Agent Model in Excel Copilot: A New Way to Work with Business Central Data

If you’ve used Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel, you’re familiar with the sidecar experience — asking questions, getting formula help, and analyzing data in a side panel. But what if Copilot could actually work inside your spreadsheet, make changes, apply logic, and reason through complex data problems on your behalf? That’s exactly what Agent Mode in Excel Copilot does.

AJ Ansari walks through five compelling scenarios that show just how powerful this preview feature can be, especially for Business Central users.

Key Takeaways

• Agent Mode is a preview feature requiring admin enablement: It’s part of the Microsoft 365 Frontier program and must be turned on by a global administrator via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center under Copilot Settings > Copilot Frontier, separately for web apps and desktop/mobile apps.
• Reconciliation just got a lot easier: Agent Mode can match payments to invoices from Business Central Customer Ledger Entries, create a dedicated reconciliation sheet, and flag unmatched invoices—all from a single natural language prompt, saving hours of manual work.
• Mass data updates no longer require a developer: Using an “Edit in Excel” export from Business Central, Agent Mode can apply conditional logic across hundreds of rows, such as assigning salesperson codes based on country and state, and publish those changes back to BC without writing a single line of code.
• Data transformation and cleanup are handled intelligently: When splitting address fields into separate columns (address, city, state, zip), Agent Mode understands nuance — keeping suite/apartment numbers combined with the street address rather than blindly splitting on every comma.
• General Ledger self-audits are now within reach: By exporting GL entries to Excel and prompting Agent Mode to find outliers and anomalies, users get a multi-step analysis covering statistical summaries, top accounts by volume, source code breakdowns, manual journal entry flags, and monthly trends.
• Bonus — the COPILOT() function: Also part of Frontier mode, this native Excel function lets you use natural language directly in a cell formula. For example, =COPILOT("show me a list of all US states by their two letter code...") Returns a dynamic, formatted result — no lookup tables required.