2016 → 2026 → 2036: from 'Can the ERP do this?' to 'Just make it happen'

If you worked with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ecosystem around 2016, you probably remember a certain weight that came with ERP projects. NAV was powerful, stable, and endlessly customizable – but it often felt like a system you had to adapt your business around, or pay to adapt the system to your needs.

Today, Dynamics 365 Business Central looks like a different product entirely: cloud-based, modular, API-oriented, easier to update, and increasingly AI-assisted.

And if you follow that trajectory another decade forward, the direction is clear: ERP  won't disappear, but the amount of manual work surrounding it will keep shrinking. People will spend less time executing processes and more time making decisions.

Let’s walk the timeline.

With Business Central, the development philosophy shifted in a practical and consequential way: from modifying the product to extending it and from hosting and maintaining infrastructure yourself to consuming it as a service. The architecture reflects this. Extensions encapsulate changes and keep a clean separation between Microsoft's base application and what partners or customers build on top.

Upgrade paths became predictable again, because you're no longer touching core tables and code.

Many changes that used to take months in 2016 can now be delivered faster. Take barcodes – a genuinely common requirement: invoices, picking lists, shipment notes all need them. In the NAV era, this meant starting from scratch. You had to figure out a barcode generation approach, render it inside reports, hunt down the right fonts or find an external DLL, then adapt it to your specific setup. It wasn't just "add a barcode" – it was research, technical experimentation, deployment headaches, and long-term ownership of a custom solution nobody else maintained.

In 2026, the story is usually much shorter. You go to AppSource, find a barcode app that already works with Business Central reporting, install it, configure the barcode type and placement, and you're done. No weeks of research. No custom development. Updates and compatibility are handled as part of the app's lifecycle.

This is the shift in a nutshell: what used to require building from scratch now usually means finding, installing, and configuring something that already exists. Custom development still has its place, but it's no longer the first answer.

The move to SaaS also took a lot of "ERP gravity" off businesses in other ways: predictable updates without upgrade projects, faster rollout of new capabilities, easier scaling, simpler environments. The system can evolve continuously instead of being rebuilt every few years.

Automation changed too. In 2016, the question was: can the ERP do this? In 2026, it looks more like a stack – Business Central configuration, Power Automate flows, Power Apps experiences, API integrations – and the real question becomes: where should this automation live for the lowest maintenance and the best ROI?

AI fits naturally into this layer. Copilot in Business Central helps teams draft and summarize information, surface anomalies, suggest next actions, and find answers through natural language. The practical result is faster processing, fewer manual errors, and smoother collaboration – with humans staying in control of approvals and exceptions.

This part is less about predicting specific features and more about following the trajectory to its logical end.

The core ERP workflows will remain. But the human busywork wrapped around them – data entry, matching, coding, routine approvals – will keep shrinking. The role of the person in the process shifts: less doing, more deciding.

The most likely candidates for automation in the next decade: routine document capture and coding (invoices, expenses, purchase orders), matching and reconciliation, basic order intake and validation, low-risk approvals where policy is clear, and first drafts of financial narratives – variance explanations, management commentary.

AI agents will handle these steps end-to-end, escalating to humans only when something falls outside the expected pattern or requires judgment.

The way data enters the system will change too. Today, most ERP data starts with a person typing something. In 2036, employees will create and receive information across many channels – email, chat, voice calls, documents – and the platform will capture, structure, and route that data into Business Central automatically.

Hardware will play a role as well: microphones and speech recognition for hands-free operations, cameras for receiving and quality checks, IoT devices for real-time warehouse execution. The gap between physical reality and structured ERP data keeps closing.

Picture a simple scenario: an employee takes a customer call about products. The system automatically creates a Sales Order in Business Central, checks item availability, generates a Purchase Order or Production Order if stock is insufficient, and schedules delivery. The employee focuses on the conversation. The system handles the mechanics. The employee reviews and approves the key actions afterward.

ERP becomes infrastructure – essential but largely invisible, embedded into the tools people already use every day.

Development will shift in a similar direction. Instead of writing detailed technical specifications, teams will describe business needs and review the solution the platform proposes. The functional consultant evolves into something closer to a business architect and governance gatekeeper – less focused on building logic, more focused on defining outcomes, maintaining data integrity, and managing what the automation is allowed to do.

That last point matters more than it might seem. When integration and automation become the default, a new layer of complexity emerges: who can automate what, and with which controls? How do you maintain data lineage and auditability across many connected tools? What happens when two automated processes conflict? How do you manage AI risk – hallucinations, bias, traceability? These aren't edge cases. They become core architectural questions.

Security investment will grow significantly. Controlling access across many tools, securing data in transit and at rest, enforcing identity and permissions consistently – this moves from IT checkbox to one of the main pillars of how the ecosystem is designed.

In 2016, ERP felt heavy because it carried everything inside one box: logic, UI, reporting, and integrations. You owned all of it, and you paid for that ownership every time something needed to change.

In 2026, Business Central is closer to a core platform designed to connect, extend, and evolve. The shift to extensions, APIs, cloud updates, Power Platform, and Copilot isn't a collection of random features – it's a consistent direction toward using the full power of the Microsoft business platform, with less friction at every step.

By 2036, the companies that win will be the ones with well-defined business processes, a well-built ecosystem, and the ability to turn intent into execution faster than anyone else. Not because they have the biggest ERP implementation – but because they've made the ERP the least visible part of how they work.