Microsoft Introduces Copilot for Finance, an AI Tool to Streamline Enterprise Finance Tasks

Microsoft unveiled a brand new synthetic intelligence (AI) device referred to as Copilot for Finance on Thursday, aiming to assist monetary professionals simply navigate on a regular basis mundane duties. The Copilot device is just not a brand new AI mannequin, and as an alternative builds on the prevailing Copilot for Microsoft 365 stack to carry new options particular to monetary operations. It’s an enterprise-focused AI device and at the moment is accessible in public preview. Notably, the tech big additionally introduced new options and main enhancements for Home windows 11 by way of a brand new replace.

Saying the brand new AI device in a weblog publish, Microsoft positioned its new product as a solution to unlock the time for finance departments in organisations to allow them to give attention to strategic duties as an alternative of mundane evaluation and report making. The corporate additionally highlighted a knowledge level from the CFO journal and acknowledged that 62 % of surveyed finance professionals listed “drudgery of knowledge entry and evaluation cycles” as a cause for not discovering time for strategic duties.

Copilot for Finance, as per the tech big, automates many monetary duties that might in any other case take lengthy hours for customers. It could carry out a protracted record of duties comparable to conducting a variance evaluation in Excel utilizing pure language prompts, reconciling information in Excel with automated information construction comparisons, offering full abstract of related buyer account particulars, turning uncooked information into visuals and reviews, and extra.

The tech big additionally highlighted that since Copilot for Finance is just not a brand new AI mannequin and may work on prime of present Copilot for Microsoft 365, it could actually seamlessly draw context from an organisation’s present monetary information sources comparable to Enterprise Useful resource Planning (ERP) techniques in addition to different comparable repositories.

Microsoft’s new AI device joins its different two operation-specific instruments — Copilot for Gross sales and Copilot for Service. The previous can generate gross sales assembly briefs, add leads and replace CRM data, in addition to different evaluation and generative duties. The latter, which is aimed for people-facing roles, can generate AI-powered conversations with a single click on, entry information about clients from different techniques, schedule and recap conferences, draft emails, and extra. Each of those instruments are typically out there to Microsoft 365 clients.