A new release of Microsoft Copilot seeks to bring the benefits of generative AI tools to finance teams, helping them increase productivity and efficiency across the board.
Microsoft says the nifty Copilot for Finance will help finance teams eliminate monotonous, time-consuming manual tasks, allowing them to focus on being a more strategic part of their business.
The launch includes some new AI-powered additions to favorite Microsoft 365 apps, such as Excel and Outlook, giving finance teams an additional tool to help influence and even make key business decisions.
Microsoft co-pilot for finance
“Finance departments are critical partners in the strategic decisions that impact the direction of a company,” said Charles Lamanna, CVP, Platform and Business Applications at Microsoft, in a blog post announcing the launch.
“Copilot for Finance can help free up time for finance to play a more strategic role in providing advice and information to the business by streamlining finance tasks, automating workflows, and providing workflow insights.”
As with other similar launches, Copilot for Finance incorporates Microsoft 365 tools, which the company says are “supercharged” through its artificial intelligence platform, along with traditional ERP systems such as Microsoft 365, SAP and Microsoft Graph.
This includes Microsoft Excel, a vital tool for many finance teams, which will now enable financial analysts to quickly perform variance analysis using natural language prompts, reviewing data sets for anomalies, risks and unmatched values, providing much greater insight. insight into where improvements can be made. can be done or successes can be found.
Copilot for Finance can also simplify the reconciliation process in Excel with automated data structure comparisons and guided troubleshooting, which Microsoft says will help ensure financial records are reliable and accurate.
When it comes to Outlook, Copilot for Finance can quickly summarize and provide reports on customer accounts, providing information such as invoices and balance statements to enable faster action.
And as with other models, Copilot for Finance can bring in raw data from Excel and turn it into “presentation-ready” reports and even visuals, which can then be shared across the entire Microsoft 365 platform.
Businesses looking to try out the new tools can try out the new Copilot for Finance plugins now as a public preview, with a broader release scheduled for sometime in the near future.
