the rest of it went.

Microsoft also notes that naming matters: "How you name your products can affect agent output. For example, using cryptic abbreviations versus friendly names can reduce output quality."

Records it will not create, and documents it will not touch

"The agent doesn't create new items, contacts, or customers. It only works with the entities that are already registered in Business Central."

So a first-time enquiry from an unrecorded sender does not become a customer automatically. A person decides.

"It can't create or work with other sales documents (such as blank orders, invoices, or credit memos) or documents in other areas of the product (such as purchase or service orders)."

"The agent doesn't post documents."

"Based on more customer requests, the agent can make changes to the sales quotes, but not to the sales orders."

That last one is a timing constraint rather than a capability one, and chapter 4 covers what it means for corrections that arrive late.

On identity, the restriction is deliberate and Microsoft explains it:

"For security, the agent identifies contacts exclusively by matching the sender's email address to the E-Mail field on contact cards. It doesn't search by contact name, company name, or other fields when establishing the security context."

Contacts with no email on file cannot be matched automatically, and Microsoft's advice is to check that field before switching the agent on.

Pricing it will not discuss, and the reason is good

This one is easy to misread as a gap, and Microsoft's reasoning is worth quoting in full:

"Business Central has an advanced price/discount calculation logic, often extended by ISV solutions. Therefore, the most reliable way to get the item price is to create a sales document—for example, a quote. For this reason, the agent is designed not to provide or update any pricing and discount information by email. Requests for changing discounts and pricing aren't accepted by the agent. Instead, they're surfaced to the users for applying them manually."

Prices still reach the customer — inside the quote document, computed by Business Central's own pricing engine including customer price groups and line discounts. What the agent will not do is negotiate, quote a price in the body of an email, or accept a discount request.

For a distributor whose customers routinely ask "what can you do on that price?", that is the sentence to plan around.

Extending, billing and operating

"Currently, partners can't extend this capability."

An ISV cannot build on top of the agent. Microsoft does publish the agent's prompt instructions — relevance filtering, item-search priority rules and behaviour guidelines — in its BCApps source on GitHub, so the behaviour can be inspected even though it cannot be extended.

Billing is consumption-based, and the failure mode is quiet: "When the agent runs out of Copilot Credits, it stops processing new emails but stays active and scheduled." Microsoft's own advice is to deactivate it when it is not needed, because it resumes and processes the backlog when credits return.

Two operational notes: "Delegated administrators can't activate the agent", and the feature "was validated and is supported in specific languages only." Microsoft adds that "mixed language input might result in lower-quality output because the system relies on pure string similarity."

Two things that are absent, bounded to what we read

Everything above is a statement Microsoft makes. These two are statements about what four pages do not contain, and they are bounded accordingly — the overview, the FAQ, the process page and the item-availability page, each fetched and read in full on 24 August 2026.

No comparison of supply sources. The agent checks availability and can calculate delivery dates with capable-to-promise, which evaluates "production capacity, procurement timelines, and supply chain constraints". Across those four pages there is no comparison of vendors on cost, and no margin figure — the price it computes is explicitly a sell price. Chapter 9.

No per-line ranking. Microsoft does explain itself: Business Central "can also display the reasoning used by the agent and citations that led to a suggested value." What those pages do not describe is a score on each row saying which line is least safe. Work is surfaced as task-level Needs Attention steps. Chapter 8.

The setup page was not read, so both absences are bounded to four pages rather than five.

About Cognilium Cognilium builds AI systems that work in tandem with Microsoft Dynamics 365 — the decisions the ERP records but does not make. Business Central and Finance & Operations, on your own governed stack. https://cognilium.ai · https://www.linkedin.com/company/37180269/

Want to work out which of your inbound falls inside this boundary and which falls outside? Book a 15-minute call and we will sort a real week of your requests. No deck.

What does Business Central's Sales Order Agent not do?