During Community Summit in Charlotte, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Morton, VP at Microsoft and head of Business Central for a chat about the product and much more. Check it out:
In this interview recorded at the Community Summit conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, Erik sits down with Mike Morton, the head of Business Central at Microsoft, to discuss a wide range of topics — from AI integration and the future of GP customers, to Microsoft Fabric, the developer experience, and Mike’s own journey learning AL development. It’s a candid, far-reaching conversation that touches on strategy, technology, and what’s coming next for the Business Central ecosystem.
Hearing Directly from End Users
Mike Morton explains why attending a conference like Community Summit — which is focused on end users rather than partners — is particularly valuable. While Microsoft regularly engages with partners and larger enterprise customers, events like this provide a rare opportunity to talk with a diverse range of customers: small, mid-sized, and large businesses across different industries.
The key difference? When feedback comes from partners, it’s filtered through their perspective. When it comes directly from end users — the people on the keyboard every day — the insights are different. Users bring deep expertise in their specific area of the product and often ask questions that even the product team can’t immediately answer. Seeing how people actually use the software in their workflows provides invaluable motivation and direction for the team.
AI in Business Central: Practical, Not Flashy
One of the major themes from the conference is AI. Mike acknowledges that while there’s enormous excitement about AI among customers, there’s also a lot of uncertainty. Expectations range from “it won’t do much” to “it will change everything.” Microsoft’s challenge is to deliver AI in a way that customers understand, trust, and value.
Importantly, the Business Central team isn’t taking a “sprinkle AI everywhere” approach. Instead, they’re starting with the core jobs that users do every day — creating sales quotes, posting invoices, managing finances, reconciling bank accounts — and asking how AI can make those tasks more efficient.
The bank reconciliation feature in BC23 is highlighted as a great example of practical AI. Unlike the marketing text generation feature, which serves more as a technology demonstration, bank reconciliation is something nearly every customer does, and automating it delivers immediate, tangible value.
From Auto-Complete to Auto-Suggest
Mike frames the AI opportunity not as “auto-complete” but as “auto-suggest.” Consider creating a sales quote: the system might already have email history with the customer, historical purchase data, information about what other similar customers buy, and seasonal trends. AI could pre-fill a quote with high-probability suggestions, and the user simply confirms or corrects — much like how GitHub Copilot suggests code that may not be perfectly right but provides tremendous inspiration and acceleration.
Another example: creating item categories. If you’re setting up a new product line for laptops, AI could immediately suggest categories like processor, memory, disk space, and screen size. Or imagine taking a picture of an item and having AI pre-fill the relevant information. Even old scenarios like OCR get dramatically better — if the system can’t quite read something on a scanned document, contextual knowledge about the customer might let it infer that the partially-readable text refers to “the Amsterdam chair.”
The Evolution of AI Models
Mike also explains the technological shift. Previous AI features in Business Central — like demand forecasting and cash flow prediction — relied on training models with large amounts of historical data. That approach still works well and will continue. But the new generation of large language models enables “zero-shot” or “one-shot” scenarios where you don’t need massive training data because the models start from a broad base of knowledge. This makes AI much more democratized and accessible, and Microsoft plans to combine both approaches for the best results.
The Future of GP Customers
There are many GP customers at the conference, and many are still uncertain about their path forward. Mike is straightforward about the situation: GP has been a great product, and there’s no reason to panic. Microsoft continues to maintain it with updates, regulatory features, security fixes, and even some small feature additions driven by community feedback.
However, Microsoft’s major investments — including AI, modern integrations, and platform innovation — are going into Business Central and the broader Dynamics 365 finance and supply chain products. Mike’s recommendation is clear: if you’re running GP, there’s no need to rush, but it’s a good time to start evaluating your future. Time moves fast, and the gap between GP and modern solutions will only grow.
Microsoft has been actively bringing GP capabilities into Business Central to ease the transition. Features like statistical accounts, GL entry allocation items, and analysis views (based on GP’s SmartList concept) have been added specifically to address GP customer needs. Interestingly, many existing Business Central customers who’ve never used GP are excited about these features too.
Mike emphasizes that there are many partners who have successfully moved GP customers to Business Central, and Microsoft is committed to supporting that journey — getting customers onto a modern solution that will serve them for the next 10, 20, or even 50 years.
