Community Summit North America returned to the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville from October 11 to 15, bringing thousands of Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform users, partners, and Microsoft product leaders together for five days of learning across more than 600 sessions. ACE Micro was there as part of that community, and for our team the week offered a chance to hear directly from Microsoft about where Business Central and the wider Dynamics 365 platform are heading, while spending time with the Dynamics GP and Business Central customers whose decisions shape our work every day.
Mark Munson on the question every GP customer is asking
ACE Micro President Mark Munson led an education session on Monday morning, October 12, titled Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?, which took on the decision most Dynamics GP organizations are working through in one form or another: whether to migrate to Business Central now or to hold off a little longer. The session sat in Summit’s Migrating and Training and User Adoption tracks, and it was designed for finance and operations leaders who want a clear way to weigh that choice for their own business rather than a pitch for one answer over the other.
Mark laid out the case for moving sooner by walking through the risks that grow as GP approaches the end of its support life, along with what organizations gain from a cloud ERP that updates automatically, connects more tightly with Microsoft 365 and Power BI, and opens the door to Copilot and the AI agents Microsoft continues to build into Business Central. He also pointed to the quieter benefits of an earlier move, including lower IT overhead, easier scaling as the business grows, and relief from the growing difficulty of finding people who can maintain an aging GP environment.
He was just as candid about why some organizations reasonably choose to wait. GP mainstream support runs through December 31, 2029, with security updates continuing until April 30, 2031, so a company with a stable environment, a tight budget, heavy customizations, ISV dependencies, or a complicated data history may be better served by a deliberate timeline that leaves room for planning, budgeting, and change management. The catch is that waiting slowly raises exposure to security, cost, and competitive risk, which is why the heart of the session was a practical decision framework, supported by roadmaps for immediate, phased, and dual-use transitions to Business Central.
That balanced approach reflects how we handle these conversations with our own clients, and it fit the wider mood among GP attendees in Nashville. The GP programming this year leaned into getting more value out of the systems customers already own, the traditional GP keynote gave way to a community-led state of the union, and several sessions explored migration paths to Business Central and beyond. If you couldn’t make it to Mark’s session and are weighing the same decision, our GP-to-BC Migration Complexity Assessment is a good place to start, and our team is always glad to talk it through.
Microsoft’s opening message: workflows, governance, and outcomes
The Monday keynote set a tone that carried through the week, pairing Microsoft’s agentic AI vision with customer stories grounded in very familiar ERP challenges. MSDynamicsWorld’s coverage noted that while Microsoft encouraged customers to think about new kinds of AI-supported process transformation, the customers on stage spoke mostly about modernizing core systems, rolling out ERP across locations, and cleaning up their data so that future investments in analytics and AI can actually pay off.
Georg Glantschnig, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Dynamics 365 Agentic ERP Applications, offered three guidelines for organizations planning AI initiatives, as reported by Dynamics Communities. He encouraged customers to rethink entire cross-functional workflows rather than individual tasks, to put governance in place so that AI operates within a system of trust, and to start from the business outcome they need by choosing a process, defining success, and scaling as results come in.
The customer examples made that advice concrete. Everon, the fire, safety, and security company spun out of ADT, replaced every one of its systems within twelve months using Dynamics 365 for ERP and CRM among other platforms, and CIO Ryan Fritts said the achievement he valued most was that the company did not lose a single employee to resignation during that demanding year. Barry-Wehmiller, which has been extending Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management across its corporate finance functions, emphasized that clean, consistent data is what lays the groundwork for AI to deliver more value later.
Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar and Leon Welicki, VP and GM of Power Platform, closed the keynote by describing a near future in which AI agents work alongside people as members of a team. They explained that they had prepared their own presentation in a Teams conversation that included both of them and their personal agents, and they showed how agents can be brought into an existing app to handle work such as coding, security reviews, or performance analysis and then switched off once the job is done.
Announcements and product updates from the week
Much of the product news at Summit centered on agents, how they are managed, and how they connect to the data customers already have in Dynamics 365.
In the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement general session, Microsoft’s Mike Morton, product management lead for Dynamics 365 Sales, confirmed that several Sales capabilities have reached general availability, including its MCP Server, four sales-focused agents, and the AI Hub, an in-app interface for managing agents. Sales in Outlook Mobile and new data enrichment features are also now generally available. MSDynamicsWorld reported that the Sales and Service roadmap for Microsoft’s fiscal 2027 will balance core CRM modernization with agentic features, and Morton acknowledged that many companies are not yet ready to switch agents on, which is why Microsoft is giving customers flexibility in how quickly they adopt them.
Work IQ and Copilot Cowork were recurring themes across both the CE keynote and the Agents and Copilot general session. Cowork is the delegated-work experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot, built on the Work IQ intelligence layer, and Microsoft has been extending it with Dynamics 365 integrations across sales, customer service, and ERP so it can support scenarios such as pipeline reviews, case resolution, and order approvals without users switching into Dynamics. Cowork is available to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers on a usage-based billing model, which makes cost governance part of any rollout plan. Several of the ecosystem experts on the MSDW Summit recap podcast singled out Work IQ’s progress as a foundational AI service as one of the developments most likely to matter to customers over the coming year, alongside more traditional concerns like user adoption, security, and business process.
The keynote also highlighted Microsoft’s growing partnership with Lovable, the AI app-building platform, including bringing apps built with Lovable under enterprise IT governance through Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, a sign of how seriously Microsoft is taking the rise of business users building their own tools.
For Business Central customers, Summit landed at the start of the 2026 release wave 2, with Business Central version 29 rolling out from October 2026 through March 2027 in monthly updates. This wave builds on the Payables, Sales Order, and Expense agents and the agent design capabilities introduced earlier in the year, all of which work on a human-in-the-loop basis. One detail matters a great deal for GP customers planning their next step: Business Central agents are available to online customers only, so the AI capabilities Microsoft showcased in Nashville come with a move to the cloud.
What this means for GP and Business Central customers
The clearest takeaway from Nashville is that Microsoft’s investment in AI is flowing into cloud Business Central and Dynamics 365, while the customers getting real value from it are the ones that took care of the fundamentals first, with clean data, well-understood processes, and teams that know why the change is happening. For GP organizations, that does not mean every company has to migrate tomorrow, but it does mean the decision deserves a deliberate plan with real dates attached, which is exactly the conversation Mark set out to start in his session.
We left Summit grateful for the conversations with customers, partners, and the Microsoft team, and energized by how much of the week focused on practical results over hype. If you are weighing your own GP-to-Business Central timeline, or want to understand which of the new Business Central agents could make a difference in your distribution or manufacturing operation, get in touch with ACE Micro and we will help you map out a path that fits your business.