There’s no better platform than the ERP systems at the heart of modern businesses to demonstrate the power of Model Context Protocol (MCP) in giving AI agents efficient access to vast quantities and types of corporate data.
That point was driven home unequivocally when Microsoft shared this data point Thursday: 650,000 ERP actions are now available to Dynamics 365 customers through AI agents, allowing the company to credibly say that “an agent can do almost anything a person can do in ERP” – without manual effort – due to the platform’s MCP support.
“Anything that you can log into the system and do manually, whether it’s a sales order or purchase order, general ledger, journal, whatever you can do, agents can do the same thing because we have MCP enabled…with the same role-based security, the same governance” that exists in Dynamics 365, said Sachin Gandhi, Principal Solution R&D architect at Microsoft during a Thursday keynote session at AI Agent & Copilot Summit. (Gandhi is pictured above).
How It Works
From an AI agent, a user can launch an ERP query to determine sales for a given item category from a given customer group over a given time period. In the past, this could have required engaging a developer to build a data model and run the required report, and one can assume that wasn’t happening overnight.
With an ERP MCP server, by contrast, an agent can automatically work through required logic – including any customizations or forms it has access to from a security credentials perspective – to access data from the application in the same way a human would.
Another example that Microsoft demoed during Gandhi’s keynote: selecting a vendor for a purchase requisition and executing that requisition. The MCP-powered agent engages with various applications to:
- Determine the lowest negotiated price for the item
- Gather vendor performance information
- Reason over available data to select best supplier
- Find the requisition record and accept the workflow task to update details on the record
- Update the requisition with the selected vendor and complete the workflow task
- Document the reasoning to select the vendor so selection logic can be reviewed
- Send an email to the human approver with an overview of the requisition record and the details on vendor selection
- Release the requisition and create the purchase order
That’s a complex set of steps that involve accessing a range of systems and functions, showing clearly how MCP enables enterprise-scale autonomous processes in ERP systems.
Other speakers at the event validated the impact of MCP on business operations in an ERP context. Marc Kase, CIO of Altman Plants, said the company has implemented an MCP connection to its ERP system that can be used to resolve transaction errors and identify and analyze common errors. It can also be used to determine transaction volume per retail store customer. MCP is enabling the company to efficiently answer common business questions by tapping into its ERP platform through MCP.
That’s the power of MCP in action, and it’s gaining further traction as more MCP servers become available, providing ready access to diverse corporate data sources. Gandhi provided a list of many of those servers in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem from Microsoft, including Dataverse MCP, ERP Client MCP, ERP Analytics MCP, and Commerce MCP.
He discussed commerce MCP in further detail. Agentic commerce with MCP enables agentic experiences including conversational buying, intelligent customer service, and automated workflows. Faster time to value is possible because customers can rapidly build agents to execute processes autonomously with minimal integration effort.
Gandhi’s update on Dynamics 365 and its broadening MCP support gave another powerful indicator of MCP’s importance as a standard that makes corporate data more readily accessible to AI agents so they can continue on the path to automating more complex workflows.
Related MCP Insights:
- Microsoft Sentinel MCP Server Democratizes Access to Internal, External Security Data
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- Microsoft MCP Server Fully Exposes Dynamics 365 to AI Without Integration Work
- Why MCP Is Becoming the Universal Interface to Enterprise Data
