Running Multiple Sales Order Agents with Smarter Item Matching

Since its general availability in November 2025, the Sales Order Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has been processing customer orders directly from email — drafting quotes, checking availability, and converting confirmations into orders. It works. But early adopters were clear about what was missing: one agent per company wasn’t enough.

With the July 2026 update, Microsoft addresses that feedback head-on. You can now run multiple Sales Order Agent instances inside a single company, each with independent configuration, and the item matching engine gets a significant intelligence upgrade.

Multiple Agents, One Company

This is the headline change. Previously, you had one Sales Order Agent per company — one mailbox, one set of rules. That forced organizations with multiple sales teams, product divisions, or regional mailboxes into an uncomfortable choice: share a single agent and hope it kind-of-works for everyone, or skip the feature entirely.

Now each agent instance operates independently:

• Its own monitored mailbox and folder
• Its own email signature and processing rules
• Its own KPI tracking — emails received, quotes created, orders created, time saved

A sales team in Germany can have their agent watching [email protected] while the French team runs theirs against [email protected]. Different product lines, different customer segments — each with its own agent, own settings, own metrics.

The existing single-instance configuration migrates automatically to the new architecture. Nothing breaks.

Smarter Item Matching That Actually Understands Your Customers

Customer purchase emails rarely include your neat, internal item numbers. They write things like “the blue one, medium size” or “that widget we ordered last spring.” The updated item search now uses three layers of matching:

Exact identifier match. First, the agent looks for direct hits — item number, vendor item number, GTIN, or cross-reference. If the customer typed a recognizable code, it matches instantly.

Semantic attribute matching. When there’s no code, the agent extracts attributes from the customer’s message using AI — color, material, size, variant — and ranks candidate items by relevance. “The blue medium” becomes a structured filter, not a guessing game.

Fuzzy fallback. If neither layer produces results, the agent runs a broader global search. This catches misspellings, partial names, and informal descriptions that would have failed in the previous version.

Relevance Filtering: Stop Burning Credits on Noise

One of the quiet frustrations with the original agent was irrelevant messages consuming AI credits. Marketing newsletters, supplier offers, discount requests — anything landing in the monitored mailbox got processed.

The updated agent now validates every incoming message against a detailed relevance model before processing. It considers the full conversation history and the agent’s defined scope. Messages clearly outside the agent’s responsibilities are identified and filtered. A separate check runs on attachments to avoid processing non-sales documents like NDAs or internal memos.

Bigger Attachments, Better Diagnostics

The PDF page limit jumps from 10 to 50 pages. A new cumulative character limit of 150,000 characters (roughly 50K tokens) applies across all attachments in a single email. Both limits address the most common failure case: customers sending their own formatted purchase orders as PDF attachments, which the old limit couldn’t handle.

When an attachment is skipped, Business Central now stores the specific reason — page count exceeded, unsupported format, cumulative limit hit — directly on the attachment record. This is visible on the Attachments page and logged in telemetry. No more guessing why a particular document didn’t process.

Try It Out Without Sending Real Emails

Configuring the agent previously meant sending test emails from external accounts. Not anymore. A new Try it out section on the setup page lets you compose a message by selecting a sender from your contacts, entering text, and attaching files. The agent behaves exactly as if it received a real email.

Two pre-built sample messages are included — one text-only referencing items from your catalog, and one with a sample purchase order attachment generated from your actual item data. Useful for first-time configuration, demos, and testing specific scenarios without bouncing between email clients.

Smarter Handling of Unknown Senders

When an email arrives from an unrecognised address, you now have three options instead of just creating a new contact:

• Create a new contact — the existing behaviour
• Use another contact once — link an existing contact to this specific task only, without modifying master data. The override is scoped to one message.
• Update an existing contact’s email — select a contact and update their email address to the sender’s

This matters for companies where customers email from personal addresses, or where the same person uses multiple email accounts.

Additional Control Improvements

• Mark email as read — a new toggle marks processed emails as read in the mailbox, in addition to the existing category label
• Mandatory folder selection — the agent now requires a specific mailbox folder before activation. Pick Inbox if unsure, but you can no longer activate in an ambiguous state.
• Stricter activation validation — clear error messages instead of silent failures
• Embedded prompts — AI prompts are now shipped as resource files within the extension package, reducing first-task latency

What This Means for Your Business

If you’re already using the Sales Order Agent, the multi-instance architecture means you can scale it across teams without compromises. If you tried it and hit the item matching or attachment size limitations, this update directly addresses those pain points. And if you haven’t adopted it yet, the improved filtering and easier configuration lower the barrier substantially.

The update is rolling out automatically to Business Central online tenants through July 2026. No manual upgrade required.

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Need help configuring the Sales Order Agent for your teams? Get in touch — we’ll walk you through setup, mailbox configuration, and testing so you see real results from day one.