People are starting to give Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI models access to their business data. The question comes from whether or not they’re risking data security by doing it.
Agents hallucinate, follow bad instructions, and are . If your AI is connected to your Business Central data without the proper guardrails in place, it could lead to detrimental consequences for your organization.
What Could Go Wrong?
If you connect your AI and Business Central data without thinking through the security risks, you could be opening your organization up to major issues:
- Data leaks and unconstrained actions: AI shares your data with people who shouldn’t see it without you prompting it to.
- Compliance issues: you can’t control or track who sees what data, introducing compliance issues.
- Liable for hackers: attackers can manipulate your AI agent to get access to your Business Central data.
- All-or-nothing access: you won’t be able to control exactly what your AI can see. Your AI will either not be able to access any of your ERP data, or it will be able to see everything.
This doesn’t mean your AI and Business Central shouldn’t work together; it just means the connection needs boundaries. The difference between a secure integration and a risky one comes down to whether you controlled the access before you turned your AI loose or not.
What to do First?
You’re now familiar with the potential risks of what could happen if you connect your AI to your Business Central data without thinking about the security behind every interaction. Here are some considerations you should keep in mind when setting up your permissions.
- Who actually needs access to your Business Central data? Who within your organization should have permission to see that data, and most importantly, who should not? Having permissions in place ensures that AI won’t be able to share company financial data with those who shouldn’t have access.
- What other systems will you be connecting to? You don't just work out of your ERP. If you need to tie in your Helpdesk, CRM, or warehouse management platform, you’ll need to think about the security within each one.
- What kind of tasks will you want your AI to perform? This determines exactly which kind of data your AI will need. PopdockAI lets you control which data your AI can access, and what it can do with it.
The last thing you want to do is take risks when it comes to data security. You need a platform that makes it easy. Set up strict permissions for every person, agent, and interaction without needing to code with PopdockAI.
PopdockAI
enforces security within the platform, outside your AI’s control. With PopdockAI, you get the flexibility to tailor permissions for every use case. That means every AI agent, internal employee, and connected system is locked down to fit within the parameters you explicitly set up for them.
- Multi-layered security: From establishing specific user identity to validating proper client inputs, every step of the way is locked down to protect your data, on your terms.
- Granular access controls: Determine exactly which records each user or agent can see. Filter by department, geography, date range, or any other custom parameter. In practice, this means someone in accounting could see vendor invoices without being able to pull vendor bank routing numbers, even if they both live in the same table.
- Strict permissions: Define permission policies for different applications or interfaces, tailoring what each deployment can see and do. A customer-facing order-status bot and an internal finance assistant can draw from the same Business Central environment with entirely different rules.
- Completely auditable: Every interaction is recorded, so you can see who accessed the data, when, and what they did with it, enabling compliance and holding your team accountable for AI usage.
Limit tools, fix parameters, filter data, and restrict fields, so your AI can only see and do what you want it to. Your users, both human and AI-driven, only get access to the data they need, and nothing more.
How This Works with Your Business Central Data
Here’s a scenario: You connect your AI to Business Central so employees can ask questions about order status, inventory levels, or shipping updates. This works until someone in the warehouse asks a question that happens to surface payroll data or banking information because your AI wasn’t scoped to keep those tables out of reach. Or imagine an agent with write access “helpfully” creates a financial record for an order that doesn’t exist. You need to make sure these things don’t happen by controlling what your agent can read and surface, and what actions are allowed.
With PopdockAI, you can determine whether your users and agents get read access or write access for specific data. Control exactly what actions it can take if you give it write access, instead of relying on all-or-nothing permissions.
Is it Safe to Connect AI to Business Central?
Answer: Yes, connecting your AI to Business Central is safe, but only if you do it correctly. With PopdockAI, you can control exactly how secure your data stays when you connect your Business Central environment to your AI.
Enabling AI functionality in your systems makes your workflows so much more powerful, but only if you have the proper precautions in place. Explore how PopdockAI can bring you peace of mind, enabling you to set up strict governance requirements on your own, without code. Get a live demo today and get started on creating a more secure connection between your AI and Business Central data.