AI was the key focus for Node4’s user day held at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham recently.
The event, which was attended by 537 delegates from a range of industries, including partners and customers, kicked off with a keynote speech by Node4’s MD Mark Skelton, who said that this was the first time all of the businesses that had been acquired by Node4 in the last year were appearing together under one brand.
“Just because the brand looks different to reflect that change, it doesn’t mean that the business is any different,” said Skelton. “The ambition is still the same - we have kept all of the best parts of these various businesses, as well as maintaining the quality, talent and capability within it.”
Skelton said that Node4’s strategy over the past 12 months has been focused on delivering the business applications and services that support Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. These include, he said, Power Platform, Fabric and Azure.
“We want to learn about your challenges and objectives because we have the talent and tools that can deliver the products and services you need for transform your business,” Skelton told the partners. “You trust us to deliver the core technology needed to drive your organisations and, in return, our commitment is to provide you with the highest possible level of quality through innovation that will empower you as businesses to grow.”
Skelton said that a key enabler of this was AI. Despite the obvious benefits the technology brings, he said, particularly given the sheer pace of its development and uncertainty around it, it was key to help leadership teams understand how it works and the capabilities it can deliver that will be relevant to their organisations.
“We are putting AI at the heart of everything we do,” said Skelton. “We want us all to keep challenging ourselves and enable you to lead with this technology, not follow.”
Skelton said that the Business Central enterprise resource planning application was fundamental to organisations in achieving digital transformation. With large investment and 45,000 new customers globally now on the platform, he said that it was Microsoft’s fastest growing product, and that showed no signs of abating.
“We are seeing increasingly more add-ons to Business Central to make it more relevant to you,” said Skelton. “Microsoft is also modularising the rest of the Dynamics 365 suite, enabling you to cherry pick the elements you require and bolt them on to Business Central.”
Live demonstration
Skelton then handed over to Tom Bevan, presales and product marketing manager at Node4, and his team, who presented a demonstration of a use case music festival that Business Central was used for. They explained and showed how the functionality works through the whole lifecycle of the event from budget and resource planning to delivery.
The demonstration was split into two presentations, the first focusing on new project costing, international trade, manufacturing, sustainability, ticketing and Shopify ecommerce features. The second honed in on Business Central reporting, Power BI, Power apps, point of sales, portals and bots, field service and reviewing costs.
The afternoon sessions were divided into four parts, looking at what’s new in Business Central, Fabric data and AI, credit and debt management, and AI, with participants getting the chance to quiz the experts. Other areas of focus included how to develop a new Business Central feature, what’s new with in-app reporting and data analysis in Business Central, automating invoicing and expenses, retail ordering, and e-commerce and online marketplaces.
Speaking about Business Central’s AI capabilities, Bevan said: “Microsoft has invested massively into AI and they are baking it into everything they do now. The next phase is moving into agentic AI – the idea that agents can be built that understand business process and logic and perform tasks that humans do is groundbreaking.
“Also, we have built on top of the AI in Azure to generate, compile and publish code into the system. And, if it has an errors, it can then quickly fix them, which is nothing short of game-changing as far as we are concerned.”