About
A Microsoft partner that built its own AI layer for Business Central
Smart Agents is built by QUALIA Technik GmbH, a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider headquartered in Cologne, Germany. For more than twenty years our team has implemented, extended, and supported Dynamics NAV and Business Central for distribution, wholesale, and manufacturing customers across the DACH region. We are not a Silicon Valley AI startup learning what a posting group is. We are the partner who has been configuring business logic, supporting month-end closes, and answering ledger questions for two decades -- and Smart Agents is what we built when we got tired of watching the same back-office work get redone on every engagement. The product is written for two audiences we know well. The first is the BC consultant who lives inside customer data and wants AI that respects the permission framework and the AppSource quality bar. The second is the ERP manager who fields the same recurring requests for statement runs, vendor lookups, and journal postings, and wants to redirect them to an assistant that understands their own configured Business Central.
Why we built it inside Business Central, not bolted on outside
Every BC partner has a drawer of recurring work they rebuild for each customer: statement layouts, reminder flows, batch posting helpers, overdue chases, vendor lookups, ad-hoc exports for the CFO. We ship them, document them, train the user, and watch them get forgotten by the next month-end. Meanwhile the market filled with AI products that sit outside the ERP and pretend to understand it: browser bots that break after every update, copy-paste assistants with no security context, and scrapers that fail on the next cumulative update. We did not want another fragile layer between our customers and their ledger. We wanted an assistant that speaks Business Central natively, calls the same data paths our extensions already use, respects the same permissions, and writes through the same validation logic. So we built Smart Agents as a Business Central extension. The chat runs inside BC. Data access uses the signed-in user's own credentials, not a service account. When a consultant asks the agent to run the monthly statement, it uses the same report the consultant already configured. There is no second source of truth, no screen recording, no external dependency to break. There is one extension, signed by us, installed in the tenant, managed like every other app in your environment.
Our four operating rules for AI that touches ledger data
AppSource validation is not a marketing line for us. Every release goes through Microsoft's technical review before a single customer installs it, and that discipline shapes how we let an agent behave. Four operating rules sit underneath the product. First, action scoping: an agent only sees the actions and data sources an administrator has explicitly assigned to it. There is no implicit access to the rest of Business Central. Second, user-scoped sessions: every conversation is tied to the signed-in user, and every data access request honours that user's BC permissions. The agent can never do more than the user. Third, full audit trail: every action is logged with parameters, result, duration, credits consumed, user, and timestamp. Compliance teams can reconstruct who asked the agent to do what, reviewable from BC like any other activity log. Fourth, data residency: customer data stays inside the BC tenant. Only the minimised, redacted content needed for a given turn is sent for AI processing. Prompts are not used for training, and administrators choose the performance tier per agent. We are a Business Central vendor first. The governance posture follows from that.
How we engineer this like a Business Central extension -- because it is one
Smart Agents is shipped under the same engineering discipline our consultants apply to every customer project. The extension is structured, documented, and tested to the standard any BC reviewer would expect. Automated test coverage validates the chat flow, the credit reservation cycle, and the secure connection to the managed service. Every release goes through Microsoft AppSource technical validation before publication, which means signed packages, upgrade scripts, dependency declarations, and translation files are all reviewed externally, not just by us. We follow semantic versioning. The change log is maintained per release and published on our website and inside BC through the extension management page. When we change how an action works or update a configuration contract, we ship the change, log it, and version-gate the migration. This is what BC partners and customers expect from an AppSource publisher, and it is what we apply to ourselves. The extension you install today is built by people who will still be supporting it on the same release cadence in twelve months.
What is shipping, what is on the roadmap, and how to reach us
Smart Agents reaches general availability in April 2026 on Business Central 26.0, with four channels (BC chat, Microsoft Teams, Web, and Email), thirty-two role-based agent templates, four performance tiers (Fast, Smart, Expert, Premium), usage-based billing with complimentary starter credits for every new tenant, and the four governance controls described above. The roadmap, without committing to dates we cannot guarantee: more templates beyond the current thirty-two, with service management, project accounting, and manufacturing shop-floor scenarios next in line; deeper agent-to-agent delegation so a coordinator can hand work to specialists within a single user conversation; broader on-premises parity for customers whose compliance requirements keep cloud channels off the table; and the formal certifications that enterprise procurement teams ask for. We stay honest on this site and in our release notes about what is shipped, what is in preview, and what is still in design. If there is a Business Central workflow eating your week, we would rather hear about it than guess. Bring us your worst back-office task and tell us what should never have been manual in the first place. We will tell you honestly whether an agent can help.