Microsoft launches Copilot for Finance to empower companies’ finance departments

• Copilot for Finance is in public preview starting today
• Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service are now generally available

Lisbon, February 29, 2024 – Microsoft today announces the public preview of Copilot for Finance, Copilot’s latest offering designed for enterprise functions that expands Copilot for Microsoft 365 and revolutionizes the way corporate finance departments approach their daily work. Copilot for Finance joins Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, now generally available, to, through Artificial Intelligence (AI), automate workflows based on the role and provide recommendations and guidance during the workflow.

Financial departments are fundamental in the strategic decisions of each company. According to a recent Microsoft study, 80%[1] of finance leaders and teams face challenges in taking on more strategic work outside the operational areas of their roles. However, another report shows that 62%[2] of these teams claim to be hostage to the repetitive or tedious work of entering and reviewing data. Copilot for Finance can help free up time for these departments to play a more strategic role in providing recommendations to the company, simplifying tasks, automating workflows and providing insights during the workflow.

Copilot for Finance is an integral part of Copilot for Microsoft 365, which means it enhances Excel, Outlook and other widely used productivity applications with insights specifics about the workflow and data for finance departments. Copilot for Finance builds on the essential context of existing data sources, including traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP, and Microsoft Graph.

In public previewCopilot for Finance presents a set of essential features to improve financial operations:

• Allows financial analysts to quickly perform a variance analysis in Excel, using prompts Natural language tools to review datasets looking for anomalies, risks, and mismatched values. This type of analysis helps departments provide insights strategic reports to company leaders about where they are achieving, exceeding or falling short of planned financial results and why.
• Simplifies the process in Excel with automated data structure comparisons and guided problem solving 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 and bill statements to speed up the billing process.
• Enables customers to transform raw Excel data into presentations and reports ready to share across Outlook and Teams.

Now generally available, Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service have made it possible to improve the workflows of salespeople and employees and transform customer experiences:

• O Microsoft Copilot for Sales allows commercials to close deals faster through insights and AI-driven recommendations. The study of Microsoft salespeople who use Copilot for Sales at least once a week concluded that it makes them more productive, saving an average of 90 minutes per week – and 67% say it allowed them to spend more time with customers.
• O Microsoft Copilot for Service is modernizing the contact center with AI to improve service and increase employee productivity. At Microsoft’s customer service department – one of the largest in the world – there was a 12% reduction in average case resolution time (the time spent actively resolving customer cases via chat) across two customer support business areas , when using similar functionality in Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The benefits and use cases of implementing Copilot at Microsoft itself will continue to shape Copilot for Service and its functionalities.

Transform your business with Microsoft Copilot
Copilot helps business users solve a common problem: moving from insights to impact. The latest Work Trend Index revealed that people are surrounded by data. About a quarter of the day is spent looking for information and only 50% of the information they consume daily is considered necessary for their work.?
Copilot helps break down information and application silos while actively obtaining insightsrecommendations, and guidance from a variety of data sources, all in line with Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles.

Companies of all sizes are moving beyond AI experimentation and strategically adopting Microsoft Copilot to empower those closest to customer interactions and critical operations, creating business value.
For more information about the new Copilot for Finance, see: https://aka.ms/CopilotforFinancePreview.

[1] Future of Finance Trends | Microsoft Dynamics 365

[2] Metric of the Month: Time Allocation in Finance | CFO

About Microsoft
Microsoft enables digital transformation in the age of Intelligent Cloud It is Intelligent Edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

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