What’s planned for 2025 Wave 2, BC27

It’s that time of year, Microsoft has revealed the content of Business Central 2025 Wave 2. In this video, I take a look at the list and try to figure out what’s cooking. Check out the video:

https://youtu.be/Na1Kw1RCWTs

In this video, Erik walks through Microsoft’s published plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 2 (BC27), covering what’s expected to ship between October 2025 and March 2026. He reviews each section of the release plan — from Copilot and AI agents to development tools, financial management, supply chain, and sustainability — offering candid commentary on what looks promising, what feels underwhelming, and what’s conspicuously absent.

The Wave 2 Timeline

As Erik reminds us, this is a “wave” release — features will roll out incrementally from October 2025 through March 2026, at which point BC28 will be on the horizon (April 2026). He’s also quick to note that the published list is almost certainly incomplete at this stage. Microsoft typically adds more items as the release date approaches, so it’s worth bookmarking the page and checking back.

Copilot and AI Agents

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft leads with Copilot and agent features. Here’s what’s on the list:

  • Give more instructions for the agent when you review its task — Erik notes this aligns with work he’s been doing on his own AI Accountant app, where giving end users the ability to provide instructions to AI is critical.
  • Enhanced Sales Order Agent — More tasks are being added: attachment processing, support for multiple ship-to addresses, capable-to-promise responses, automatic email processing, and the ability to resume with user input.
  • Suggest gas emissions in sustainability journals with Copilot — Copilot integration for the sustainability module.
  • Enhanced Chat with Copilot — This is one Erik finds genuinely interesting. The key improvement is support for 20+ additional languages beyond English, along with better understanding of multi-sentence prompts, faster performance, and increased reliability.
  • Better autofill field suggestions — Erik acknowledges the concept but admits he hasn’t found autofill particularly useful yet.
  • Connect AI agents to Business Central through MCP servers — MCP (Model Context Protocol) provides a unified way to define web services that AI systems can consume. If you’re working with ChatGPT, Claude, or other external AI tools, you can expose Business Central functionality through an MCP server so the external AI can look up data and perform operations within BC. Erik mentioned he’s planning videos on building an MCP server that connects to Business Central.
  • Use AI resources for your Copilot extensions — Microsoft wants ISV publishers to use Microsoft-managed Azure OpenAI resources rather than requiring customers to manage their own subscriptions. Erik is fine with paying for resources in principle, but takes issue with the message pack pricing model: you buy 20,000 messages per month, and unused messages don’t roll over. He finds this structure problematic.
  • Enhanced Analysis Assist — Moving from preview to general availability, with a new system permission set and the ability to ask Copilot to include fields from related tables.
  • Summarize with Copilot enhancements — Erik has strong opinions here. The summary FactBox currently occupies prime real estate on pages like the Customer Card, but often just restates fields already visible on the page. He’s hoping for deeper intelligence — for example, telling you that a customer is in your top five, or that they’re consistently late on payments — rather than simply reformatting existing data.

Country and Regional

Business Central is currently available in approximately 156 countries, and 14 more are being added. Of particular interest to Erik:

  • Install UK localization as an extension to the base app — As a Canadian user, Erik highlights that many Canadian companies also have UK subsidiaries. The UK’s Making Tax Digital requirements have a dedicated app, but it’s only been available on the UK version. Since the Canadian version can run UK companies just fine, making the UK localization available as extensions on the W1 base app could mean these apps become installable on Canadian (and other) versions.
  • Submit US 1099 forms electronically to the IRS
  • Australian Payment Times Reporting Bill compliance
  • UI improvements for unreliable payers for Czechia

Development Experience

This is typically the section Erik finds most interesting — but this time the list is remarkably short:

  • Extend Copilot autofill using AL
  • Extend Copilot summary using AL

In essence, Microsoft has added two events — one for the autofill feature and one for summaries — allowing AL developers to subscribe and add custom logic. That’s it for the development section so far. Erik is hoping the list grows as we get closer to release.

