AI in ERP

Over the last couple of years, most of the conversation around enterprise AI has focused on productivity and building agents. Microsoft 365 Copilot helps employees work with information. Copilot Studio allows organizations to build business agents. Microsoft Foundry gives developers a much deeper engineering platform for building AI applications, models, agents, tools and workflows. But there is another side to this story. Who is protecting this increasingly agentic enterprise? As organizations introduce AI into Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, HR, Operations and other business functions, security also needs to evolve. This is where Microsoft Security and Microsoft's new Project Perception become particularly interesting. Project Perception represents Microsoft's move from security AI that primarily assists security professionals toward an agentic security system that can reason and act across the security environment. Microsoft describes it as a workforce of specialized Re...

Most conversations start with "Should we use Copilot?" But that's a bit like asking "Should we use software?" The real question is: What outcome are we trying to achieve?  Over the past few months, I've been exploring Microsoft's enterprise AI ecosystem and have found that many people use the terms Copilot , Cowork , and Copilot Studio interchangeably. In reality, they represent three very different layers of value. Copilot helps people do work, Cowork does work on behalf of people, and Copilot Studio enables organizations to build AI agents tailored to their business. Together, they form a progressive AI operating model that moves from productivity, to automation, to enterprise-scale agent development. What I find most interesting is how these capabilities build upon each other. Microsoft 365 Copilot sits closest to the employee, helping create content, summarize discussions, analyze information, and improve day-to-day productivity. Cowork then raises ...

Microsoft Foundry is quickly becoming the engineering‑grade backbone for building, deploying, and operationalizing AI systems at scale. Unlike traditional “chatbot builders” or UI‑only agent platforms, Foundry is designed for real developers — people who care about versioning, reproducibility, security boundaries, and clean architecture. At its core, Foundry gives you a unified place to define models, agents, tools, workflows, and evaluations, all backed by Azure’s enterprise‑grade infrastructure. But the real power shows up when you bring Foundry into Visual Studio Code, where everything becomes code‑first, scriptable, automatable, and production‑ready. In this blog, we’ll walk through the setup steps to connect and use your Microsoft Foundry LLm models in VS Code.  Prerequistes: Download and install VS Code -  https://code.visualstudio.com Set up GitHub Copilot in VS Code -  https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/setup Create a Project for Microsoft Foundry -  ...

UDE represents a shift toward treating F&O apps as part of the broader Dynamics 365 and Power Platform ecosystem, simplifying administration and improving productivity. But wait! What if we could take this one step further? What if deploying a UDE‑enabled environment didn’t require building templates in Power Platform Admin Center, exporting JSON, re‑importing configurations, and manually triggering deployments? What if you could simply ask Copilot: “ Deploy a new UDE‑enabled latest release F&O environment for me  in Australia with the name 'Patrick-Dev'. Keep all other settings same as my last sandbox. ” No templates. No PPAC wizard. No repetitive configuration steps. Just a conversational deployment pipeline. No Drama! Introduction Unified Developer Experience (UDE) in the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) is a modern approach for developing, testing, and deploying Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 F&O) applications. It replaces traditional, costly remote...

Microsoft has just introduced Toolboxes in MS Foundry - a managed, versioned bundle of curated tools that any MCP‑compatible agent can consume through a single endpoint, removing per‑agent wiring, centralizing auth, and enabling safer rollouts What is a Toolbox in MS Foundry Toolboxes in MS Foundry lets you define a reusable set of tools once (APIs, MCP servers, connectors, skills, flows), configure authentication centrally, and expose them through a single MCP‑compatible endpoint that agents discover and call at runtime. This removes duplicated integration code and secret sprawl across agents. Read more on toolboxes here . How do Toolboxes Work? Toolboxes are a named, versioned collection of tools you manage inside Microsoft Foundry and expose through a single MCP‑compatible endpoint. Each toolbox groups tools by namespace; tools can be APIs, MCP servers, connectors, skills, or flows. At runtime an agent points to the toolbox endpoint, discovers available tools, and invokes them. Fo...

GitHub Copilot can now review your code directly in VS Code, providing immediate feedback on uncommitted changes. It even adds comments similar to the feedback in a pull request! This local review capability allows developers to catch issues before they even reach version control, improving code quality from the start. And maybe catch those embarrassing typos! Prerequisites Before you can use GitHub Copilot for code reviews, you will need to have the following setup: A GitHub account. (sign up for free at github.com ) An active GitHub Copilot subscription (Individual, Business, or Enterprise). VS Code installed or Visual Studio 2022 17.6 or later installed. GitHub Copilot installed Refer to my previous blog Getting started with GitHub Copilot in VS Code  if you have not setup GitHub Copilot already. Code reviews with GitHub Copilot In VS Code, a fter you have made changes to files in a source controlled repository, o pen the source control panel and ensure there are uncommitted ch...