Copilot for Finance: gen AI for financial departments

Microsoft Copilot for Finance is a cutting-edge financial management solution powered by artificial intelligence. Developed with insights from Microsoft's own world-class finance organization, Copilot for Finance aims not only to relieve the burden of routine work but also to empower teams with predictive insights and analytics, enhancing decision-making and strategic financial planning.

Furthermore, its ability to streamline financial processes and deliver actionable real-time data marks a significant shift toward smarter and more efficient financial management practices that drive growth and reduce costs. In this article, we will delve deeper into its features to discover how it can help your finance team achieve maximum efficiency.

What is Copilot for Finance

The finance department is a cornerstone of every organization, overseeing critical functions such as quote-to-cash processes, credit and collections, compliance, and risk management. Beyond these core responsibilities, finance teams are tasked with analyzing real-time data to evaluate business performance and provide growth recommendations.

However, 80% of financial leaders and teams face challenges in balancing strategic goals with daily operational activities, and recent research reveals that 62% of finance professionals express frustration with repetitive tasks and review cycles, aspiring to contribute more significantly to growth strategies.

To address these challenges, Microsoft has introduced Copilot for Finance, building on the success of Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service. This innovative tool aims to enhance financial operations by enabling teams to streamline tasks, automate workflows, and leverage valuable insights to support strategic decision-making.

The solution integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications, providing employees with access to a comprehensive Gen AI assistant. Microsoft states that its Copilot offering will support the 68% of CFOs who anticipate being able to increase revenues and improve performance using generative AI.

A brief introduction to Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the AI-powered digital assistant developed by the tech giant from Redmond, designed to simplify users' daily tasks, boost productivity, and foster creativity. Its primary focus lies in code generation, writing assistance, and collaboration.

Seamlessly integrated with popular Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Copilot provides contextual suggestions and helps users understand information more effectively.

Powered by the cutting-edge GPT-4 language model, Microsoft Copilot boasts impressive capabilities such as code auto-completion, documentation search, and collaborative writing. It caters to a broad spectrum of users, including developers, content creators, and professionals seeking AI-powered assistance for their tasks.

Copilot leverages large language models (LLMs) trained to understand and generate text. These models are informed by your organization’s unique context and data securely stored within the Microsoft Graph (emails, meetings, chats, calendars).

When a user provides a prompt within a Microsoft 365 application (e.g., "Summarize key trends for this quarter's results" in Excel), Copilot enhances the request with relevant information from the Microsoft Graph, improving the accuracy and relevance of its response.

Subsequently, Copilot processes this enriched prompt using the language model (LLM) and retrieves results, along with application-specific commands for the tool in use. This seamless integration enables users to gain valuable insights and complete tasks directly within their workflow.

Key ways to utilize Microsoft Copilot

1. Adopting Copilot: Microsoft offers various Copilot assistants to enhance productivity and creativity. Integrated across several Microsoft products and platforms, Copilot transforms the digital workspace into a more interactive and efficient environment.
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2. Extending Copilot: Developers can incorporate external data, simplifying user operations and reducing the need to switch contexts. This not only boosts productivity but also encourages greater collaboration. Through Copilot, it is easy to integrate this data into the everyday Microsoft products you use. For instance, businesses and ISVs can develop plugins to embed their APIs and enterprise data directly into Copilot. By adding these plugins, connectors, or messaging extensions, users can maximize the AI capabilities offered by Copilot.
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3. Building Your Own Copilot: Beyond adoption and extension, organizations can create a customized Copilot for a unique conversational experience using Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and other Microsoft Cloud technologies. A tailored Copilot can integrate enterprise data, access real-time external data via APIs, and seamlessly integrate into business applications.

How to use Copilot for Finance

Microsoft Copilot for Finance is an AI-powered tool designed to optimize and automate financial processes within Microsoft 365 applications. It can assist with tasks such as simplifying audits, managing collections, and accelerating financial reporting by quickly identifying discrepancies.

Released in public preview by Microsoft on February 29, 2024, and made generally available in May of the same year, this latest extension of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is designed to make the work of finance teams easier through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). This tool supports all activities, from daily operations to strategic decisions, improving financial management.

Copilot for Finance connects to existing financial systems, including Dynamics 365 and SAP, and can extract information and update actions directly from the tools already in use. It is proficient in handling critical, time-consuming tasks that characterize the daily workload of finance professionals, offering a simple way to ask questions about data, gain insights, and automate processes.

