On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled its plans to introduce a Copilot chatbot tailored for finance professionals, with an initial public preview of the tool to be offered. The company will announce pricing information subsequently.
The move comes as many business software companies, including HubSpot and Salesforce, integrate generative artificial intelligence into their offerings to enhance productivity. This trend gained momentum following OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, a chatbot capable of generating coherent text and other outputs from minimal human prompts.
Microsoft aims to equip each department within a typical organization with its Copilot technology to perform specialized tasks efficiently. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, shared with CNBC in San Francisco, “We want every one of the departments to be enabled and enriched with a Copilot.”
Microsoft has already launched Copilot applications for broad industrial use in Office software and has developed versions specifically for sales and customer service roles.
The finance-specific Copilot is designed to conduct variance analyses, streamline data reconciliation in Excel, and enhance the collections process via Outlook, leveraging data from SAP and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Lamanna mentioned that further capabilities for the finance Copilot are expected to be introduced later in the year.
Dentsu, a prominent Japanese advertising firm, is set to implement the finance Copilot for its financial operations, according to Lamanna.
Microsoft also noted that its finance department contributed to the Copilot’s development and has already observed preliminary advantages from its application.