Microsoft’s Product Strategy and the BC Platform
Erik raises an interesting question: with new products spinning out of Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and CRM, is anyone knocking on Business Central’s door wanting to use its technology stack for something completely different?
Mike provides strategic context. A few years ago, Microsoft was introducing many separate products — Intelligent Order Management, Supply Chain Center, Fraud Protection — and it became overwhelming for customers and the field. The current strategy is simplification: essentially, Microsoft has its sales product, its service products (customer service and field service), Power Platform, and ERP, where they have two products — Business Central and the finance/supply chain suite.
From a platform perspective, there are three platforms in the Dynamics ecosystem: Dataverse (foundation for customer engagement and service), the finance and supply chain platform (X++), and the Business Central platform. All three have bright futures. Dataverse is the most universal at a Microsoft level, but the BC platform excels at being the fastest to deploy, most flexible, and truly built for cloud scale with many customers.
Mike also pushes back gently on the idea that Business Central is “just one product.” While it’s sold as one offering, BC does a tremendous amount. The strategic decision has been to keep it as a suite rather than splitting it into separately-sold modules, partly because licensing is already complex enough.
Microsoft Fabric and the Future of Analytics
Fabric is generating significant buzz in the hallways at the conference. Mike explains that Business Central customers have many data-related needs: archiving historical data, building data lakes, combining data from multiple systems, and creating consistent analytics and Power BI access.
Fabric is Microsoft’s unified foundation for how data gets worked with, managed, transformed, and modeled. For Business Central, it will provide a long-term, sustainable infrastructure for scenarios like getting BC data into a data lake. While there’s already an excellent open-source solution for this today (which Microsoft recommends), Fabric will be the strategic path forward.
More broadly, Mike signals that the team’s passion for analytics and reporting is huge. Looking back three or four years, BC’s reporting capabilities were arguably stuck in the 1980s and 1990s — adequate for printed documents and PDFs, but not much more. The mission now is to make Business Central the absolute leader in analytics and reporting for its segment. Features like analysis views, the new Report Center, and Excel layouts are just the beginning, with much more to come.
Mike’s Journey Learning AL Development
In a lighter segment, Mike shares his experience learning AL development — partly inspired by watching Erik’s YouTube channel. He deliberately avoided asking his team for help, relying solely on Bing, Google, and the AL language documentation to build his first extension.
With a solid development background in C, C++, TypeScript, and C#, Mike found the experience fascinating. Some things puzzled him initially — like why object ranges exist — but he was also impressed by how much can be accomplished through metadata and how polished the VS Code experience is.
This wasn’t just an academic exercise. Microsoft uses the term “dogfooding” — using their own product internally. Mike was building a real PTE (per-tenant extension) to track internal engagements using Business Central: adding fields, changing views, and creating workflows. Not rocket science, but a real-world application.
The Developer Experience Getting Noticed
The work Microsoft’s modern development team has done with VS Code, Git integration, debugging, auto-complete, and the overall coding experience has apparently caught the attention of other Dynamics product teams. Mike confirms that other divisions have come to learn from the BC team’s approach.
Erik shares a relevant anecdote: his team recently onboarded a developer straight out of university who was productive in AL within a couple of weeks — a testament to the platform’s accessibility.
The Biggest Learning Curve: The Application Itself
Both Mike and Erik agree that the biggest challenge for new developers isn’t the AL language or the tooling — it’s understanding the massive application itself. There are fields that should never be modified directly because hidden codeunits handle them, methods whose names don’t imply all their side effects, and vast amounts of tribal knowledge that isn’t documented anywhere.
Mike outlines Microsoft’s plan to address this: dramatically improving the core documentation of the application, including better documentation of methods and their side effects, and creating guides for the 10-15 most common development scenarios. He also emphasizes the importance of connecting junior developers with mentors in the community to pass on institutional knowledge.
Conclusion
This interview paints a picture of a Business Central team that is deeply focused on practical customer value — whether through AI that solves real everyday problems, analytics capabilities that are being modernized from the ground up, or a developer platform that continues to impress even Microsoft’s own product leadership. For GP customers, the message is compassionate but clear: start planning your future. For the broader BC community, the message is one of continued investment, simplification, and a genuine desire to listen — which is exactly why conversations like this one matter.
