Agentic AI, 50,000 customers, vibe coding, and AI once again: Reporting from Directions EMEA 2025

Our team just returned from Directions EMEA, the conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners in Europe, Middle East, and Africa which this year took place in Poznan, Poland. Over the course of three days over 3,000 attendees from 650 companies coming from 60 countries networked, discussed the future of technology, and heard the words “AI”, “agents” and “vibe coding” more times than they care to admit across the 300+ sessions in the program.

Here are our highlights of the event.

Business Central remains extremely popular

Business Central has officially reached the milestone of 50,000 customers, a significant increase from the 45,000 announced at Directions North America in April. This is an important signal from the market: the platform is strong, and demand is not abating.

There’s also a new logo for BC, for the joy of all those who like rounded corners and gradients, and the despair of marketing teams everywhere.

AI and agents are the name of the game

How much of AI is revolution, and how much of it is hype? This was the question on everyone’s mind. Microsoft clearly believes that the technology has moved way beyond the hype phase, and that we are on the brink of a business transformation. They shared ambitious plans where Agents will live inside the platform.

For now, two agents are on their way in: the Sales Order Agent (intelligent order fulfillment) and the Payables Agent (automated invoice processing) will be generally available this November.

Partners will also soon be able to design their very own AI agent directly within Business Central – and we at LS Retail have already started this journey.

LS Retail’s early steps in the AI and Agent journey 

We are very proud to be among the few partners that Microsoft selected to be part of the Microsoft AI Red Carpet workshop, where we tested the AI Agents and Copilots before public release. We were honored to be highlighted on stage at Directions during the day two keynote, where our CTO Dadi Karason announced the pharmacy Agent which our team developed during the workshop.

A simple idea lies behind our Agent. In countries where doctors send prescriptions via email, pharmacies can get from 20 to 400 prescriptions a day. In these locations, a lot of time is spent logging the data in the system and creating prescriptions from the emails.

The agent we have created can read emails and create prescriptions. The result is then checked and approved by a pharmacist to ensure accuracy.

If you take a chain of 100 stores, where each pharmacy receives 30 email prescriptions a day, the savings are in the hundreds of hours. That’s real business benefit.

Our new payment solution LS Pay for BC

During the event we officially launched LS Pay for Business Central, our new payment solution that works from the Business Central back office. This is the latest sibling of our wildly popular LS Pay payment software, which is now available globally. Built on the knowledge about payments we have developed in the past few years, LS Pay for BC is ideal for any company that uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and needs to perform payments but doesn’t require a full-fledged point of sale system.

We received a lot of interest in LS Pay for BC from both current and prospective partners. Request a demo if you’d like to see for yourself what it’s all about.

From vibe coding to coding agents

If you were not at Directions, you could not begin to imagine how many sessions were dedicated to vibe coding. For the uninitiated, vibe coding is a chatbot-based approach to developing code: you describe what functionality you want in your app by talking to the AI in natural language, and then you let the AI generate the code for you. By giving more examples and guiding the AI, you can refine the result – it’s coding, but with zero coding skills required. The goal is to democratize and speed up development of software, and while the process is still in its infancy, it has gained a lot of traction in the past few months. Collins dictionary recently named “vibe coding” Word of the Year 2025, and according to Microsoft, this AI-driven approach to development is already changing the way we are building apps for Business Central.

If you are a developer, sit down: there’s more bad news. Microsoft believes coding Agents will take over in the not-so-far future.

According to Dmitry Chadayev, Program Manager at Microsoft and a well-known name in the BC community (and a frequent guest at our own conneXion events), new AI models are becoming dramatically better at coding. AI coding agents won’t just suggest single lines; they will be able to plan and execute entire coding tasks in a loop, autonomously based on a goal, with access to compilers, tests, online documentation, source control, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) server.

Is this the end for the developers among us?

Not so fast.

According to Microsoft, “AI won’t replace your people. The right people with AI skills will.” So go ahead and get reskilled, now. Technology moves fast, and with AI, it’s moving faster than ever. The time from demo to reality will be shorter tomorrow than it is today. Agreed, there is still a lot of hype around AI; but the foundations for a significant transformation are there. Stay tuned! A lot will change before the next Directions EMEA.