Keynote on AI and Copilot at Tech Days 2024

Introduction

The speaker reflects on the past year's advancements since the last Tech Days event.
Copilot and AI technologies will be core themes of the presentation.
AI's rapid advancement compared to past technologies like the internet and cloud.

Around two years since AI tools like ChatGPT started gaining public attention.
AI is revolutionizing industries and is now a focal point for innovation.
Microsoft has heavily invested in Copilot, integrating it into various tools.
User statistics show high productivity and a preference for continued use of Copilot among early adopters.
Copilot integrates into numerous business processes in Dynamics 365.

AI, as a term, dates back to the 1950s with Alan Turing's early research.
Machine Learning (ML) emerged in the 1970s; it involves training models on data rather than explicit programming.
Deep Learning, a subset of ML, allows models to train themselves, requiring no explicit feature selection.
Generative AI produces new content (text, images, music) and includes large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

Copilot is a brand encompassing all AI-related tools within Microsoft, not just a single technology.
Introduced across multiple platforms (e.g., Business Central, Office 365).

Utilizing AI for Quotes:
- Copilot helps generate sales quotes through natural language interaction, automating product suggestions.
- Hina demonstrates entering sales orders using Copilot to speed up the process and enhance accuracy.
Enhancing Customer Loyalty:
- Extensions created to manage customer loyalty levels, integrating Copilot to suggest relevant discounts based on loyalty tiers.
- Copilot reads and interacts with newly added data from extensions.
Financial Overviews with Copilot:
- Leveraging Copilot to review financial positions, such as customer debt, by generating ad-hoc BI analysis views within Business Central.
- Demonstrated through pivot tables and custom data queries.
Developer Toolkit for Copilot:
- Allows developers to build AI into custom solutions using Microsoft’s developer toolkit for Copilot integration.
- Example shown on how to automate event organization tasks using prompt dialogues.

New feature announced that allows the recording and replaying of user actions within Business Central for automated testing and process replication.
Supports complex scenarios using Power FX for input variation and test suites for reusable building blocks.

Represents the instance of the current object and is useful for scenarios like event registration and subscriber patterns.

Ability to extend and cast between multiple interfaces, enabling more complex object-oriented paradigms in AL programming.
Use cases include combining multiple interfaces within single objects and parameter type checking.

A prototype demonstrated for generating XML comments in code using an AI model designed to understand and describe AL code methods.

Continuing focus on AI, development tools, infrastructure improvements, and product innovation.
New educational resources and video series like “Under the Hood” to explain BC's internal workings and AI integrations.

Graphical overview

For further details on upcoming features and documentation visit [link to resources].