Agents such as the Payables Agent and the Sales Order Agent do most of their work in the background. They stop and ask a person when they need a decision: an unknown vendor, a quote that needs approval, an item that isn’t in stock. The people who answer these requests are called agent supervisors.
Business Central gives supervisors two ways to review agent work. The Tasks pane shows the full task timeline. The data review bar shows agent changes directly on the document page. Version 29.0 (2026 release wave 2) updated the agent interface and added review notifications on list pages, so records waiting for review are visible before you open them.
How Agents Ask for Help
An agent pauses and asks for input in situations like these:
- Confirming an incoming or outgoing email
- Confirming a new contact or vendor that the agent created
- Reviewing a draft document, such as a sales quote or a purchase invoice draft
- Resolving a problem, like a missing item or a customer that doesn’t exist
When that happens, a red badge with a number appears on the agent’s icon in the Role Center navigation. The number is the count of tasks that need attention.
You only see agents that you have access to. An administrator adds you to the agent’s user access list, and you need the Manage Agent Tasks permission, which Essential and Premium licenses include.
Two Ways to Review
| Approach | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Tasks pane | You want the full timeline, need to see each step the agent took, or the agent is blocked and needs instructions |
| Directly on the page | You are already on the document and only need to check the fields the agent filled in |
Both lead to the same result. Once you confirm, the agent continues.
Review from the Tasks Pane
- Select the agent’s icon in the navigation menu.
- In the Tasks pane, select a task under Needs Attention. The task timeline opens with each step the agent completed.
- Select Review on the step that needs you. The pane switches to review mode, and the document or email opens in the main area.
- Check the content and make changes if needed.
- Select Confirm.
The agent picks up from there. If it needs you again later in the same task, a new notification appears.
Review Directly on Pages
When an agent creates or changes a document, a data review bar appears at the top of the page. It appears whether you open the document from the Tasks pane, from a list, or through search. You also see it on documents changed by agents you don’t have access to, but without the links to their tasks.
What the bar shows depends on the situation:
| Situation | What you see |
|---|---|
| A task awaits review and the agent changed fields | Review agent task link and Review (N) button |
| A task awaits review, no field changes | Review task button |
| Fields changed, no task awaiting review | Review (N) button |
| Several agents changed the document | Stacked agent icons and a review message |
| The page also has notifications | Show other notifications (N) link |
N in Review (N) is the number of fields agents changed.
Check field suggestions
- Select Review (N) to list the changed fields. On documents with lines, the list shows a summary such as rows: 3, fields: 5.
- Select a field in the list to jump to it.
- Select the info icon next to the field to see which agent set it, why, and how confident it was.
- Edit the value or leave it.
- Select Done when you have checked everything.
The icon color tells you where to look first:
| Icon | Meaning |
|---|---|
| White | Standard confidence. Likely correct, but check it. |
| Orange | Low confidence. Check this one carefully. |
Done records your name and the date and clears the markers. Dismiss (the X button) only hides the bar and refreshes the page, which is useful if you want to come back later or already fixed the values yourself.
Page notifications during review
Normal page notifications are hidden while the data review bar is showing. Select Show other notifications (N) to see them below the bar. Showing or dismissing them doesn’t affect the agent review.
Give Instructions to the Agent
When an agent is stuck, you can tell it what to do instead of making the change yourself. In the Give instructions to the agent section of the step, pick one of the suggested instructions or type your own in Type your instructions, then select Confirm.
Write plain, specific instructions:
| Situation | Instruction |
|---|---|
| Requested quantity isn’t available | Change the quantity to 50 |
| The agent can’t find the right item | Give a quote for the Rome guest chair in blue |
| A date needs to change | Change the shipping date to 11/02 |
| The vendor doesn’t exist | Create vendor using OCR data |
Instructions only apply to the current step. The agent doesn’t remember them for the next task. Don’t use instructions to skip steps or to change unrelated records. Use the buttons in the pane for workflow changes.
Stop a Task
Select Stop on a step to end that task, or Stop all tasks to end every active task for the agent. Stop all tasks is useful when an agent imported a large backlog by mistake.
Before you stop a task:
- Stopped tasks can’t be restarted.
- The document can be left half done, and someone has to finish it manually.
- Stopped tasks stay in the timeline until an administrator deletes them.
Agent Activity on Lists
Two features make agent work visible outside the Tasks pane. Review notifications on lists arrived in version 29.0:
- Review notifications on lists flag records that are waiting for review, so you can spot them from the Sales Quotes or Purchase Invoices list without opening each document.
- Avatars for record creators and modifiers show who created or last changed a record, including agents. Hover over the avatar to see the full name and the time of the change.
To see how much an agent has done over time, hover over its icon or select Show summary for agent in the Tasks pane. It shows key figures for the agent’s work in your company.
Troubleshooting
The data review bar doesn’t appear. It only shows on Card, Document, List Plus, and Worksheet pages. Make sure you are on the main document, not a subpage, and refresh the page. Another user might also have completed the review already.
A task is missing from the Tasks pane. Check that you selected the right agent icon. The task might be complete, stopped by someone else, still processing, or deleted by an administrator.
The agent keeps getting stuck on the same thing. Fix the cause rather than answering the same question every day. Common causes are missing master data, such as vendors without email addresses or items without references, and permission sets that don’t cover fields added by extensions.
For the setup side of the agent that most finance teams start with, see How to Set Up the Payables Agent in Business Central.