Microsoft recently announced the launch of CoPilot for Finance. It is an AI-powered assistant designed to boost productivity for finance professionals.
In reality, 80% of finance leaders and teams struggle to do strategic work beyond operational tasks. This article dives into Microsoft CoPilot for Finance, its features and advantages for businesses.
What is CoPilot for Finance?
CoPilot for Finance is an AI-powered productivity tool from Microsoft designed specifically for finance professionals. It leverages the power of advanced AI models like GPT-3 to provide intelligent assistance for finance tasks and workflows.
CoPilot for Finance helps with things like analyzing financial data, generating reports, creating presentations, answering questions, and automating manual processes.
Copilot for Finance, now in public preview, connects to the company’s financial systems, including Dynamics 365 and SAP, to provide role-specific workflow automation, and guided actions. It also provides recommendations in Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications, saving time and letting you focus on company success.
Key Capabilities
CoPilot for Finance includes several innovative capabilities and features.
– Conversational Answer
CoPilot understands finance questions posed in natural language. It can provide direct answers to common inquiries about financial data, accounting, investments, forecasting, and more.
– Automated Analysis
CoPilot can analyze financial documents, data, reports, and models to extract key insights, trends, and metrics. This automated analysis saves significant time compared to manual review and lookups.
– Advanced Calculations
The AI assistant can perform complex financial calculations and scenario modelling easily. CoPilot can do common tasks like cash flow analysis, risk modelling, valuation, forecasting, and more.
– Document Creation
CoPilot can automatically generate formatted financial documents including reports, presentations, invoices, budgets, and statements. It greatly speeds up financial reporting and documentation.
– Process Optimization
CoPilot looks for ways to streamline financial workflows, reduce errors, and improve efficiency. The AI assistant provides personalized recommendations to optimize routine finance processes.
Benefits of CoPilot for Finance
CoPilot for Finance can significantly benefit finance professionals and teams. This improves productivity, efficiency, and accuracy for common finance tasks.
– Increased Productivity
CoPilot can help automate repetitive tasks like data entry and report generation. With this, Finance staff can focus on more strategic initiatives.
– Greater efficiency
The tool can quickly analyze data, spot errors, and make recommendations. This allows finance teams to work faster and smarter. CoPilot reduces the time spent on manual processes.
– Enhanced insights
By processing volumes of data faster, CoPilot enables deeper analysis of financial information to uncover trends and opportunities.
– Better collaboration
CoPilot facilitates collaboration by allowing multiple people to work within the same documents and models simultaneously. The AI learns team preferences too.
To learn more, watch our recent webinar: ‘Copilot Lab: Launch Your Coplot Adventure with Evolveconnect’ as industry experts Martins Ilesanmi, M365 Global Ops Global Manager, and Zakariyah Oyeniyi, Microsoft Office 365 Consultant, dive into the launch of Microsoft Copilot.
Integration
Microsoft CoPilot for Finance is designed to integrate seamlessly with Excel and other Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint. This provides a unified workflow experience for finance professionals.
CoPilot is currently integrated with these applications as an add-in as Preview.
– Outlook
– Excel
– Dynamics 365
CoPilot can be invoked directly within Excel to provide contextual suggestions. It also offers automation for financial modeling, analysis, and reporting tasks. You can have a conversation with CoPilot through the sidebar in Excel while working on spreadsheets. It will help fill in formulas, create pivot tables, generate charts and graphs, and more based on your natural language prompts.
The add-in works across desktop, web, and mobile versions of Excel so you can access the same AI-powered capabilities wherever you’re working. CoPilot remembers your company data, formatting preferences, and typical tasks so the integration is customized.
Since CoPilot hooks into Excel, you can leverage its help while emailing reports through Outlook. CoPilot understands context and delivers assistive AI right where and when you need it.
The Road Ahead For CoPilot
Microsoft CoPilot for Finance is an exciting new addition to the CoPilot family of AI-powered productivity assistants.
In summary, CoPilot for Finance represents an important step in bringing the power of AI to one of the most essential business functions. As AI continues to evolve, we can expect to see more specialized tools like CoPilot that focus on boosting productivity in specific domains. The future looks bright for integrating AI into finance workflows in ways that save time, drive insights, and allow professionals to focus on higher-value strategic tasks.
