AI actions for finance and operations business logic

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically	Jul 15, 2024	Sep 2024

Business value

Makers in finance and operations apps must be able to extend and customize Copilot experiences for their application users by adding capabilities through plugins. This includes both Copilot for finance and operations apps, which provides the in-app Copilot with a natural language chat experience, and other Copilot experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem, like Copilot for Microsoft 365 and custom copilots.

This feature enables makers to create AI plugins based on the business logic of finance and operations apps for both in-app prompts or actions that can be used in any Copilot experience. These are copilot capabilities that use the business logic of the application without requiring any specific application context or user interface. This enables Copilot users to ask questions in Copilot that can be answered by directly invoking business logic in finance and operations apps, dramatically expanding the capabilities and customization options for Copilot.

Feature details

Copilot in finance and operations apps provides generative AI capabilities in a natural language chat experience in the finance and operations client. Makers of finance and operations apps must be able to extend and customize Copilot to tailor the capabilities and experience to the needs of the organization. Extending Copilot can be done by creating AI plugins that add needed capabilities.

With this release, we will expand the maker's ability to customize the Copilot experience by enabling the creation of AI plugins that are based in finance and operations business logic and code. Copilot can respond to prompts with plugins that run finance and operations methods in code to determine the answer or action in response to the prompt. These are headless actions that don't require a specific context in the finance and operations client. These actions can be registered in the Dataverse plugin registry and made available in any Copilot connected to the registry, like Copilot for Microsoft 365, other Copilot experiences for Dynamics 365 applications, or custom copilots.

These capabilities open up finance and operations business logic to be used in expanding the capabilities of Copilot in finance and operations in-app experiences, as well as across your Copilot ecosystem.