By [Saurav Dhyani] | Business Central Consultant & Architect
A few weeks ago, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central community gathered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for Directions Asia 2026 — and it was one of the most energising editions of this conference I have attended.
I was there as both an attendee and a speaker, which gave me the unusual privilege of experiencing the event from both sides of the room. I sat through keynotes and sessions that genuinely shifted how I think, and I delivered a session of my own on a topic I care deeply about. This article is my attempt to capture what mattered — for partners, consultants, architects, and developers across the Asia-Pacific Business Central ecosystem.
If you are looking for a surface-level summary, this is not it. What follows is a full recap of what was said, what it means, and what you should actually do with it.
What Is Directions Asia — and Why Does It Matter?
For anyone new to the Business Central partner ecosystem: Directions Asia is the annual conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners across the Asia-Pacific region. Run by the Directions for Partners organisation, it brings together resellers, ISVs, Microsoft representatives, MVPs, developers, consultants, and business leaders for three days of keynotes, technical sessions, workshops, and partner networking.
The 2026 edition marked the first time the conference was held in Vietnam — specifically at Ho Chi Minh City. The city was a fitting choice: fast-moving, ambitious, and increasingly central to the technology landscape of Southeast Asia.
Directions Asia 2026 covered the full spectrum of Business Central topics — from Microsoft product roadmap and AI strategy to technical deep dives on development, integration, upgrade practices, and partner commercials. AI was, without question, the thread that ran through almost every conversation.
The Keynote: ERP Is No Longer a System of Record
The defining moment of Directions Asia 2026 came in the opening keynote delivered by Mike Morton, Vice President of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
The central framing was this: ERP is shifting from a system of record to a system of action.
For the better part of four decades, ERP systems — including Business Central — have been fundamentally tools for recording what happened in a business: transactions posted, orders created, invoices approved. Humans played the middleware role: reading the data, interpreting it, deciding what to do next, and triggering the next step.
Microsoft's position in 2026 is that AI agents are beginning to absorb that middleware role. Agents handle the routine interpretation and action. Humans move up to direct, govern, and review what the agents produce.
The keynote brought this to life with live demonstrations of agents already in production or near-release:
- Accounts payable agent — autonomously matching invoices to purchase orders, flagging exceptions for human review rather than routing every document through a human first
- Sales order agent — handling order intake, validation, and routing with minimal manual intervention
- Expense agent — processing expense submissions against policy, approving compliant claims automatically, and escalating only the exceptions
What made this keynote land harder than most was the closing message Mike Morton delivered — one that I have heard repeated in conversations ever since: drive AI transformation inside your own company first, before you try to sell it to your customers. It is a simple instruction. It is also one most partners have not yet acted on.
The roadmap presentation that followed swapped the traditional feature-by-feature list for a set of investment themes — a structural change in how Microsoft is communicating direction that signals a shift in how partners should be thinking about Business Central capability planning.
The Broader AI Theme Across Sessions
Outside the keynote, AI was the dominant theme across the session agenda at Directions Asia 2026 — not as a topic in its own right, but as a lens through which almost every technical subject was now being examined.
Several patterns emerged consistently across sessions:
Agent design is becoming a core partner competency. Multiple sessions across the three days touched on Microsoft's AI Development Toolkit and the Agent Building Sandbox — the infrastructure that allows partners to design, test, and deploy custom agents inside Business Central. The message was consistent: this is not a capability reserved for large ISVs or specialist AI teams. It is something every serious Business Central partner needs to understand and begin experimenting with.
The AI Development Toolkit, now in broader availability following its public preview, enables partners to prototype intelligent agents tailored to specific business processes — defining agent goals and instructions in natural language, testing them in sandbox environments, and version-controlling agent definitions as structured JSON files in GitHub. This lowers the barrier to experimentation significantly.
Integration architecture is under pressure. Sessions on Azure Integration Services and Business Central integration consistently returned to the same architectural tension: traditional point-to-point integrations built around human-triggered events do not hold up in an agent-driven environment. As agents begin to act autonomously on business data, the integration layer beneath them needs to be decoupled, event-driven, and capable of handling asynchronous operations gracefully. For partners still building tightly coupled integrations, this is a design debt that will surface sooner than expected.
Governance is the conversation partners are not having. Across multiple sessions and hallway conversations, one gap kept appearing: most Business Central partners are still not having structured governance conversations with their customers about AI. What decisions should agents make autonomously? What requires human approval? How are agent actions audited? What happens when an agent makes an incorrect decision? These are not product questions — they are architecture and delivery questions that partners need to be equipped to answer.
Standout Sessions Beyond the Keynote
Directions Asia 2026 ran a full three-day agenda of technical and business sessions. A few that stood out across the community:
Sessions on the Business Central 2026 Release Wave 1 (v28) drew strong attendance, covering the breadth of what Microsoft delivered from April through September 2026 — AI-driven automation in finance workflows, expanded supply chain capabilities, and the MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration that enables Business Central to connect with external AI agents and tools via a standardised open protocol.
ISV partnership sessions explored a theme that resonated strongly across the Asia-Pacific partner community: the strongest Business Central implementations today are not single-vendor solutions but thoughtful combinations of specialist ISVs — each solving a specific operational problem well — integrated into a coherent platform. The partner's role is shifting from builder to architect: selecting the right stack, ensuring the pieces work together, and delivering outcomes rather than configurations.
