Dynamics Corner

Episode 506: Vibe Working, Not Vibe Coding: Is This Where We Are Headed?

• Kris and Brad • Season 5 • Episode 506

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In this episode of Dynamics Corner, Kris and Brad are joined by Renato Fajdiga, a Croatia-based Dynamics veteran with a decade of experience spanning NAV development, Business Central consulting, and Finance & Operations implementation across 12 countries. Renato shares his unique perspective on running both BC and F&O, side by side, explains when multi-country organizations should lean toward one platform over the other, and breaks down how his team uses Microsoft Fabric to address consolidation challenges that ERPs were never designed to handle. The conversation takes a fascinating turn into AI, where the group compares Copilot capabilities between BC and F&O, and debates what happens when AI handles your transactions, reports, and even tells you to enjoy your day at the beach. Renato also shares how he uses AI in his personal life — from workout plans with follow-up suggestions to hiking route planning with AllTrails — proving that the impact goes well beyond code. Whether you're an SMB evaluating your first data warehouse or a consultant navigating the rapidly shifting ERP landscape, this episode is packed with insights and a few laughs along the way.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner. What is the difference between FNO and Business Central? Which one do you choose? I'm your co-host, Chris.

SPEAKER_01:

And this is Brad. This episode was recorded on February 12th, 2026. Chris, Chris, Chris. FNO Business Central, Fabric, Power BI, AI, Data Lake, One Lake. There's a lot of things out there. And with us today, we had the opportunity to break some of that down with Renato.

SPEAKER_03:

Is it both of us are not moving? But now it's better, but it was only bread.

SPEAKER_01:

I hope I was paused in a good position. Because you ever see like how sometimes when you're in meetings and such and somebody will either drop or they'll have uh internet connectivity issues and they're in some crazy pose. See?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, obviously.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, exactly. That's an idea. That's it. That's an idea for a website for somebody to create. What would we call it? Like disconnected pictures or something.

SPEAKER_04:

And just the crazy pictures that people are hung in when they get disconnected, which is um But you know, we are like uh six years ago when all this stuff started, you know, COVID and so on, and you still have like you know, you are on mute, you're on mute.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh yeah, that's the famous, that's the famous quote. You're on mute.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, can you say that again? You broke up. Can you say that again? Uh you uh you broke up.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm pretty sure they sell t-shirts for those men that says you're on mute, or a hat that says you're on mute.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, to everyone's defense, I'll give, you know, I'll have to be the nice guy today. Like with Teams, if you go into a meeting now, it can be set to pre-mute everybody who joins, but I think that's also if there's a certain number of people already in the meeting that will mute the person who attends. And I'm assuming that's so that they won't cause a disruption to people already speaking.

SPEAKER_00:

But that's true.

SPEAKER_01:

It's it sounds like a good story. It sounds like a good story.

SPEAKER_03:

Especially for the big groups that uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

But speaking of that, uh you figure we'd still would be able to get like those large gallery meetings to work properly, right? Where you have 10 or more people, 16 or more people to be able to see everybody, and then also be able to see who's talking. It's um we can AI vibe code the space shuttle and a rocket ship, but we can't have good video conferencing.

SPEAKER_04:

Exactly. Because it this is still good enough, you know, and there is no need to improve.

SPEAKER_03:

Good enough. Yes, good enough.

SPEAKER_00:

We can have the effect you could suffer the rest of the time.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we can we can still have effective meetings, but uh enough of talking about our video conference woes. That is an idea. If somebody wants to make that website, let me know. I'd be interested in seeing all the photos and people could submit them. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_04:

Okay, thank you, Brent and Chris, for having me on on this podcast. I think after a while we managed to somehow sync our calendars. Yeah, yeah. So thank you for uh having me on this. I'm very happy to be with you. Uh my name is Renato. I'm coming from Croatia, Zagreb. Uh so uh in NAV world or in dynamic space, I was I can say now a decade, and you know it's such a good word. You know, I'm a decade, I have a decade of experience uh with working with ERPs. Uh and I started as a developer, so I was uh NAV developer, and I was just remembering two days ago with my current manager uh in this company what was my first task uh as a as a developer then, and it was like we had to connect NAV with a printer, uh you know, and we didn't have that kind of printer because you know it's the old one where you have your those um continuous papers, you know, with the whole society. And we didn't have it, and then the customer sent this to us to our uh premises and sent five boxes of those papers just so we have for testing purposes.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly true story matrix matrix.

