ERP Roundup: Business Central 26 Goes Out of Support on Monday, and SAP Puts a Risk Tier on Every Agent

1. Business Central 26 goes out of support on Monday, and BC29 on-premises is now downloadable

Two things happened to the Business Central upgrade path this week, pointing in opposite directions. Yun Zhu's October cumulative update summary, published 5 October, lists CU00 for BC29 with on-premises download packages attached — the build that had not released when we wrote up BC29's GA last Friday. Alongside it, 28.6, 27.12 and 26.18 shipped.

26.18 is the part worth reading twice. Zhu's lifecycle table, updated 2 October, puts the end of support for version 26.x at 13 October 2026 — next Monday. Treat that precise date with care: Microsoft's own released-updates page for 2025 release wave 1 lists 26.18 as the October update and states no end date at all, and the trackers that do publish one mostly derive it from the standard eighteen-month rule. Two sources agree on the month; one gives the day.

Scope is where this gets misread. These are modern-policy dates governing on-premises servicing: after 26.18, a 26.x deployment stops receiving cumulative updates. An online tenant hits no support cliff at all — it is governed by the mechanic in Microsoft's update rollout timeline: a five-month update period you can reschedule inside, a one-month grace period where you cannot, then an enforced update period in which, in Microsoft's words, extensions that cause the update to fail "might be automatically uninstalled". Data is not deleted and a compatible version can be reinstalled afterwards. That is not a support deadline. It is a worse one: it arrives on Microsoft's schedule and removes your extensions to get there.

2. SAP Connect: autonomy stops being a setting and becomes a test-design decision

SAP Connect ran this week, and SAP's own keynote write-up of 7 October is the primary worth reading rather than the conference coverage. Joule Work rolls out to all customers in October, the SAP Autonomous Suite covers finance, procurement, supply chain, HR and customer experience, and SAP counts over 200 Joule Agents since May against a target of 400 by year end. The productivity figures quoted — above 20% in HR, finance and procurement — are SAP's own and self-reported, so take the direction, not the number.

Most readers here will never deploy Joule. Read it for the governance vocabulary, which is the part the rest of the market copies. SAP named three oversight levels: human-in-the-loop approval, human-on-the-loop monitoring, human-in-command override. Chief Security Officer Marielle Ehrmann said every agent should carry a verified owner, a risk tier and scoped access rights, with tighter oversight the more autonomously it runs. The operative claim is that embedded agents run inside existing workflows, on the same data and rules, leaving the same audit trail.

3. Copilot Business default-on billing slips to 1 December, with a 4,000-credit cap nobody chose

Microsoft's October Partner Center announcements moved the usage-based billing change for new CSP purchases of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business from 2 November to 1 December 2026. Pay-as-you-go is on by default, covering Copilot Cowork, Work IQ APIs and GitHub Copilot Harness, with a default spending limit of 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month that an admin can adjust. Sandbox environments open on 2 November, and eleven markets are excluded at launch.

A date moving a month later is not, on its own, a story. The shape of it is: a default that is on, a limit set for you, and a meter attached to products the buyer did not separately purchase. That turns up on an invoice, not in a test result. The sandbox date is the useful one — four weeks to see the billing behaviour before a client does.