4-6 November 2025 in Poznan, Poland
Directions EMEA 2025
Join us for Directions EMEA 2025 - experience the latest updates from Microsoft and the ecosystem while connecting with the entire Business Central community, including resellers, add-on providers, Microsoft, CSPs, MVPs, developers, consultants, sales and marketing professionals, and business leaders. Fuel your motivation, inspiration, and success through sharing and collaboration.
AI Integration in Business Central apps: Managed vs Custom AI - What You Need to Know
When implementing AI solutions in your Business Central extensions, you face a critical decision: adopting Microsoft's Managed AI service or custom Azure OpenAI deployments? This choice impacts costs, control, and monitoring capabilities of your AI solution.
During this session, we'll go in-depth into both approaches. We will discover what the new Microsoft's Managed AI service is, its integration with AL and when it's the optimal choice to adopt. Then we'll also explore the adoption of custom Azure OpenAI deployments, including setup, configuration of an AI layer, advanced tips for AI performant architecture (like routing models) and advanced monitoring techniques.
You will learn practical implementation strategies, cost optimization methods, and best practices for tracking AI usage per customer. I will also share custom monitoring tools and frameworks you can immediately adopt in your development practice.
Whether you're building your first AI-powered extension or scaling existing solutions, this session provides the insights and tools needed to make informed architectural decisions and implement effective AI monitoring strategies.
Speakers:
Stefano Demiliani
Microsoft MVP. Microsoft MCT Regional Lead. CTO for NAV-lab Group. Azure Solution Architect and DevOps Engineer. Microsoft MCSD, MCSA. International Speaker, Trainer and Author.
Stefano Demiliani is a Microsoft MVP for Business Applications and for Azure and the MCT Regional Lead for Italy.
He's the author of many successful IT books related to Dynamics NAV, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Azure DevOps, Azure solution development and Power Platform.
He's the winner of the global "Tech Start of the Year" Digital Revolution Award 2023 (the "Tech Star of the Year" award recognizes outstanding contributions to the cloud industry by individuals working at any level within an organization).