Leveraging the power of generative AI and machine learning, Microsoft Copilot for Finance is an ideal partner for financial management. From automating challenging tasks like collections and capturing contracts and invoices to providing actionable recommendations, proactive anomaly detection, and tailored guidance, this AI partner covers every aspect.

Let’s explore some key features of Copilot for Finance.

Save time and effort with automation

One of the biggest challenges for finance professionals is tackling tedious and repetitive tasks, such as data entry, review cycles, and report generation. These activities can consume significant time and energy, preventing focus on more strategic, impactful tasks like financial planning, risk analysis, and business growth. Copilot for Finance helps overcome this challenge by automating these monotonous activities, freeing up valuable time. With Copilot for Finance, you can delegate these tasks to your AI assistant and focus on what truly matters for your work and business.

Gain insights with AI

Another challenge for finance professionals is navigating the vast and complex financial data they work with. It can be difficult to find relevant and meaningful information to make better financial decisions and optimize performance. Copilot for Finance addresses this challenge by providing AI-driven insights. With Copilot for Finance, you can uncover hidden trends and patterns, predict cash flow issues, and identify areas for cost optimization. All this is powered by AI, seamlessly integrated into the familiar Microsoft 365 environment you already use.

Personalize the experience with role-specific features

Finance professionals have different needs and preferences depending on their roles and responsibilities. For example, an auditor may require different functionalities compared to a collections specialist or a reporting analyst. That’s why Copilot for Finance is not a one-size-fits-all solution; it adapts to the specific needs of different financial roles. Copilot for Finance helps streamline workflows and enhance productivity with features and tools tailored to your role. For instance, you can simplify audits with a simple command or speed up collections with automated communications and payment plans. Copilot for Finance provides every member of the finance team with the functionality best suited to their role and responsibilities.

Enjoy a seamless experience

One of Copilot for Finance's greatest advantages is its seamless integration with the Microsoft 365 tools you already use, such as Excel, Outlook, and (in the near future) Teams. This means you don’t need to switch between applications or struggle to import data from one app to another. You can access financial insights and actions directly within your familiar workflow, breaking down silos and barriers within your team. Copilot for Finance allows users to enjoy a seamless and integrated experience. You can access Copilot for Finance from any device, anywhere, at any time, and collaborate with your finance team and stakeholders, easily sharing financial insights and actions.

Keep data secure

Security and compliance are paramount in the financial world. It’s crucial to ensure financial data is secure and protected while adhering to the strictest data privacy regulations and standards. No one wants to risk compromising their data or reputation with a solution that doesn’t meet these requirements. Copilot for Finance helps you trust your data through robust security and compliance features, inheriting Microsoft 365’s strong security capabilities, such as encryption, authentication, and verification. You can also leverage a solution compliant with the highest data privacy standards and regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC. This provides peace of mind and assurance that your financial data is safeguarded.

Copilot for Finance: What does the future hold?

But that’s not all the future has in store for Copilot for Finance. As an add-on still in general availability, many of its more advanced features are currently in development or public testing. Microsoft has announced a roadmap for updates to the digital assistant, with regular enhancements planned through the first half of 2025.

So, what can we expect from the future of Copilot for Finance? Quite a lot, actually. Just like other vertical AI agents from Microsoft, such as Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, the finance-focused version of Microsoft's copilot will see a host of new features and improvements in the coming months, promising significant advancements for this already impressive tool.

The main innovations for Microsoft Copilot for Finance announced for 2025 will focus on optimizing AI capabilities and enhancing collaboration within financial organizations. Here are some key features to look forward to:

• Automated macroeconomic analysis: Copilot for Finance will introduce a new feature to monitor and summarize macroeconomic signals in real time. Organizations will be able to customize a library of macroeconomic themes and use it to provide timely reports to stakeholders. Integration with Microsoft Teams will facilitate collaboration between teams, such as treasury and company leadership, ensuring real-time updates on market events.
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• Enhanced reconciliation features: Starting in 2025, Microsoft will extend automatic reconciliation capabilities within Excel. This feature will enable assisted data cleansing and preparation, improving accuracy and facilitating variance analysis from multiple data sources.
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• Greater application integration: Integration between Teams and Copilot will be further enhanced, allowing for managing credit recovery calls, sending suggested scripts, and automatically logging actions in the financial system. This functionality will improve the efficiency of financial operations and foster collaboration.

Copilot for Finance: use cases in Excel and Outlook

Now, let’s explore a couple of practical examples to get a hands-on understanding of Copilot for Finance and its capabilities for your work.

