How business skills, Work IQ, and Dynamics 365 work together to deliver reliable, repeatable processes with AI agents.
Recently introduced, Dynamics 365 ERP business skills are instructions for your organization’s business processes that AI agents can follow. Business skills are written in plain language, can be easily managed and updated, and any agent can use them. When you update a business skill’s instructions, the change is applied everywhere, without needing to update each AI agentic that is using the skill.
To show you how business skills work with Dynamics 365, let’s walk through an example using an inventory allocation business skill we’ve created.
Inventory allocation sounds like a supply chain problem. In reality, the consequences rarely stay within supply chain.
A sales representative needs to know whether inventory will be available for a customer. An inventory analyst needs to understand how available supply is being allocated. A logistics manager needs to know what a delayed inbound shipment could mean for orders already in the pipeline.
Same underlying allocation problem. Three very different reasons for needing the answer.
In the demo video above, the allocation logic and data in Dynamics 365 can provide three different answers to three different questions, all while following the same business skill instructions. It’s giving each person useful business context without requiring the business process to stop at a departmental or application boundary.
Consider a sales representative heading into an on-site customer meeting.
The important question isn’t how to navigate the inventory system. It’s whether the business can fulfill its commitment to that customer.
In our demonstration, the representative uses the Inventory Allocation Business Skill from a mobile experience to understand how the customer’s order is being allocated and whether inventory could become an issue.
The allocation logic comes from the operational side of the business. The reason for accessing it is entirely customer-facing.
For the inventory analyst, the same capability serves a different purpose.
The analyst is reviewing a top-selling item and needs to understand its allocation results and spot potential concerns before they become larger problems.
There is no need to invent a separate AI use case simply because the role has changed. The underlying business capability is still inventory allocation.
What’s different is the question being asked of it.
Now introduce a disruption.
An inbound shipment is delayed. For the logistics manager, knowing that a shipment is late is only the first piece of information.
The operational questions follow quickly:
A logistics event has become an inventory problem and potentially a customer problem.
That progression from sales to inventory to logistics is intentional.
It reflects something Sunrise sees every day in Dynamics 365 environments: business processes flow across multiple systems and softwares, and connecting them together matters.
Dynamics 365 spans customer-facing and operational applications, but the business itself is even more interconnected.
A customer commitment can depend on available supply. An inventory constraint can change a sales conversation. A logistics delay can create a customer-service issue.
Business skills give us a new way to think about those connections.
Rather than designing every AI experience around an individual application or department, a business capability can be made available in the places and situations where people need it.
The inventory allocation business skill is one example. The principle extends further.
Sunrise works across Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM applications, supply chain, sales, customer engagement, integrations, data, and industry-specific processes. That experience matters because valuable business questions frequently cross several of those areas at once.
A capability may originate in supply chain and create value for someone working with a customer. A customer interaction may depend on operational information from inventory or fulfillment. A disruption in logistics may require action by teams that never work directly in logistics.
The interesting question isn’t whether a scenario belongs to ERP or CRM.
It’s what someone needs to know or do, and which business capabilities should be available to help them do it.
The other part of this story is where work happens.
Employees don’t spend their day inside a single business application. They move between business systems, conversations, meetings, email, Teams, and increasingly AI-powered experiences.
With business skills, Dynamics 365, and Work IQ, the goal is to make relevant business capabilities and context available within those experiences.
Our allocation demonstration makes that tangible: a sales representative, an inventory analyst, and a logistics manager can approach the same underlying business capability from the perspective of the work each is trying to accomplish.
They don’t need three different definitions of allocation.
They need the right context around the same business reality.
Building a business skill is only part of the challenge.
The harder question is deciding which business capability is worth exposing, what logic should govern it, which data gives it meaning, and how that capability changes when it reaches another part of the organization.
That’s familiar territory for Sunrise.
Our work in Dynamics 365 has always required us to understand more than application functionality. It requires understanding how customers actually sell, allocate inventory, fulfill orders, manage disruptions, serve customers, and connect those processes across the organization.
Business skills give us another way to apply that experience.
Inventory allocation is our demonstration because it makes the idea easy to see. One operational capability becomes relevant to three roles for three different reasons.
But that same thinking can start with other business capabilities that cross sales, service, finance, supply chain, operations, and industry-specific processes.
Ready to bring valuable context to your AI agents? Contact Sunrise to explore how business skills can connect your Dynamics 365 processes and help people make informed decisions.