A Business Central consultant's first week with Smart Agents

This is the plan we hand to CSP partners on their first Smart Agents engagement. It assumes you are a BC functional consultant running a five-day onboarding for a mid-size tenant. No marketing fluff and no demo-room theatre, just the order of operations that actually works.

DAY 1, MORNING: INSTALL

Open Business Central in the customer's tenant as an admin. Search the AppSource extension marketplace for Smart Agents (publisher: QUALIA Technik GmbH, extension ID 776a67fc-e35b-45f7-8e97-ec0bc6cb9077). Click Get it now and accept the permission prompt. The extension declares object range to , so you should not see any conflicts unless the tenant has another publisher squatting that range.

For on-premises tenants, drop the signed .app file into the BC server folder and run Publish-NAVApp + Install-NAVApp through PowerShell. The on-prem path is supported and tested but it does require the BC server to be allowed outbound HTTPS to the QUALIA backend; an air-gapped install is not in scope.

Once installed, the extension brings two permission sets: SMART AGENTS USER and SMART AGENTS ADMIN. Assign yourself both. Open the search bar and type Smart Agent Setup to confirm it loads.

DAY 1, AFTERNOON: SETUP WIZARD

The Smart Agent Install codeunit runs the setup wizard automatically the first time an admin opens the Smart Agent Setup page. It walks you through three things: the backend URL, the API key, and the default model tier.

For production, store the API key in Azure Key Vault and point the wizard at the vault URI rather than pasting it into the BC field. Grant the BC tenant's app registration read access to the secret. Run Test Connection before leaving the wizard. If the test fails, the BC event log under source Smart Agents will tell you the exact error; the most common ones are a stale API key, outbound HTTPS blocked to the backend, or a clock skew on an on-prem server.

Register yourself and one power user on the client side as Smart Agent Users. Send one message from the Smart Agent Chat page: "What are my top ten customers by sales this year?" If a table comes back, the install is done. If not, check the event log.

DAY 2: PICK AND CUSTOMIZE A TEMPLATE

Open Smart Agent Templates from the Smart Agents list page. The Smart Agent Templates codeunit ships 32 role-based starting points. The full list lives in the source at lines 24 through 215; we counted them ourselves and so can you with a single grep. Categories include BC data agents (Sales Invoice Manager, Customer 360 View, Financial Reporter, Vendor 360 View, G/L Journal Manager, Bank Reconciliation Agent and seventeen more), web search agents, knowledge base agents, and general-purpose agents (Business Writing Assistant, Excel Formula Helper, Process Documentation Agent).

Do not try to activate them all at once. Pick one template that maps to a real workflow the client runs daily. For wholesale distribution that is usually Customer 360 View or the statement workflow inside Sales Invoice Manager. For manufacturing it is often Stock Lookup Agent or Bank Reconciliation Agent. The template you pick first will set the tenant's first impression of the product.

Duplicate the template; you cannot modify the shipped originals. Then edit three things on the duplicate. First, the system prompt: add the client's fiscal calendar, their escalation thresholds ("flag anything over fifty thousand euros"), and their internal naming conventions. Second, the data scope on the Smart Agent Tool Link subpage: if the template ships with access to forty tables and the workflow only needs eight, remove the rest. Tighter scope means tighter audit. Third, the suggested prompts: write three that match real questions the client's team asks on Mondays.

Activate the duplicate, send three test messages, and inspect the SA Tool Call Log entries for each one. Verify the data scope only touched the tables you expected.

DAY 3: BUILD ONE CUSTOM AGENT

This is where the tenant gets its first fingerprint. From the Smart Agents list page, choose New. Pick one workflow that the client keeps asking you to report on but that no template quite covers. For a wholesaler, it is often "top twenty customers whose margin dropped year-over-year." For a manufacturer it is "items below reorder point grouped by primary vendor."

Write the system prompt like you are writing a runbook for a new hire. What the agent does. What it does not do. What output format to use. What to flag for human review. Keep it under three hundred words; the Smart Agent Instruction Validator enforces a soft cap and will warn you if the prompt is unwieldy. Scope the data sources to the minimum tables.

Set the model tier to Fast for the first version. If the answers are too shallow, bump to Smart on the second pass. Do not start at Expert or Premium because you will double or quadruple the credit burn before you know whether the cheaper tier was sufficient. The credit math is in the related blog post on credits.

DAY 4: GOVERNANCE WALKTHROUGH WITH IT

Bring the IT or ERP manager into a one-hour call. Open the SA Tool Call Log page (, tool call log API). Walk through a live query you just ran. Show them the user, the timestamp, the agent, the tool, the data scope, the token counts, and the credit cost.

Then open the data access subpage on a Smart Agent card and show them table-level restrictions. Then open one agent and flip its autonomy setting from "ask before write" to "execute" and back, so they can see the difference. Then show them the audit retention configuration on the Smart Agent Setup page.

Governance objections usually die in this meeting. What the IT lead cared about was not "can AI do things" but "can we see what it did and constrain it." The answer is yes, with a row in a BC table per action. They have signed off on similar tables for years.

DAY 5: TRAIN TWO POWER USERS, NOT EVERYONE

Pick two end users on the customer side. Give them the SMART AGENTS USER permission set. Walk them through the chat page, the template you customized on day 2, and the custom agent you built on day 3. Leave them with five prompts that work today.

Do not try to train the entire client team on day five. The rollout pattern that actually works is lateral. Those two users show their teammates the three prompts that save them the most time, and adoption grows organically from there. You come back in two weeks to tune the system prompts based on what the audit log shows the users actually asked.

ROLLOUT TO FIVE TENANTS

For a CSP partner managing several customer tenants, the same five-day plan compresses for tenants two through five because the templates you customized for tenant one usually transfer. Export the customized agents as JSON via the Smart Agent Agents API, import into the next tenant, adjust the fiscal calendar and the escalation thresholds, and you are at day three of the plan in half a day. The 32 templates are the starting point; your customized library becomes your differentiator.

See /docs/getting-started for the install steps in detail and /docs/user-guide for the chat workflow.