Microsoft said on Thursday that it will launch Copilot, a chatbot that can handle essential duties for finance professionals. The tool will initially be available as a public preview from the software business. Details on prices will be added later.
Several commercial software suppliers, such as HubSpot and Salesforce, have begun utilizing generative artificial intelligence to enhance their current solutions to increase customer efficiency. The ChatGPT chatbot, developed by OpenAI in 2022 and capable of producing natural-sounding text and additional content with a few human input words, is credited with starting the trend.
Specialized labor is performed by personnel in several groups that comprise a typical organization. In a conversation with CNBC on Wednesday in San Francisco, Charles Lamanna, an executive vice chairman at Microsoft, stated, “We want every department to be empowered and augmented with a Copilot.”
Microsoft has already released Copilots for sales and customer support representatives and a general-purpose industrial Copilot for Office applications.
Initially, the Finance Copilot will speed up the Outlook collections process, perform a variance analysis, and reconcile data in Excel. The program has access to data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP. Later this year, according to Lamanna, the finance Copilot will get new capabilities.
According to Lamanna, the Copilot will be used for financial chores by the Japanese marketing firm Dentsu.
Microsoft indicated that it saw certain initial benefits from adopting the recently released Copilot, and its finance department contributed to its development.
According to Cory Hrncirik, contemporary finance lead in Microsoft’s chief financial officer’s office, every finance team globally compares data from various platforms frequently. Reconciliation takes approximately two hours per week for a couple of thousand financial analysis and planning team members. Still, using the new Copilot, it only takes ten or twenty minutes, he claimed.
The goal is to free up these workers’ time so they may focus on more exciting projects that will benefit the company more than hours of labor-intensive ones. However, according to Hrncirik, Microsoft’s finance staff is not compelled to utilize the new Copilot.
However, a corporation may be able to finish its books faster if many financial specialists utilize that automation.
According to Lamanna, that is one of the main pitches made to CFOs.
