Microsoft opens public preview of Copilot for Finance

This Copilot in Microsoft 365 designed to transform the workflow of finance teams

Microsoft has unveiled the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Finance. This latest addition to the Copilot suite, tailored for business functions, promises to redefine how finance teams approach their daily tasks according to Microsoft’s blog post.

Copilot for Finance joins the ranks of Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, which are now generally available, ushering in a new era of AI-powered workflow automation and recommendations.

Finance departments play a pivotal role in shaping the strategic direction of companies. Despite their importance, finance leaders and teams often find themselves constrained by operational tasks, with 80% facing challenges in expanding into more strategic endeavors. Moreover, a staggering 62% of finance professionals report being bogged down by the mundane tasks of data entry and review cycles.

Copilot for Finance aims to address these challenges head-on by liberating finance professionals from tedious tasks, thereby allowing them to focus on providing valuable counsel and insights to the business.

By streamlining financial workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and offering actionable insights within the workflow, Copilot for Finance empowers finance teams to play a more strategic role in driving organizational success.

A key component of Copilot for Finance is its integration with Microsoft 365, which enhances widely used productivity apps such as Excel and Outlook with workflow-specific insights tailored to finance professionals.

Leveraging essential context from existing financial data sources, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP, as well as the Microsoft Graph, Copilot for Finance offers a seamless and efficient solution for financial management.

Copilot for Finance introduces several key features to enhance financial operations:

• Helps financial analysts quickly conduct a variance analysis in Excel using natural language prompts to review data sets for anomalies, risks, and unmatched values. This type of analysis helps finance provide strategic insights to business leaders about where it is meeting, exceeding, or falling short of planned financial outcomes and why.
• Simplifies the reconciliation process in Excel with automated data structure comparisons and guided troubleshooting to help move from insight to action, which helps ensure the reliability and accuracy of financial records.
• Provides a complete summary of relevant customer account details in Outlook, such as balance statements and invoices, to expedite the collections process.
• Enables customers to turn raw data in Excel into presentation-ready visuals and reports ready to be shared across Outlook and Teams.

The offerings provided by Copilot for business functions aim to address a common challenge faced by workers: translating insights into actionable outcomes by leveraging relevant data and workflows tailored to their roles.

Copilot facilitates the breakdown of information and application barriers while actively generating insights, recommendations, and guidance from diverse data sources, all in alignment with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. Through Microsoft Copilot Studio, businesses can further personalize Copilot for their specific processes within Copilot for Microsoft 365 and its role-based extensions.