We'll focus on the two software programs it is most tightly integrated with at the moment: Outlook and Excel. We'll explore some of its basic functions within each to better understand its features.

Copilot for Finance: writing an email in Outlook

Let’s dive into drafting a new email using Copilot.

Imagine you need to share details about open invoices with your clients. First, you’ll need to get Copilot for Finance in Outlook. Go to the Add-ins section, type "Copilot for Finance" in the search bar, and click Add.

Next, start a new email and select Copilot for Finance from your Add-ins. Choose the recipient, then begin drafting what you want to say in the Draft with Copilot section, as shown in the image.

You'll notice some interesting options for adjusting the tone and length of your message, as highlighted in the screenshot below. This feature is especially helpful for overcoming the common hurdle of drafting an initial email.

After writing a brief text to inform your client that you’re sharing the list of open invoices, click Create draft, and Copilot will generate a draft for you. You can edit it if needed or use it as is and add it to your email draft. And that’s it! Your draft is ready to send.

Copilot for Finance in Outlook also offers the ability to send actual invoices as attachments. Simply select the necessary invoices from the Customer tab, click Attach Invoice to Draft, and the attachment is ready.

Copilot for Finance for reconciliation in Excel

Which financial analyst hasn’t faced client reports that don’t match? Those with countless rows and transactions requiring significant time to analyze. Copilot for Finance in Excel could be the solution to this problem. As mentioned in previous sections, this add-in analyzes reconciliations and accomplishes in seconds what would otherwise take an eternity.

First, let’s launch Copilot for Finance in Excel. Navigate to Add-ins, type "Copilot for Finance" in the search bar, and click Add. Once added, Copilot will be available in your Excel environment. Now comes the fun part. Let’s say you have two Excel sheets that are difficult to reconcile—for example, when a supplier transaction and an invoice amount don’t align.

Start Copilot, select Reconcile, and in a flash, a new sheet appears: a clear overview of the transaction, complete with visual graphics, as shown below. On the right-hand side of this image, you’ll see that Copilot provides a brief explanation of the analyzed results, including any missing matches in the reports.

If you spot discrepancies, click Troubleshoot a transaction, and the report will highlight the issue and suggest a resolution.

Here again, a process that would have taken significant time to complete is resolved in what feels like the blink of an eye.

Conclusion

Microsoft Copilot for Finance represents a significant leap in applying AI to financial processes. By automating routine tasks, delivering immediate insights, and enhancing decision-making capabilities, Copilot enables finance professionals to work more efficiently and strategically.

As organizations navigate an increasingly complex and fast-paced business environment, tools like Copilot for Finance will become essential for maintaining competitiveness and driving growth. The ability to quickly analyze vast amounts of data, generate accurate reports, and make data-driven decisions will set leading finance teams apart from the rest.

For finance professionals, embracing AI-powered tools like Copilot isn’t just about improving efficiency—it’s about redefining their role within the organization. By leveraging AI to handle routine tasks, finance teams can focus on providing strategic insights, driving innovation, and contributing to the company’s overall success.

FAQ on Copilot for Finance

What is Copilot for Finance?

Copilot for Finance is an AI-powered financial management solution developed by Microsoft. It integrates with Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, Excel, and Teams to streamline financial processes, provide predictive insights, and enhance strategic financial planning.

How does Copilot for Finance assist financial teams?

Copilot for Finance automates routine tasks, offers real-time data analysis, and delivers actionable insights. This enables financial teams to focus on strategic decision-making and improve overall efficiency.

Which Microsoft apps does Copilot for Finance integrate with?

Copilot for Finance seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications, providing a comprehensive AI assistant within familiar tools.

What are the benefits of using Copilot for Finance?

By leveraging AI, Copilot for Finance helps reduce the burden of routine work, offers predictive analytics, and enhances decision-making processes. This leads to smarter and more efficient financial management practices that drive growth and reduce costs.

How does Copilot for Finance handle data security?

Copilot for Finance operates within the secure environment of Microsoft 365, ensuring that all data is protected according to enterprise-level security standards.

Is Copilot for Finance suitable for all sizes of financial departments?

Yes, Copilot for Finance is designed to assist financial teams of various sizes by automating tasks and providing insights, thereby enhancing productivity and strategic planning capabilities.

How can my organization implement Copilot for Finance?

To implement Copilot for Finance, organizations should integrate it with their existing Microsoft 365 applications. Consulting with a Microsoft partner or referring to Microsoft's official documentation can provide guidance tailored to your organization's specific needs.