SPEAKER_01:

I had that happen to me as well early on where it was a laser printer, and someone had to send me a laser printer to the office for me to configure. And uh well, I want to go back to your stories, but I also remember it was faster one time. I was going between uh the north, well, New York and Boston area at one time, working with a lot of um implementations in New York City. It was faster to get on the train from Boston, go to New York, grab a backup, come back to be able to restore it to work on it.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Different times, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Different times, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

And from those development uh exercises, uh, I switched to uh consultancy. So I was uh dynamics NAV consultant, uh, and then uh six years ago I uh switched uh role. Now I'm leading the team uh responsible for implementation of financing operations, business central, public, and so on at the customer side, but I also have my own company uh that I am consulting for Business Central. As you know, business central is my my true love, I would say.

SPEAKER_01:

I share that love because I have business central in my veins, as they say, going through it. So you work with Finance and Operations, Fabric, and Business Central, and you also do consulting. You have to be Superman.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, uh you know they have only 24 hours, so yeah. You work all 24 hours.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you work all 24? Yeah, that's that's an interesting combination because I mean if you go back historically, we had Nivision, we had Xapta, which was DamGuard. Nevision had the Nivision software, Damgard had Exapta, or yeah, it was Xapter at that point. I forget when it was AX or Xapta. Then they merged, and then Microsoft Perch, and because then it wasn't like wasn't it like Nevision DamGuard that the company switched at one point or something? I don't know. And then it was always talked that you know AX, Exapta, or Finance and Operations was like the big brother to Business Central. And you're working with both of them today. Is there that much of a difference between the two?

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, in in in if you think about uh how much you need to implement ours, and if you hope only to implement all modules, yes, it would be like big, big brother uh uh comparison to BC. Uh but it's very nice to see that, for example, we are using finance modules mostly in our organization. And you can do the same process in the both systems uh without any any issues. And users can very easily switch from one to another tool uh because we have some users that are working at the same time in BC and finance and operations, and they are uh so they're using both. Yeah, yeah. We have in one of our country we have Business Central, while in the other 11 we have uh finance and operations.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh so it it's quite that's that's an interesting pick of why they would someone would choose that. I listen, every business makes decisions for the moment just sounds you know a little different from it.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay, mostly because they just upgraded from NAV to BC and it was like no uh no benefit to migrate them to immediately after they migrated to BC to F and O. So they let they say okay, we want to keep a little bit of BC, and then uh let's see uh when we are going to move to group-wide solution.

SPEAKER_01:

That's amazing. So you're saying so that they can work in finance, it's similar in finance. I have only seen FNO or finance and operations. Um, I did sit through a small demonstration of it. I've gone through a demonstration on how to develop in it many years ago. Um, but I never really had the opportunity to use it at any uh level. And I was always curious to know because it then you have two ERP systems under one umbrella. Well, you have many ERP systems now because you also have Great Plains, but I think we know where that's going in the next couple years, um, within the next couple years, uh what the differences are between them. So it's it's it's challenging to see. I mean, I've always thought that Business Central was geared towards the SMB small to medium businesses, and the finance and operations was geared towards the larger organizations. But now I'm also thinking and seeing like Business Central could run a large organization with the current technology. Maybe many, many years ago it it had some constraints uh for some the it also defines what you could depends what you define a large implementation, because I've seen several large implementations even back of NAV 2009 with several hundred users. So I was just curious to know what the difference would be for for driving somebody to one versus the other in 2026.

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, I would now go, if you ask me. I would go and let I mean our uh situation is specific because we have 11 countries and they are all on the same environment, same tenant, everything works between one database. Except business title is its own database. To achieve that kind of uh uh work, you will need 11 environments or multiple tenants and so on for BC. So this is the way when I will go to F and O. If you have multi-country, uh lot of localization, a lot of partners, uh very heavy processes, a lot of transactions, uh then yeah, go to F and O. Even though, as you said, uh we can also support uh a lot of transactions as well with uh business central, with proper configuration, of course, of BC. Um because you can also have issues uh in F and O if you set keys differently wrongly.

SPEAKER_01:

I I I think any system will sweat if you set it up improperly or use it improperly. Uh you know, it's a lot of times they you know permission and performance to me, performance is uh one, it's relative because how fast should something go? I mean, i I tell everyone you can only fly from here in the United States from Boston to Los Angeles so fast. I mean, you could say I'd like to be there in five minutes, but the reality is you have an entire continent you have to span. So that will definitely take some time. But yes, oftentimes it can be misconfigured. And any system, I'm not trying to say that um any system is poor in that case, because you can code yourself into um sleep or stoppage.

