Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
I’m writing this a few days after the event, and I’m still a little bit in Billund.
Earlier this year I posted that my session had been accepted for Nordic Summit 2026. Announcing a talk and actually standing in front of a room are very different things. This is the story of the second one.
This isn’t a technical deep dive. It’s what it felt like to speak at Nordic Summit, and why the community around it is the real reason I’d go back.
Getting to Billund
I flew from Amsterdam to Billund on Sunday afternoon, the day before the conference started, and landed at 2 PM.
I had the rest of the afternoon to settle in, and that evening I went to the speaker dinner. It’s a good way to start a conference: you meet the other speakers before the rooms fill up and everyone is busy.
I stayed two nights at Hotel LEGOLAND Castle, and a childhood dream came true: I got to live in a LEGO house.
Billund is a small town, and it’s easy to forget that until you’re there.
A Conference Inside a LEGO World
Nordic Summit took place on 21–22 September at LEGOLAND® Hotel & Conference. I’ve been to conferences in convention centres and hotel ballrooms. This was different.
There’s something disarming about talking about enterprise AI architecture in a place built for building things brick by brick.
The Keynote: Going Headless
Nordic Summit kicked off with our keynote speaker, Juliane Rask Maack, talking about the headless experience of the platform. My take: “headless” isn’t a Dynamics 365 feature you flip on, it’s the direction Microsoft has been pointing the whole platform since Satya Nadella’s “SaaS is dead” comments back in late 2024. The model-driven and F&O interfaces stop being the main way people work, and Dynamics becomes a back-end layer of logic and data that agents reach over MCP, grounded by Work IQ, while people mostly talk to Copilot or a lightweight custom front end instead. Microsoft has already shipped a good chunk of the plumbing for this — MCP servers for Dataverse, Sales, Customer Service and Finance & Operations, plus a genuinely headless Commerce server running on the same Commerce Scale Unit engine behind storefronts and POS — with Work IQ meant to sit underneath all of it as the shared grounding layer, and licensing already shifting toward MCP access bundled into the Premium tier rather than a flat per-seat model.
Where I land on it: the hard part was never the MCP plumbing, it’s the semantic layer — getting “revenue” or “customer” to mean the same thing across every team’s agent — and a lot of what’s shipped so far is still in preview. But opening a community conference with this as the keynote message tells you how mainstream the direction already is, whatever the maturity gaps.
My Session: Copilot Studio vs Azure AI Foundry
My session was Microsoft Copilot Studio vs Azure AI Foundry. I opened it the same way I planned to: with a failure, not a feature list. The case update succeeds. The confirmation is lost. The agent retries. Does the case get updated twice?
I believe questions like that should drive the platform decision more than any comparison table. The rest of the session followed one idea: SaaS convenience versus PaaS control, with Azure AI Search as the retrieval layer underneath both, and a hybrid pattern where Copilot Studio is the front door and Foundry is the engine room. The full framework is in my Copilot Studio vs Azure AI Foundry guide.
What I’m taking home
I’ve now presented in Budapest and in Billund within a few weeks of each other. I’d like to keep doing this, and I’d like to keep meeting the people who come to these rooms.
None of this happens by itself. Thank you to the organizing team — Vivian Voss, Guro Faller, Jens Kofod, Liv Tornquist, Sigrid Berg Wallin, Marc Pascal Landgreen, Fredrik Saetre and Simon Bolther Ørsted — for putting on Nordic Summit for the fifth year running.
Sessions and Speakers
Nordic Summit 2026 had 75 speakers and 71 sessions across Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Business Central and AI. This is the full list, as published on the Nordic Summit 2026 speakers page, sorted alphabetically by session title.
| Session | Speakers |
| 50 Business Central Upgrades Later: Patterns Nobody Talks About | Hrefna Thorisdottir |
| A Developer’s Guide to Testing Copilot Studio and AI Agents | Claire Edgson |
| A Recipe for Not Succeeding with Agents | Allan Rocha |
| Agentic Selling with D365: The Good, The Gap, and The Extensibility | Dennis Istel |
| Automate your order flow through EDI | Christian Kellberg, Rasmus Andersen |
| Azure Foundry – Lets build some agents | Nathan Sweeney |
| Balancing the Bricks with Power Automate | Sara Fennah |
| Beyond CCaaS: Microsoft’s AI-First Vision for the Future of Contact Centres | Sabina Kuzmiakova, William Dorrington |
| Beyond reactive Service: Designing D365 Customer Engagement at enterprise scale | Daniel Lindgren, Kristine Risberg |
| Beyond the Chatbot: The Evolution of the Financial Controller in the Age of Agentic ERP | Jonas Feddersen Melgaard, Lone Gru |
| Break your AI system before users do: Red teaming your AI Agent | Shubhangi Goyal |
| Build the Same Multi-Agent System Twice: Copilot Studio AND Microsoft Agent Framework SDK | Wesley Nell |