Commercial and go-to-market sessions addressed a subject that is rarely spoken about directly but that every partner in the room was thinking about: as AI compresses the time required to develop and configure Business Central solutions, the economics of partner delivery are changing. Billing hours for tasks that agents can perform — or dramatically accelerate — is not a sustainable model. The sessions that tackled this directly offered some of the most candid conversations of the event.
My Session: Smarter BC Upgrades Using AI
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The session focused on a pain point that every Business Central partner carrying a customised implementation knows intimately: the AL code merge problem. With Microsoft shipping two major Business Central release waves per year, partners face a continuous cycle of reconciling their AL extensions against changes in the Microsoft base application — a process that is currently manual, time-intensive, and high-risk.
I covered three specific applications of AI to this problem:
AI-assisted AL diff analysis — using AI to parse both versions of a modified C/AL object and produce a structured conflict report, reducing what is currently a multi-day manual triage into hours.
Conflict resolution suggestion — AI generating first-pass resolution candidates for each identified conflict, which a developer then reviews and approves rather than authors from scratch. This eliminates the blank-page problem that slows experienced developers down.
Post-upgrade performance analysis — using AI in combination with Azure Application Insights telemetry to surface performance regressions post-upgrade: query plan changes, deprecated AL patterns, and agent execution overhead that becomes visible only under production load.
The reception from the room was something I did not fully anticipate. Several attendees approached me afterward to say they were rethinking how their teams handle upgrade projects. One conversation I keep returning to was with a partner managing a large portfolio of customised Business Central implementations — someone who said that what I described in the session was the first approach they had seen that made the twice-yearly upgrade treadmill feel genuinely manageable.
What the Asia-Pacific Business Central Community Is Thinking About
One of the most valuable aspects of Directions Asia is that it is not a global event with a regional flavour — it is a regional event, which means the conversations are shaped by the specific commercial, technical, and market realities of the Asia-Pacific Business Central ecosystem.
Several themes surfaced consistently in the conversations I had across three days:
The pace of AI adoption varies enormously across the region. Markets with larger, more established Business Central partner communities are moving faster on AI integration. Smaller markets are often still focused on foundational cloud migration. The partners who are ahead are not necessarily the largest — they are the ones who have committed to learning and experimenting regardless of market size.
Vertical solutions are gaining traction. The demand for industry-specific Business Central solutions — Food and Beverage, Manufacturing, Distribution, Professional Services — is growing across the region. Partners who can combine specialist ISV depth with platform knowledge are increasingly winning deals that generalists cannot.
The talent question is real. Multiple conversations touched on the challenge of finding and developing Business Central talent with genuine AI competency. This is not a future problem — it is current, and partners who are investing in developing their teams now are building an advantage that will compound.
Frequently Asked Questions About Directions Asia 2026
What is Directions Asia 2026? Directions Asia 2026 is the annual conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners in the Asia-Pacific region, held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in May 2026. It is organised by Directions for Partners and brings together resellers, ISVs, Microsoft representatives, MVPs, developers, consultants, and business leaders for three days of sessions, keynotes, and networking.
Where was Directions Asia 2026 held? Directions Asia 2026 was held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — the first time the conference was hosted in Vietnam. Previous editions have been held in cities including Bangkok, Thailand.
What were the main themes at Directions Asia 2026?
The dominant themes at Directions Asia 2026 were AI agents in Business Central, the shift of ERP from system of record to system of action, integration architecture evolution for agent-driven environments, and the changing commercial model for Business Central partners.
What did Microsoft announce at Directions Asia 2026? Microsoft's keynote at Directions Asia 2026, delivered by VP Mike Morton, focused on the expansion of AI agents in Business Central — including accounts payable, sales order, and expense agents — and a roadmap structured around investment themes rather than individual features.
Who should attend Directions Asia? Directions Asia is designed for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners — including resellers, ISVs, developers, consultants, architects, and business leaders — across the Asia-Pacific region.
When is the next Directions Asia after 2026? The next Directions Asia event after the 2026 Ho Chi Minh City edition has not been formally announced as of this writing. Check the Directions for Partners website for updated information.
Closing Thoughts
I came home from Directions Asia 2026 with a clearer picture of where the Business Central ecosystem in Asia-Pacific is heading — and a strong conviction that the next two to three years will be more consequential for Business Central partners than any period I have seen in this ecosystem.
The AI era is not arriving. It is here. The partners who engage with it seriously — who experiment, who build competency, who have the governance and commercial conversations their customers need — will define what Business Central delivery looks like in this region for the next decade.
The Directions for Partners team put on a conference that earned its reputation. If you were not in Ho Chi Minh City this year, I would encourage you to make the next edition a priority.
And if you want to continue any of the conversations this article has started — on AI in upgrades, on agent governance, on what the shift to system-of-action means for your practice — I would welcome that.
📖 Related: [(8) Smarter BC Upgrades | AI for Business Central | Directions Asia 2026 - YouTube]
Saurav Dhyani is a Business Central Consultant & Architect and a speaker at Directions Asia 2026. Connect on LinkedIn: [Saurav Dhyani | LinkedIn]
Tags: Directions Asia 2026 · Directions Asia 2026 Recap · Business Central Conference 2026 · Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central · Business Central Upgrade AI · AI Code Merge Business Central · BC Upgrade Automation · Ho Chi Minh City · D365BC · Microsoft Partner · ERP AI
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