SPEAKER_00:

And I mean, so so primarily uh uh because I I get this question from time to time, especially when we have uh prospects that are moving, you know, whether they do business central or another ERP, it could be uh other uh ERP, it could be Net Suite and so forth. And um, you know, a lot of the questions like when do we go to F and O. And you know, I I think my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that typically around the localization, especially if you have multiple entities that uh spans across different locations where you have localization requirements and but they want to keep at the same tenant rather than multiple tenants and then having it talk to each other uh for consolidation. Is that the key factor of why you why the I mean one of the big reasons why you would want to go to FNO at that point?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that was that was the reason because of the consolidation. But then uh over the time we grow so much that even now consolidation cannot run in the let's say uh time that we want to that we want to. And what we are now trying to achieve, and this is the project for uh this year and maybe next year, consolidated all the data from both systems in one data warehouse known as Microsoft Fabric, and then on top of that implement proper consolidation tool. Because many times I hear from Microsoft support, Microsoft Engineer, look, this is the ERP, it's accounting software, it's processing tool. It's not consolidation tool, it's not meant that primary focus is consolidation. And for consolidation, we have uh various tools, even they are saying you can use Power BI together with Fabric and consolidate all your uh statements, all your transactions on that way rather than having a load on the production of database.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that is a that's a good point. That's another interesting point. It's again your ERP software is for your transactional data, and then you have other tools that give you the analysis portion of it. So instead of trying to use the same tool for everything, offload some of that. See, I like all these things.

SPEAKER_00:

No, I do like that because a lot of times there's maybe some confusion, and I I could be wrong from an accounting. I'm not an accounting person, uh, but you know, we work with a lot of accounting.

SPEAKER_01:

But you play one on TV, don't you?

SPEAKER_00:

Or I play one, I play one on TV and uh or behind the teams meeting. But like if you were to look at when they say, you know, uh we need a consolidating company, and so they typically create a company in Business Central or F and O. And then, but in reality, consolidation is really just for them to report against um to you know appease the maybe some of the requirements for the consolidating, all the different companies. So you're what you're doing right now, it's rather than putting it into an entity in itself just to consolidate all the different places, uh, instead you're putting it in fabric and then presenting it in a uh Power BI report. I mean, that's really what it is, right? That's that's what that's what consolidating is. It's just a reporting answer.

SPEAKER_03:

And then it's a report, report.

SPEAKER_04:

And the end of the end of end product of consolidation is a report. Yeah, it's not some translation or so on. And then when I now go back from that perspective, uh if I take a look at the process wise, I could I could say that every all the countries that we implemented in F and O, for example, we can split them into multiple BC instances and nothing will break, you know. Everything will work, users will have the even better maybe UI, uh, and some advanced AI capabilities. Uh and we will be able to achieve the same. Because as I said, the process is not that complex in our F and O systems that we cannot support with BC currently. But of course, we don't have warehousing production, manufacturing, and so on. So that's why I would say uh I have this opinion.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, okay. So that from the manufacturing distribution point of view, maybe uh a different scenario. You had mentioned, and I was going to try to go the entire episode or recording, whatever we call these things, without saying AI, but you said more advanced AI features. Yes. So did you uh infer that Business Central has more advanced AI features today than FNO, or do you think they're relatively the same? I'm putting you on the spot.

SPEAKER_04:

They both have MCPs. Woo-hoo. There you go. That's one, but uh, if I mean if you take numbers, like I like to be you know uh strict. Let's take a numbers. If you open the BC and search for co-pilot and agent capabilities, you will get 11 or 12 copilots, right? You have data analysis, you have chat, you have summarization, marketing text, bank reconciliation, and so on. If you go to F and O, you will find up to 10. So not more than BC. So, and that's I would say the benefit of VC, because BC is more agile tool. You know, we can implement more features, more AI features without interrupting the core standards. And F and O being Beast, uh, in my opinion, that's why they're somehow lacking of behind the BC of having those copilot capabilities within the tool.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, BC does have a lot. I think they're up to I think I just did a presentation on AI uh within BC, and it's over 17 AI features. Not necessarily just copilot, but AI features. If you talk about uh the purchasing agent, sales order agent, uh, you know, let's talk about the expense agent. Now you have the agent preview, which came out 27.4, uh that you can work with. Uh you have the MCP service, like you said, you have the co-pilot chat, copilot summary, uh ask co-pilot for the co-pilot fields, uh bank reconciliation. I can keep going on.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, BC is yeah, it's because I said, because I this is my opinion, uh because they are like smaller, they're better to innovate uh and team is investing a lot. I'm not saying that F and O is not doing it, but I think it's much harder for them to achieve that.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I understand. It's it's much it's much more difficult to ship shift a large vessel when it's moving than it is something that may be a little bit smaller and has the ability to do it. So I and I understand what you're saying. It's it's um the business central team is doing a great job and they have the opportunity because of just the way the architecture works and uh uh the way it's going through. So you work with business central fabric. Fabric's another topic that people talk about. Just from an overview, what is fabric? Because I hear when it's data warehousing, you know, it's I'm an old guy. People went from you know, um SQL analytics, right? Um with uh reporting server, SQL reporting server, you know, as their data warehouse. And then now I hear like One Lake, Data Lake, Fabric, all these other things. So what is fabric in essence?

