An agent is not a strategy
Every board pack this year has a slide about Copilot. Very few have a named process, a human owner, and a rule for what the agent is forbidden to post. That is how you buy a demo and inherit a control failure.
On a global Dynamics 365 programme the temptation is worse. HQ turns agents on in one company. Country teams copy the prompt. Master data was never the same. The agent is consistently wrong in four currencies. We start from the process, not the model.
Where an agent earns its keep
Collections, bank reconciliation and order intake share a shape: high volume, clear rules, and a human decision only on the exceptions. An agent can draft the chase, match the statement line, or turn a mailbox into a sales order. A named person still releases the posting.
Those three processes pay for themselves because the alternative is headcount that does not scale when you add a country. An agent that proposes, with the ledger as the system of record, adds capacity without adding a new book.
Where it must not touch
Anything that posts without an approval step. Tax, payroll, a write-off, a vendor bank change, a journal that hits retained earnings. The agent proposes. A named person disposes. That is not caution for its own sake. It is what your auditor will ask for, in Nairobi and in the group audit.
We will not put an agent on a process whose master data is still a debate. Customer records, dimensions, payment terms and bank accounts have to be boring before the agent is useful. If they are inconsistent, the agent will be consistently wrong, faster than a clerk.
Readiness before licences
We assess the data and the approval design before we recommend an agent. That assessment is part of the same programme as the template: one chart, one dimension set, one security model, then automation. Turning Copilot on in a tenant that still closes in Excel does not make you an AI company. It makes the spreadsheet faster to fill.
If you want agents on a Dynamics 365 estate that already spans countries, start with the three processes and the guardrails. We will tell you, plainly, which of them you are ready for.