Microsoft introduces Copilot for Finance, an artificial intelligence tool to streamline corporate finance tasks

Microsoft unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Copilot for Finance on Thursday, aimed at helping finance 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 provide new features specific to financial operations. It is an enterprise-oriented AI tool and is currently 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 is positioning its new product as a way to free up time for finance departments in organizations so they can focus on strategic tasks instead of simple analysis and reporting. The company also highlighted a data point from CFO magazine and said that 62 percent of finance professionals surveyed cited “fatigue of data entry and review cycles” as a reason for not making time for strategic tasks.

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

The tech giant also emphasized that because Copilot for Finance is not a new AI model and can run on top of existing Copilot for Microsoft 365, it can seamlessly extract context from an organization’s existing sources of financial data, such as resource planning systems of the enterprise (ERP) as well as other similar repositories.

Microsoft’s new AI tool joins two other operations-specific tools — Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service. The former can generate inquiries for sales meetings, add leads and update CRM records, as well as other analysis and generating tasks. The latter, which is aimed at human-facing roles, can generate AI-powered conversations with one click, access customer knowledge from other systems, schedule and summarize meetings, draft emails, and more. Both tools are generally available to Microsoft 365 customers.