You just spent thousands on a third-party Business Central extension that promises to revolutionize your project management—but day one, your team is paralyzed by questions. “How do I create a project?” “What does this field even mean?” “What permissions do I need?” Your inbox fills with support requests, your implementation partner’s queue grows longer, and your expensive new tool sits unused while everyone waits for answers that should be instant but take hours or days to get.
Microsoft’s Business Central 2025 Release Wave 2 eliminates this friction with a game-changing enhancement to Copilot Chat. Now, Copilot can answer questions about your installed third-party extensions using their documentation—automatically, instantly, and without leaving Business Central.
The Gap That’s Been Slowing You Down
Copilot Chat has been helpful for questions about standard Business Central functionality, pulling answers from Microsoft Learn documentation. But the moment someone asked about a third-party extension—project management add-ons, specialized inventory tools, industry-specific functionality—Copilot hit a wall. It simply didn’t have access to partner documentation.
Users couldn’t get help where they actually needed it most. Third-party extensions often introduce new concepts, unique workflows, and specialized terminology that aren’t covered in Microsoft’s documentation. When Copilot couldn’t answer these questions, users fell back on the same old support channels: emails to implementation partners, tickets to software vendors, or that one person in the office who somehow knows everything.
That bottleneck doesn’t just slow down individual users—it delays implementations, reduces adoption of valuable extensions, and creates support costs that accumulate quickly.
How the Enhanced Copilot Chat Works
The solution is simple. Copilot Chat now searches the web via Bing to find documentation for your installed extensions, pulling answers directly from partner websites and presenting them right inside Business Central.
Here’s what happens: Copilot recognizes you’re asking about third-party functionality based on your installed extensions. It searches Bing’s index for relevant documentation from the partner’s website. It finds the answer, verifies the source, and presents it to you with clear attribution showing exactly where the information came from. You can click through to the partner’s website for more detail if needed.
All of this happens in seconds, without leaving Business Central, without opening a browser tab, and without submitting a support ticket.
Example: Project Management Extension
Let’s walk through a scenario using Fabricam Project Management, a fictitious third-party extension that adds project task and resource management capabilities.
Question 1: “What is Fabricam Project Management?”
Previously, Copilot couldn’t answer this—it’s not a Microsoft product. Now, Copilot searches the partner’s documentation and responds: “Fabricam Project Management adds lightweight project task, resource pool, role, and allocation management to Dynamics 365 Business Central.” The answer includes a reference showing it came from the Fabricam website, with a clickable link for more detail.
Question 2: “How do I create a project?”
Copilot provides detailed step-by-step guidance pulled directly from Fabricam’s documentation. You get the same quality of instruction you’d expect from Microsoft Learn articles, but for third-party functionality. The answer includes the “Powered by Bing” notation showing the search source.
Question 3: “What is the pool code field for?”
As you’re creating a project, you encounter an unfamiliar field. Rather than stopping to search through documentation, you ask Copilot. It explains: “The pool code field links the project to a default resource pool for the planning context.” Copilot can even surface reference documentation that explains how different fields work.
Question 4: “What permissions do I need to assign to grant read-only access to projects?”
Copilot responds immediately: “You need to assign the FPM project viewer permission set.” The answer includes a reference to the partner’s permission documentation where you can see the complete table of available permission sets.
One-Step Setup, Zero Ongoing Configuration
This capability works out of the box with minimal setup. Administrators simply enable Bing search on the Copilot and agent capabilities page—the same place where you control other Copilot features. That’s it. One toggle switch.
Once enabled, Copilot automatically searches for documentation from all your installed AppSource extensions that have provided documentation links. There’s no per-extension configuration, no mapping of which documentation goes with which extension, no maintenance required when you install new extensions.
For extensions from AppSource, everything is automatic. For privately developed extensions (PTEs), you just need to provide the documentation URL in the help URL field.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
This enhancement removes one of the biggest barriers to third-party extension adoption and success.
Faster Onboarding: New users get productive with extensions immediately instead of waiting for training or support. When questions arise during actual work, answers are instant and contextual.
Reduced Support Costs: Every question answered by Copilot is one less support ticket to your implementation partner or the extension vendor. For organizations with multiple extensions or large user bases, this adds significant savings.
Higher Extension ROI: When users can actually use extensions effectively without friction, you realize investment value faster and more completely. Features that might have been ignored due to confusion become part of normal workflows.