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, in I as I'm calling it to my finance team, and I'm explaining, it's like one-stop shop for all your financial data in our case. So we are bringing all the data from various finance systems like F and O and BC into Data Lake, and from there we can manipulate with those data. So we are extracting data, you can transform, and you can of course load this data to someone else, somewhere else. Uh so I would say uh Fabric will ultimately become like main repository for your data when we are talking about reporting and uh building uh analytics and dashboards on top of finance finance data.

SPEAKER_01:

So for the from the FNO point of view, how do you get the data into Fabric? And from the business central point of view, how do you get the data into Fabric?

SPEAKER_04:

I uh this is where I like FNO. It's much easier than in BC. Uh in FNO you have a uh a link between uh uh F and O and Fabric, so you are usually using two datavers and then uh pushing data to uh to Fabric. Uh for BC, we still don't have a connector uh natively that we can use, so we are relying to uh some community solutions like Bert has uh or you can use uh business central, uh how is called data flows to import the data uh with data flows to fabric workspace and then consume it, consume it from there. So those are the two ways that you can do now. There are third way which I don't like. It is like you know that there is like native integration between business central and dataverse. So you can somehow that way uh use the bring data from BC to Fabric, but this is not the purpose of that connector between BC and Dataverse. Uh yeah. So I hope that soon we will have some data down for something like uh to Fabric.

SPEAKER_01:

So you can report off of FNO, external systems and business central within Fabric, so you can do your data analysis. So if you have disparate systems or even historical data, right? It's I think a lot of times individuals, if they're going through a new implementation or an upgrade, even the challenge is what do I do with my data? Do I convert everything and bring it into my ERP software? Or do I leave my existing system functional? But or even from the reporting point of view, I have multiple systems. How do I get them all together? You know, do I do I do interfaces to import data into one system so I can do all my reporting in one place? But now we can take it up a layer, like you said, let the ERP software manage the transactions and the data reside somewhere for you to be able to do reporting on.

SPEAKER_04:

Exactly. Yeah, I mean, this is like always, you know, as we said on upgrades for new implementations or the implementation. Should I bring 10 years of my uh GL to a new system or should I bring this outside and then connect both the systems uh in fabric?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I'd have to look at some analysis. I wonder how much of an upgrade or an implementation has to do with data management. You know, no, not even an upgrade necessarily, or even like if you move. To a new system, right? If you really are trying to take that data, how much of the effort is really in bringing that data over and why? Right. So I mean, I can understand open transactions, right? Open sales orders, open purchase orders, open receivables, open payables, you know, even maybe a couple years worth of GL information so that you can do some uh financial reporting you know in that system without having to go externally. But again, you could still go externally. But I really am curious to know or think. I'd like to see that how much of a uh how much of an upgrade implementation uh goes with data management.

SPEAKER_03:

The the value in itself.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, Chris.

SPEAKER_04:

I said in previous uh when I was a consultant, I mean I never we never move transactional data. It's always like open transactions, like the mentioned bread. And then you either do some BI uh bring this data to some BI dashboards and so on. I don't see value uh of bringing all transactions in the business central or any database. You're just growing the the old database.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and well you know there's a cost to space uh you know from the business central point of view. I don't know how it's licensed within F and O, but I know Business Central. Um, you know, you you get with the system in the number of users you have uh uh large capacity uh for data, and uh why consume that with nothing? You know, I call it nothing, you know.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. And it's I mean FNO, you have like uh you're buying uh licenses and you're getting some capacity, and off top of that you can buy as well capacity uh if you need uh, of course.

SPEAKER_01:

I wonder where this will all go. Like there's just a lot, right? It's I I I keep saying, and I'll say this on every episode almost like a broken record. I just miss like the simple days. I wonder if we'll ever get back to the simple days because now I don't know how you do it with the the you know, understanding and managing all that, because the the technology is just expanding. And then now, forget it, you throw AI and models and all this stuff into the mix, and it's like, which way am I going? Or uh how do I manage uh all of that?