| Building SOLID PCF controls with Github Copilot 🤖 | Carl Cookson, Matt Beard |
| Choose a Voice Channel architecture for D365 Contact Center | Filipp Koivu |
| Citizen Development Governance in an Agent‑First World | Feline Parein |
| Closing Keynote – Are you using AI all wrong? | Fredrik Saetre |
| Code Apps, Generative Pages, and Vibe: Understanding the Technology and the Impact | Carl Cookson, Matt Beard |
| Complex Requirements. Smarter Solutions – Smarter Output Management for Complex ERP Requirements | Lennart Garbarsch |
| Customer Insights – Journeys Deep Dive | Björn Zahnow, Pauline Kolde |
| Designing B2B Contact Centers in Dynamics 365: Where B2C Approaches Fall Short | Alessio Bongiorno |
| Does solid app architecture still matter in a Copilot World? | Lilian Stenholt |
| Don’t Wait for Errors: Monitoring Power Platform in Real Time | Andrew Bibby, Cathrine Bruvold |
| Error-Free Solutions – Error Handling in Power Apps and Power Automate | Krzysztof Kania, Tomasz Poszytek |
| Fast AI, Slow Thinking: Why the Pause Matters | Máté Tóth |
| Forgotten features of Dataverse: Hidden gems that enhance agents, apps, and everything in between! | Nick Doelman |
| Forwarded: Fwd: Fwd: RE: Urgent – Fixing your Tickets with Azure DevOps and Dynamics 365CE | Balazs Horvath |
| From AI Adoption to Business Transformation | Nenad Sljivic |
| From Chaos to Clarity: Mastering Multi-Vendor Dynamics 365 Deployments | Johan Persson |
| From Copilot Hype to Real Business Value | Chike Eduputa |
| From ERP Template to Global Rollout: Building a Scalable Foundation in Dynamics 365 | Allan Lynggaard Petersen, Steen Pipper |
| From ERP to AI: Building Copilot Studio Agents for Business Central Using MCP | David Lorenzo, Samir Makwana |
| From Ethical Hacking to Responsible AI: What Went Wrong? | Ahmad Najjar |
| From Likes to Insights: Measuring real User Experience in Conversational AI | Katerina Chernevskaya |
| From Manual to Autonomous: Designing AI Agents in D365 Finance & Operations | Magdalena Mitreska, Olivera Pavlovska Stanojevikj |
| From Pen and Paper to AI Agents: Rethinking Data Collection for Dataverse | Janka Tomcisakova |
| From RPA to Agentic Automation: Getting Hands-On with Computer Using Agents | Agnius Bartninkas |
| From Zero to Hero: 5 Steps to Automation in Business Central | Brynjar Jóhannesson |
| Full stack solutions with Code Apps | Tomas Prokop |
| Global by Design? The Truth About D365 F&O Localizations in Europe | Magdalena Mitreska, Olivera Pavlovska Stanojevikj |
| Governance as Code for Power Platform | Jukka Niiranen |
| How to Save Storage Costs & Optimize Document Processes in Dynamics 365 | Michael Dohr |
| If AI Builds Apps, What’s Left for Power Platform Experts? | Mikko Koskinen |
| Introducing the Power Platform ToolBox | Carl Cookson |
| Knowledge Source Governed Copilot Studio Agent | Karl-Johan Spiik |
| Knowledge, Tools, MCP, and Multi‑Agents: Choosing the Right Approach in Copilot Studio | Lee Ford |
| Learn A New Skill You Already Know – Business Skills in Agents | Sebastian Sieber |
| MCP in Power Platform: One Year Later – Building Custom MCP Servers with Low Code 🧠 | Daniel Laskewitz, Mats Necker |
| MCP vs. A2A – Bridging the security & governance gap for agentic AI in Power Platform | Claire Edgson, Tatu Seppälä |
| Microsoft Copilot Studio vs Azure AI Foundry | Zsolt Zombik |
| Microsoft Fabric Updates You Shouldn’t Ignore | Hanna Schwab |
| Microsoft Work IQ: Making Copilot Studio Agents Understand How Your Organization Actually Works | Katerina Chernevskaya |
| Mind of the Machine: Building Autonomous AI Agents That Transform Customer Service in Dynamics 365 | David Reid, Sumit Kumar |
| Orchestrating Multi‑Agent Systems in Microsoft Copilot Studio | Holger Imbery, Jennifer Krause |
| Power Automate Approvals vs F&O Workflows | Ted Ohlsson |
| Power Automate or Copilot Studio? Stop Guessing | Wesley Nell |
| Power Pages: Bring your own code! | Nick Doelman |
| Power Platform rollout: what to know and why | Tomasz Poszytek |
| Productivity Hack Battle: Top 10 productivity tips for busy tech professionals | Nick Doelman, Pauline Kolde |
| Simplify Your BC Deployments with Praxedo’s Native FSM Integration | Arnaud Morel |
| The Customer Odyssey – When Marketing and Service Finally Align | Kristine Risberg, Pauline Kolde |
| Thinking Like A Power Platform Architect workshop | Keith Atherton, Neil Rowlands |
| Validating behavior after AI changes your code | Matej Samler |
| Vibe Coding and Canvas Apps: Empowerment or the End of Craft? | Krzysztof Kania |
| Welcome and Keynote | Juliane Maack |
| What Does AI-Driven Copilot Studio Development Actually Look Like? | Mikko Koskinen |
| When Users Leave: The Ripple Effect Across Microsoft 365 and Power Platform | Laura Graham-Brown, Sara Fennah |
| Who is Policing the (AI-)Police? Welcome to the Age of Algorithmic Injustice. | Marin Niehues |
| You are ready for AI! But are your users? | Leo Visser |
| You Don’t Need to Know Everything to Start: A Real Path Into Data with Microsoft Fabric | Hanna Schwab, Sandra Kiel |
| Your ALM might not be my ALM or their ALM, and that’s ok. | Yannick Reekmans |
| Your ERP Just Got AI Developers: X++ Development with MCP, Agents & Zero Patience for Manual Work | Laze Janev |
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