Prominent technology vendor Microsoft has endeavored to transform the way financial teams handle their everyday tasks by releasing a public preview of Microsoft Copilot for financial, its newest Copilot solution that expands upon the current Copilot offered on Microsoft365.

Copilot for Finance, which lets finance teams take advantage of AI-powered, role-based process automation and suggestions, is now available to businesses in addition to Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service.

Microsoft: Handling the requirement to produce more work with added value

In fact, a study by Microsoft found that 62% of finance teams and executives are stuck in a never-ending cycle of data input and review work, and 80% of finance leaders and teams find it challenging to take on more strategic work outside of their operational tasks.

By adopting Copilot to relieve them of tedious and repetitive activities, financial teams, according to Microsoft, may concentrate on more value-added work. Finance will be able to assist their organization more actively by offering guidance and insights as a result.

Microsoft365's Copilot for Finance can improve Microsoft productivity suites used by organizations on a daily basis, such as Outlook and Excel.

Additionally, Copilot uses context from already-existing financial data sources, such as SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the Microsoft Graph, which are still widely used ERP systems.

"Building on our 30-year history of embracing AI, Visa is on a journey to roll out generative AI across our entire company to empower our employees and develop new solutions to serve and protect our cardholders, merchants, and the broader ecosystem," says Don Hobson, CIO at Visa, one of Microsoft's Copilot for Finance clients.

The widespread adoption of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 by our staff has been encouraging, and we're eager to keep offering them additional opportunities to utilize the technology, which will revolutionize both our daily operations and the services we provide to our clients.

Copilot for Finance: Essential characteristics

Copilot for Fiance, which is now in preview, offers a number of significant capabilities to improve FinOps, such as:

• uses natural language cues to assist financial analysts in swiftly doing a variance analysis in Excel to check data sets for irregularities, hazards, and mismatched values. Business executives can gain strategic insights from this kind of study regarding where the financial results are meeting, surpassing, or falling short of expectations and why.

• helps go from insight to action by streamlining the Excel reconciliation process through automatic data structure comparisons and guided troubleshooting, so assisting in ensuring the quality and dependability of financial records.

• To speed up the collections process, Outlook offers a comprehensive summary of all pertinent client account information, including balance statements and invoices.

gives users the ability to transform unprocessed Excel data into reports and graphics that are ready for sharing via Teams and Outlook.