SPEAKER_04:

I I think there is no point of returning back. Uh so we are just need to embrace AI uh in our day-to-day life, building reports and and so on.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, you have to embrace it. It's um I think I I've been reading a lot of interesting articles, even with some of the new models that came out. I do quite a bit with it each night or each evening, and even use it several times during the day. But I think um what you can do with it if you use it properly is amazing. And even I'm excited about the features within Business Central. I'm really excited to work with the agent playground to be able to create my own agents. That's my fun for this weekend, is I'm going to work with uh the new agent preview to say create some agents to see what I could do and have some fun.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I mean uh I like this stuff, uh, what we saw already about policies that you can upload the policy and for example see if uh your customer is always uh overdoing their payments. So do we have somebody are compliant, not compli uh compliant to our policies and so on.

SPEAKER_01:

No, it's it's uh it's amazing what it can do, and it's it's getting so much better because it is almost like having uh an employee or uh an assistant. So, you know, the word co-pilot from the Microsoft, you know, platform is truly what it is. It's like Chris, you had mentioned it several episodes ago and something. It really is like a co-pilot that's helping you uh get your tasks done, which is um it's uh it's breathtaking, I guess you could say. It's awesome, it's my overwhelming monstruck. I don't even know what to say. Um it's even now pushing back in a sense, where it's saying, Oh, did you want to do this? You know, because you can see like when you put it in the mode, you can read the text. Oh, the user wants to do this, the user wanted that. And I asked it to do something and it said, Oh, do you sure you want to do this because you could do it this way? I was like, What?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It gives you suggestions to do something different and better. And sometimes you don't realize, like, oh yeah, I didn't think about that. It's like it's it's making you be more efficient in in uh thinking about more the intent of what you're trying to accomplish rather than just actioning against what the prompt you you've given it.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, and that that's what I like, that's follow-up questions. I mean, just uh some uh example from uh my personal life. I started to like work out. Uh and I said, okay, give me like I want to do this. Uh I have 30 minutes, give me the exercises that I and then he kind of follow-up. Do you want the images of how this exercise should look like? I was like, Yes, I never thought of that. Because I was already in my mind that okay, he will give me the exercise, I don't know, uh push-ups, and I will go and Google how to do push-ups, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

That's such a perfect example because when you say push-ups, right, there's you people don't realize there's different ways to do push-ups. You don't just do normal push-ups. And so, like, well, to be more efficient, you should do this kind of push-ups if you want, you know, like bigger upper body strength, right? Like, it's it's pretty interesting that it's allowing you to be more focused in what you're trying to accomplish, more intentional, rather than just like, oh yeah, go do a push-up, and you maybe you'll uh improve.

SPEAKER_01:

But you bring up a good point with that. One, I wonder how all this stuff works. I might wonder, but I've given up trying to uh you know understand how it can be like talking to a person. Uh you know, uh, like I said, I'm going to start hooking voice up to it and have it just talk back to me. But you can use it for so much more than just code, right? Because a lot of people talk about AI and coding and being able to produce all this stuff. On a side note, yes, you can do it with AL for Business Central, but people making all these apps for a lot of things. I'm wondering where all these apps go, by the way. Because I see all these people online, like, oh, I, you know, I spent this much long, coded this app, did all this, I'm doing all this. Like, who's going to use all these apps? And I'm going to go on a little tangent right now. All these apps that are created with AI, if we don't have quality standards for it, then we're going to have we're going to lose our trust in the applications, right? Because now people think, oh, I'm going to buy the software application, it's going to do something for us. History repeats itself. People used to write their own applications, and then everyone started purchasing applications, right? Remember when people, even with ERP software, a lot of people would write their own ERP software. And then they realized, well, it's not cost effective, and we can have somebody else maintain it, get feedback from all these other users, and then write it, and then we purchase it, and uh, we have the business value from it. But now, if everybody's vibe coding, as they call it, all these different applications, what are you going to download and install and use? And if it's not trustworthy, people are going to like, okay, it's easier for me just to do it myself because at least I know what I'm getting and I can fix it quickly. So that was my side thing. But to go back to your point, you can use it for so much more than just coding.

SPEAKER_04:

It's and you said vibe vibe coding. And I I I think I read yesterday or two days ago. It's not there anymore live coding, it's now vibe working. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a good way to that's a good way to put it. It's not just for development.

