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

Copilot for Finance builds on top of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and adds new tools in Excel, Outlook, and other apps.

Written by Akash Dutta, Edited by Siddharth Suvarna | Updated: 4 March 2024 15:01 IST

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

Photo Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft says Copilot for Finance can take raw financial data and turn it into visuals and reports

Highlights

Microsoft’s Copilot for Finance can conduct a variance analysis in Excel
The AI tool can be fed data from a company’s financial data sources
Copilot for Finance is currently in public preview

Microsoft unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Copilot for Finance on Thursday, aiming to help financial professionals easily navigate everyday mundane tasks. The Copilot tool is not a new AI model, and instead builds on the existing Copilot for Microsoft 365 stack to bring new features specific to financial operations. It is an enterprise-focused AI tool and currently is available in public preview. Notably, the tech giant also announced new features and major improvements for Windows 11 through a new update.

Announcing the new AI tool in a blog post, Microsoft positioned its new product as a way to free up the time for finance departments in organisations so they can focus on strategic tasks instead of mundane analysis and report making. The company also highlighted a data point from the CFO magazine and stated that 62 percent of surveyed finance professionals listed “drudgery of data entry and review cycles” as a reason for not finding time for strategic tasks.

Copilot for Finance, as per the tech giant, automates many financial tasks that would otherwise take long hours for users. It can perform a long list of tasks such as conducting a variance analysis in Excel using natural language prompts, reconciling data in Excel with automated data structure comparisons, providing complete summary of relevant customer account details, turning raw data into visuals and reports, and more.

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The tech giant also highlighted that since Copilot for Finance is not a new AI model and can work on top of existing Copilot for Microsoft 365, it can seamlessly draw context from an organisation's existing financial data sources such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as well as other similar repositories.

Microsoft's new AI tool joins its other two operation-specific tools — Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service. The former can generate sales meeting briefs, add leads and update CRM records, as well as other analysis and generative tasks. The latter, which is aimed for people-facing roles, can generate AI-powered conversations with a single click, access knowledge about customers from other systems, schedule and recap meetings, draft emails, and more. Both of these tools are generally available to Microsoft 365 customers.

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Further reading: Copilot, Microsoft, Artificial Intelligence, AI

Akash Dutta Email Akash Dutta

Akash Dutta is a Senior Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In his free time, he can be seen supporting his favourite football club - Chelsea, watching movies and anime, and sharing passionate opinions on food. More