Combining Copilot and Inventory Visibility using the magic of Power Platform and natural language
Article written by Gustav Sundblad - Senior Solution Architect at Engage Group & Fast Track Recognized Solution Architect
Covering the basics
In my?previous article?about Copilot, I discussed leveraging multiple components of our favorite business application, Dynamics 365, to expose different operations across channels. In that article, I also covered the basics of accessing Copilot Studio and understanding the differences between a sidecar copilot and a custom one that can be published to different channels.
My previous Copilot could then check the customer balance in D365 FnO and place an order through natural language while still honoring ERP's security and business logic. What if we also want to check the current on-hand for a specific item? Ideally, you want to add this functionality to your customer service agents or sales channels. If you can also order directly from the same agent, that could simplify many scenarios.
Understanding Inventory Visibility Service
If you are using Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and have inventory, then you have probably encountered scenarios where we want to be able to expose this to other systems, both from an ad hoc pattern and by exporting full, on-hand details on a recurring basis.
Historically, this has been somewhat connected to issues from a performance and modeling perspective (since it's not always easy for external systems to understand the inventory dimensions). The Inventory Visibility Service takes care of this by providing low-level data replication to Dataverse. It also exposes the on-hand information in a specific web service where you can add or expose your on-hand information in a way that makes more sense to surrounding systems while keeping the data as fresh and up-to-date as possible.
I won't go into further details about IVS since there is a lot of documentation already covering that one (linked below), but one of the new features is that we also get an Inventory Visibility Copilot (of course, we get a Copilot) that allows us to ask for on-hand information using natural language.
Combining IVS and Copilot
Once you install IVS, you will immediately see the IVS Copilot in your studio, but since it's a managed solution, you cannot edit it.
However, since we can now see the actions and topics in this Copilot, we can use that to learn how to call the IV service using natural language and incorporate that in our own Copilot we created earlier. Looking at the actions and how the IVS Copilot is parsing and presenting the response, we can copy/steal that process and enable our own custom Copilot to do the same thing.
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What we are basically doing is using Power Automate to call IVS using the exposed natural language API (described below) and parsing the returned value so it better suits the natural language feeling.
So, in the end, we get a new action in our custom Copilot that allows us to call IVS using natural language, and we can publish it to any channel we like, such as Teams. The reason we need to specify site, company, and location in my example below is because I am using demo data, but the answer would rely on your setup and how you would expose your on-hand information in IVS, of course.
You can, of course, choose to only display one of these values depending on your needs, which is something you can do either in IVS by only exposing those values or you could remove them when you parse the response.
In summary
So, in summary, you can really do a lot of powerful operations as long as you understand the capabilities of each tool. If we combine this inventory operation with the actions I listed in my previous article, you get a natural way of interacting with very complex systems all by using Copilot and Power Platform.
Good luck with your Copilots!
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