SPEAKER_01:

It's not. It's not. I I uh I see it used in many ways. And it's like I said, you're almost you are if you haven't started using it, you need to start using it. I mean, the people have been saying that for months. Uh you know, and months in AI terms is like decades and maybe even centuries in human terms because the the turnaround every two three months is is is crazy. But to use it even for like you said, if your person who's to help you come up with a workout, yes, you can validate and come up with a workout, but at least it brings exposure to you for a workout plan. I've known people who've used it for financial plans. I've known people who've used it to um uh create other types of plans um for themselves and in documentations and even you know researching and summarizing um topics.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I mean what I also like, I mean, on top of that, uh workout plan. Uh it was also that you you know that you can connect uh uh Spotify and so on to to uh ChatGPT, like an app, and then you ask, please suggest me uh Spotify playlist on top of that. No, I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, you can so it's it's crazy. I mean I also using it sometimes for for hiking. You can also connect app that is all trails, it has all trails, all kinds of trails uh for hiking. And they just say, okay, I want to go there and there, give me that hike. I want that this is like medium really.

SPEAKER_01:

I use all trails. I mean when I'm when I'm up north and I do the hiking up north, I use all trails and I use it to track all myself. So you can use AI with that now?

SPEAKER_04:

Yes, you can use it AI within the uh all trails when you are creating a route. So you have like, okay, I want to go, I don't know, to Monteveras, give me the shortest route and with the less uh uh steep, you know.

SPEAKER_03:

And it will create a route like that for you. And it tells you how to prepare for it at the same time.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Where are we going to be without AI? Is there anything that doesn't have AI in it?

SPEAKER_00:

There's gonna be dependency on this uh AI down the road. I would say probably in three years, that there's gonna be a lot of dependency on AI and the things that we just want to do. Three years.

SPEAKER_01:

Three years AI won't even be AI anymore. It will be something completely different. That's like a lifetime several lifetimes away. I mean, I saw it this week, Notepad even has AI now. That was a big problem with Windows and the update. Like I was and I said to myself, for a simple text editor, like that's what you want sometimes. Like just a jot a quick note. Why do you need AI and Notepad? It's like we're getting AI in everything.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, yeah. Yes, I I like to say, I think this is just a beginning, you know. It was like two years ago it became mainstream. Uh, and it's I I I have it's just a beginning when you see when you say agent playground, what it can do just by you typing the words and what it can do in the BC that I think the agent playground.

SPEAKER_01:

The MCP was exciting. Um, I think there's a certain space for that, right? For certain types of organizations for interconnectivity and stuff. But I really do see the agent playground to me, or agent preview, I think they they named it now. I I pay attention to the GitHub repo for documentation, and I think it was February 6th. They did change it to uh agent preview, I believe, right before the update for 27.4. I think that would get a lot of use. It was almost going to be like what it won't be as exciting to me as the analysis mode was on the list pages, because to me that's still by far like one of the best things that were added to the application. But I think the agent uh preview or agent playground is what it was called before, is going to be another big one for even small tasks. I'm not necessarily saying end-to-end processing like the sales order agent or purchasing agent. I'm saying, like you said, even go through, take a look at all my customers with an overdue balance and block them. Right? Little simple tasks like that to help you um here's manage stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

Here's the thing that I'm actually pretty excited about. So you so Copilot has this uh two tools that I actually really love. Uh uh one is the analyst mode, why you feed data to it. And remember how not too long ago we were like, oh, Chat GPT or uh AI couldn't crunch numbers or couldn't really grasp the numbers that you provide, right? Now the analyst mode, you can you can do that. You you give it some Excel data and it's going to give you some trends and all that stuff. There's also research mode. I would love to see, and I don't even know if I don't know if this is something that they're working on. So you know how you have analysis mode in Business Central? If they slap analyst agent within that game changer. Because it's just going to give you the trends and uh and uh things to look out for and look at patterns from your analyst mode or analysis mode in business central. So if you if they marry that together, man, that would be one of the biggest exciting features if they are going to push that. Because eventually it'll get there. Have you played have you guys played with that yet? The analyst mode and co-pilot?

SPEAKER_04:

Uh no, not yet. I played only with analysis mode, but I I saw some videos.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh on the co-pilot, yeah. You should check it out. So you you've you fed it with you know, it has to be like a um a database structure, uh, you know, and and you feed it and you'll say, hey, tell me, can you analyze this report? And it gives you a pretty good summary of trends and patterns and so forth, and makes you suggestion as well. And so if you could do it that way, I'm sure you could do it in Business Central at some point in the near future.