For reference, here’s the standard scaffolding of a BC AL extension — what you’d start with before subscribing to any of these new events:

namespace DefaultPublisher.WhatsNewinBC25;

using Microsoft.Sales.Customer;

pageextension 50100 CustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage();
    begin

    end;
}

And the corresponding app.json for the extension:

{
  "id": "27b30fa5-54ff-41af-9ef5-bcd41dfc5377",
  "name": "WhatsNewinBC25",
  "publisher": "Default Publisher",
  "version": "1.0.0.0",
  "platform": "1.0.0.0",
  "application": "25.0.0.0",
  "idRanges": [
    {
      "from": 50100,
      "to": 50149
    }
  ],
  "runtime": "14.1",
  "features": [
    "NoImplicitWith"
  ]
}

E-Commerce (Shopify)

  • Enable staff-to-salesperson mapping for Shopify use orders
  • Synchronize market-specific prices with Shopify
  • Define sell-to and bill-to customer details per company location

Erik notes these look like very specific asks from the community — detailed, targeted functionality.

Electronic Documents

  • Admin permission set for e-documents
  • E-documents for shipment and transfer shipment document types
  • Clearance model setup in the e-documents framework

Financial Management

  • Create multiple fixed asset cards — Buy 10 of something, get 10 fixed asset cards created. A practical quality-of-life improvement.
  • Print the audit trail report — A new report showing detailed information from the GL Register and GL Entry tables. Erik notes this seems like it should already exist and suspects the feature description was heavily AI-assisted (lots of words, not much substance).
  • Accounts Payable Role Center — A new role center centralizing AP-related documents and tasks, likely connected to the accounts payable agent.
  • Calculate excise taxes — A new feature that caught Erik off guard, as he wasn’t previously aware of excise tax requirements in Canada.

Reporting and Data Analysis

  • Enhanced financial reporting — Run financial reports on a schedule and receive output via email, run reports across all dimension values, edit row definitions in Excel, and move/demote fields. Erik notes that several of these features overlap with what his own Advanced Finance Reporting app already does, so he’ll need to ensure his app continues to add value on top of the base functionality.
  • Enhanced purchase analysis — New Power BI reports for purchasing.
  • Enhanced sales analysis — New Power BI reports for sales.

Supply Chain Management

  • Subcontracting capabilities in production processes — New functionality for the manufacturing module, which is great to see for premium users.
  • Evaluate quality of incoming goods and materials — Another premium-tier feature, notably being released as a separate extension. It will auto-install on newly deployed environments, but for upgrades you’ll need to install from AppSource.

Erik raises an interesting point about this extension-based delivery model. While he understands Microsoft’s rationale (avoid disrupting existing environments, as happened with subscription billing), it contributes to “bloatware.” He suggests that when creating new environments, users should be able to choose between a full demo environment and a minimal production environment, then selectively add the Microsoft apps they actually need rather than installing everything and then uninstalling what they don’t want.

Sustainability Management

The sustainability module, introduced a couple of versions ago, continues to receive updates. Erik appreciates that Microsoft is actually investing in improving the module rather than letting it languish — unlike some other Microsoft products that got introduced and then quietly abandoned (Paint 3D, Movie Maker, etc.).

The Mystery of the “Maker” Role

Erik noticed something curious in the “Enabled for” column of the release plan. Some features are listed as being for “admins, makers, or analysts.” His question: who in the Business Central ecosystem is a “maker”? Is it a developer? A Power Platform user? A citizen developer? The documentation doesn’t clearly define it, and Erik invites viewers to weigh in.

Summary

BC27 is shaping up to be what Erik describes as a “quiet release” — and he means that as a compliment. Rather than sweeping new features, this wave focuses on incremental improvements (+0.1 updates) across many areas: Copilot getting smarter and supporting more languages, financial reporting becoming more flexible, manufacturing gaining subcontracting and quality inspection, and the sustainability module maturing further. The development section is disappointingly thin so far (just two new events), but the list is expected to grow. The introduction of MCP server support is a genuinely exciting development for connecting external AI tools to Business Central. Keep an eye on the release plan page — Microsoft will almost certainly be adding more items as October approaches.

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