Better Decision-Making: When users understand how to leverage extension capabilities fully, they make better decisions about when and how to use those tools.
Reduced Implementation Partner Dependency: Your team becomes more self-sufficient with extension functionality, reserving partner engagement for truly complex issues rather than basic “how do I” questions.
Content That Helps Users Helps Copilot
For extension developers and implementation partners, this creates an interesting opportunity. The better your documentation, the more effectively Copilot can help your users.
Partner documentation that’s clear, well-structured, and addresses common questions becomes dramatically more valuable. Users can now find that content through conversational questions to Copilot rather than only through deliberate searches.
Documentation investments pay double dividends—helping users who deliberately seek information while also powering AI-assisted help for users who might never have thought to search documentation directly.
Safety and Privacy Considerations
When Copilot starts searching the web on your behalf, legitimate questions arise about data security and privacy.
What data gets sent to Bing? Only curated search terms derived from your question to Copilot Chat. Your actual Business Central data never leaves your environment. Copilot constructs search queries based on your question and installed extensions but doesn’t send sensitive business information.
Where does the data go? The Bing service operates in the US, and search data is retained for less than 24 hours.
Can the web access Copilot or Business Central? No. Copilot can connect to the web to retrieve documentation, but external websites cannot connect back to Copilot or your Business Central environment. It’s a one-way connection for information retrieval only.
What about AI safety? Both inputs and outputs go through multiple safety checks from security perspectives and reduce risks of AI-generated harmful content.
Does This Cost Extra?
No. Using Bing search within Copilot Chat doesn’t cost more. There are no one-time charges, no ongoing service fees, and no per-query costs. If you have Copilot Chat available in Business Central, this enhanced capability is included.
Implementation Considerations
While the technical setup is simple, getting organizational value requires planning:
Document your extensions: If you’ve developed custom extensions internally or through partners, ensure they have good documentation available at a public URL. This is the foundation that makes Copilot’s enhanced capabilities useful.
Train users on Copilot: Users need to know Copilot can now answer extension questions. Don’t assume they’ll discover this organically—explicitly communicate the new capability and encourage its use during extension rollouts.
Set expectations appropriately: Copilot is reading documentation, not replacing it. For complex scenarios, deep troubleshooting, or unique configurations, users may still need to engage support resources. Copilot handles 80% of straightforward questions.
Monitor adoption: Pay attention to whether users are asking Copilot questions about extensions. If adoption is low, investigate whether documentation quality, user awareness, or other factors are limiting usage.
The Broader Trend: AI That Understands Your Ecosystem
This enhancement represents a broader trend in how AI assistants are evolving. Early AI tools operated within narrow bounds—they knew what they were explicitly trained on and nothing more. Modern AI tools can reach beyond their initial training to access information relevant to your specific environment.
This is particularly important in the ERP context, where every organization’s Business Central environment is unique based on installed extensions, industry requirements, and custom functionality. An AI assistant that only knows about vanilla Business Central isn’t serving the environments most users actually work in.
By connecting Copilot to the broader ecosystem of partner documentation, Microsoft has made it dramatically more useful for real-world Business Central implementations.
Ready to Unlock Copilot’s Full Potential?
The enhanced Copilot Chat capability in Business Central 2025 Release Wave 2 transforms how users interact with third-party extensions. When questions get instant answers, when documentation is conversationally accessible, and when support bottlenecks disappear, your investment in Business Central extensions pays off faster and more completely.
The organizations that will benefit most are those with multiple third-party extensions, large user bases, or frequent onboarding of new team members—exactly the scenarios where documentation accessibility becomes critical to success.
At CAL Business Solutions, we help organizations implement and optimize Business Central along with the ecosystem of extensions that make it truly powerful for specific industries and use cases. Our team understands both the technical capabilities and the practical challenges of getting teams productive with new functionality.
Ready to see how enhanced Copilot Chat and other Business Central 2025 Release Wave 2 features can reduce support burden and accelerate user adoption? We’re here to help you evaluate these capabilities and develop an implementation strategy that delivers measurable improvements in user productivity.
Contact us today to learn more about leveraging Business Central’s enhanced Copilot capabilities.
By CAL Business Solutions Inc., Connecticut Acumatica & Microsoft Dynamics GP / 365 BC Partner, www.calszone.com