SPEAKER_04:

I would say that real real stuff, uh this is yeah, we're using it compiled, and this is when things will explode, when you will be able to on a single click bring all your data uh under one UI. Because I was thinking, you know, if I need to go to BC to run some data analysis view, and then go to Power BI to some run some reports. I mean it's again, you know, changing the focus, changing the what I'm doing. But if I would be able, like to ask and compilate, uh, create me a report and give me an underlying data set and uh I can trust to this, that would be like crazy.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so Rita, from from your perspective, I'm curious what you think about this. So, you know, the the idea is for us to remove friction uh when someone interacting with Business Central. And a lot of times what happens is somebody has to go to an external application, for example, Power BI, or they may have a data warehouse and things like that. So if but we also have clients that, especially in the SMB space, that are it's like, why can't I just do everything within Business Central? Do you see at some point where you just do everything in Business Central, including the report? Because we know we know that there's Power BI reports now in Business Central, so you don't have to go too far, you can just have a single place to go to and just give me everything I need, including uh agents, interactions, and so forth.

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, uh for the you end user, I think this is the way to go that I have everything under one tool. Uh either it's called business central or I can access to my uh business central data inside Power BI. And like I think that we already have this in one of the Power BI reports where you can drill down back to the BC. So I would say this is the uh the good path. Uh yes, Brent.

SPEAKER_01:

No, no, I'm I'm waiting. I'm I'm thinking, I uh I definitely think you'll get to that point. I think this is probably where the extension of the MCP comes into play because now you'll have disconnected systems that can communicate with each other and pull the information back. And I don't know if necessarily again, this is just my thought, right? Because I do agree with you. It's almost like we have all this data, I just need one place to go to get it. Therefore, for the most part, this is why I keep saying like software becomes faceless. You're almost going to build the interface that you need at that time, if you follow what I'm saying. So if I need to do analysis, if I have a warehouse management system and I have an ERP system, because I'm I'm not using my ERP for the warehouse management system, people have disparate systems for many different reasons. But I need to do cross-reporting. Maybe you could have that, like you said, like it this is where some of that MCP um uh functionality will come into play, because now you have that information exposed in the systems who know how to speak with each other to work with it. I'll be curious to see how performance works with all these with some large data sets, and you know, everything works great with one or two records. I'd like to be curious to see when you have you know organizations that span continents and do a number of transactions.

SPEAKER_04:

But yeah, but if you also take a look, like if you have AP agent, accounts payable agent, you receive an invoice and it will be if it will be able to process all these documents for you automatically in Business Central, and you out of output of that will be some analysis of vendor payments uh payment to our vendors, you know, you will not be able you will not need to log into BC, you will just and get a report in our BI or whatever automatically.

SPEAKER_01:

You won't even have to go to work. You just sit on the beach and open up your phone and look at the report.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, and and you will get a report, like uh you had you received 15. What says we processed successfully, oh 50, enjoy your day. You don't you are done for today.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, even from a report perspective, too, like you don't have to because a lot of times you look at the dashboard, a report, and you're like, okay, how do I translate this? What am I supposed to get out of this? You know, I I a lot of times I I'm sure you guys have across this too, like I've come across this too, where you interact with a C suite and it's like I want this kind of report, but at the end of the day, they don't always necessarily read it or understand it. They just want to see dashboard and they still need to be translated of okay, what am I looking at? What what do I need to do to make adjustments based upon this report? It's uh eventually you just have uh co-pilot tell you, okay, this is what it's telling you in natural language, and here's what you need to do. What do you want me to do with that? And you can just say co-pilot, go ahead and action those things, and then it'll just you know, it just works with other agents to make those adjustments. At that point, you're just gonna be a decision maker. Yes, no, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, this is what I usually present on uh on the on my sessions at the conferences, like you know, you need to know who are your audience for the reports, and we know we have this from Kenny, right? On the Microsoft Learn. You cannot, you you know, C suite is not interested in tables and so on. They need a dashboard, as you said, Chris. And reason why is that number there, yeah, you know, and how to fix it if need to be fixed. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Knowing your audience is important. I I start thinking about this stuff. I I almost stopped talking about it. Uh in this context, I do speak um on the podcast with it and stuff, but outside of it, sometimes I stop talking about because I think people think I'm crazy or they won't understand like what you can do with AI in a sense. Um it's uh the world is changing fast. And sometimes I go to bed and I wake up and something news here. But yes, um, like you said in the sessions, know your audience uh when it comes to anything uh that you're working on, uh whether it's reporting or even interface or functionality or usage, which is important. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, usually on our session, uh, for example, when we are doing tele, I'm doing telemetry with my colleague Milan. We ask our audience, I mean, are you developers, are you consultants? Because you know, some topics are important equally for developers and for consultants. Uh yeah. And AI is one of that as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, everyone well, AI almost levels a lot of that stuff out because even if you look at like some analysis with telemetry, right? Now, you know, Waldo has his tool for telemetry. I've seen other people, you know, create some AI um uh stuff, instructions, I guess you could call them. The term changes, you know, instructions, agents, um, prompts, skills, you know, tomorrow will be something else, tasks. And you keep coming up with all the different words, but to be able to help you with analysis and consolidate it. Like I've done it, even taking logs from um my internal VPN here and just throwing it to analyze these logs and tell me what you see. You know, simplicity, and it comes back and it tells you certain information about those logs. So I don't know anything about it, I just know what it tells me it it analyzed.

SPEAKER_04:

So and it will even be practical and give you an explanation that you even didn't think about it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and if it doesn't have one, it will it will come up with a good sounding one too. Even if it doesn't have it, which is um um I I got a quick question for you, Renata.

SPEAKER_00:

On on uh you know, you working in Business Central and Fabric. Um you know, clearly there's some SB folks that wants to tap into kind of a data warehouse um capability from Business Central. Do you have any uh preference in terms of like in terms of how do they, you know, what's the best way to get them into a data warehouse? Is it fabric still? I know people have said it's expensive uh or it can get it pretty expensive depending on and and how uh it gets done. Uh is there any other way for SMBs to get um a good data warehouse to get them started at least?

SPEAKER_04:

I mean I mean to get started, I always I mean how we started uh back then when it was not fabric, we started with pulling our data uh to uh Power BI service through data flows and then building our uh let's say small warehouse for analyzing uh AP stuff in data uh through data flows in Power BI service and then building our reports on top of data flow data sets in Power BI service. So that's I would say the good approach. Uh and I can share, for example, uh one million of transactions of GL transactions we loaded from BC to uh Power BI in less than five minutes. So it's very performing well uh if you need also huge data set of one million transactions. Uh so yeah, that's uh my recommendation how to start. So Power BI service, I don't think uh it's too expensive like uh to have Power BI pro license or better use a premium and start with uh with uh building Aquarius queries and then exposing data from BC to Power BI.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, yeah. It's a good way to get them started because a lot of times we're like you know they want to be able to slice and dice data quickly. I mean obviously you have analysis mode and business central to get what you need, but if they want to be able to crunch numbers or maybe even pulling data from other external systems, uh you're saying it's a good way to start with just Power BI uh services.

SPEAKER_04:

You have data full of that are working very well and reliable. We are using it like for I would say one and a half year or two, uh without public perfectly fine for for our needs, which we is analyzing general ledgers, accounts available, accounts receivables uh inside Power BI. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Excellent. There's a lot to that there. Well, Mr. Ronaldo, sir, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today, this morning. Uh I look forward to seeing you at some of the upcoming events. Are you going to come to Directions North America this year?

SPEAKER_04:

No. No, no, Directions North America, no. No, uh my my trip will start with uh days of knowledge in uh in UK, and then hopefully we'll see each other. If not in Europe, then in Nashville.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, Nashville. Are you going to Nashville?

SPEAKER_04:

Uh I hope I hope I will be there. Oh, I hope you'll be there too.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm looking forward to going to Nashville in October.

SPEAKER_04:

Um I I heard there are some promises about cost-picking engagement and so on.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, yes, yes. Um yeah, we'll have to get together on that uh to see. So um if anyone has any other questions or like to learn more about the content that you speak or where you'll be presenting and the content you're presenting, uh geez, we talked about a lot. FNO, Business Central, Fabric, Power BI. What's the best way to get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_04:

I mean, it's either through LinkedIn or uh I can share my email uh with you. But as I say, I'm on LinkedIn X. Uh, you can contact me and I'll reply to your messages.

SPEAKER_01:

Excellent, excellent. We'll put a link to your profile as well with the show on the website. Uh, thank you again. Look forward to seeing you. Uh if I don't see you before I'm gonna see you at the end of the year in Nashville, we'll have uh a lot of fun. Uh thank you again.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair. And thank you to our guests for participating.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for join joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlife.com. That is D V L P R L I F E dot com. And you can interact with them via Twitter, D V L P R L I F E. You can also find me at mattalino.io, m-a-t-a-l-in-o.io, and my Twitter handle is mattalino16. And see you can see those links down below in the show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you, and take care.

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Kris

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Brad

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