Hey Everyone,

Microsoft’s more niche Copilots is where things start to get really interesting. Microsoft continues to roll out more generative AI capabilities across its software offerings with the debut of its Copilot for Finance.

Microsoft says its tool called Microsoft Copilot for Finance, helps users review data sets for risks, produce reports from raw numbers, and generally handle tasks they might otherwise outsource.

Video: length: 1:14

Whatever you want to use Copilot 365 for, it’s these specialized Copilots that have really caught my attention. For Finance, Coding, Sales or Customer Service. In Copilot for Sales, Finance and Service I think we will see more tangible benefits.

Accelerate impact with financial insight

Spur growth with action-oriented recommendations, proactive anomaly detection, and specialized prompts and guidance.

Optimize financial processes to reduce costs

Improve efficiency by applying next-generation AI to labor-intensive processes like collections and contract and invoice capture.

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Ever since Bloomberg built BloombergGPT, I’ve been thinking about copilot for Finance and investing a lot.

Read the Paper

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Microsoft’s Copilot for Finance lives within the Microsoft 365 Copilot framework.

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Why is this Useful?

Microsoft has said it will be able to perform a handful of common role-specific actions in Excel and Outlook. For a lot of us we spend a fair amount of time in these things.

What if you could get insights faster? Copilot helps turn data into insight. You can supposedly accelerate impact with a specialized tool built for finance. Productivity in finance might have serious ROI for some organizations.

For instance, this newest AI portion of the Microsoft 365 suite is meant to smooth tasks such as performing variance analysis of a company’s sales and automating audits of accounts receivable.

Charles Lamanna, one of the more respectable people at Microsoft in my opinion said:

The newest Copilot offering is designed for financial professionals and transforms how they work by drawing from their most relevant data and providing AI-powered workflow automation, recommendations, and guided actions right in the flow of work. This comes at a time when leaders are relying more than ever on their finance teams to help drive business growth.

Copilot for Finance joins Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, which are both generally available, to offer tailored extensions of Microsoft Copilot in the productivity apps you know and use every day, including Outlook, Teams, and Excel.

Since we launched Copilot a year ago across Microsoft 365 and our business applications, these capabilities have already been enabling companies like dentsu, Lumen Technologies, Northern Trust, Schneider Electric, Visa and more to empower their employees to be more productive and deliver business impact.

Copilots for Work Productivity

Copilot for Finance

Copilot for Sales

Coplit for Service

Microsoft, now we are talking!

Microsoft recently invested in Robotics, so I’m feeling good about them. Microsoft also partnered with Mistral, showing their comment to open-source LLMs for Azure AI.

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Read Copilot for Finance Docs

Read the Documentation

After testing the new tool, Microsoft’s own finance department has seen time savings, the company said.

“Sixty-two percent of finance professionals say they are stuck in the drudgery of data entry and review cycles,” noted Charles Lamanna, Microsoft chief vice president of business applications and platforms.

Microsoft Says:

Turn data into presentation-ready visuals and reports to share in Outlook and Microsoft Teams.

Fair enough, the Microsoft 365 GPT-4 integrated ecosystem is looking a bit more polished in 2024.

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What can it do?

Copilot for Finance, noted the company, handles things such as variance analysis in sales. The program pops up a natural-language summary of where actual sales may fall short of projected sales, with an indication of the reason for the variance. 

Many business software providers, including HubSpot and Salesforce and Bloomberg, have been working to supercharge existing products with generative artificial intelligence, in the hope of making clients more efficient.

A year ago in March, 2023, BloombergGPT really blew me away. Bloomberg’s 50-billion parameter large language model. I simply love the idea of specialized propriety models built for tangible things like Science, Finance, Biology or Sales. Because in the long-term these can move the needle for humanity as a whole.

It makes sense that Copilot for Finance is tethered to 365. The Finance Copilot is embedded in Microsoft 365 so that it can work with the productivity apps in the suite. 

Microsoft believes Copilot for Finance has the potential to help finance professionals at organizations of all sizes accelerate impact and possibly even reduce financial operation costs. Will that be true, time will tell.

In November, 2023 Microsoft unveiled two more Copilots, Copilot for Service and Copilot for Sales.

What is Copilot for Service?

The Copilot for Service application integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) applications, and contact or call center applications — including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk — to provide “guidance,” said Microsoft. The program can be trained to retrieve answers from a company’s knowledge base and from the CRM and contact center application repositories.

Copilot for Service, Sales and Finance are the trinity that makes Copilot 365 an interesting work in progress. Full disclosure, I am not a Microsoft user.

Nor do I agree with everything Satya Nadella says or seems to care about.

Read Age of Copilots

Still Cloud and software service providers are integrating Generative AI and pushing the field forward. I genuinely think Enterprise AI has a lot of potential especially how various LLMs via agents can work together in the not so distant future.

As far as I could find in the PR too, Microsoft has not disclosed the pricing of Copilot for Finance.

What this results in, is a lot of Microsoft copilots for various departments and specialized functions. Microsoft Copilot is basically an early use case and pilot for how AI agents might work in the future across teams and in business.

Summary

Microsoft envisions professionals using Generative AI seamlessly across their tools and augmenting their capabilities. Read more.

Copilot for Finance accelerates time-to-impact for finance professionals by surfacing insights that support strategic decision-making and reduce the time that’s spent on manual, repetitive work.

Copilot empowers finance professionals to stay in the flow of work by seamlessly connecting productivity tools such as Excel with existing financial systems to support critical business processes and generate insights and actions in real time.

Copilot for Finance offers finance professionals productivity gains in Microsoft 365 Outlook and Microsoft 365 Excel.

In Outlook, it supports the collections process. Users can connect to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance directly from Outlook to gain easy access to valuable insights from customer data in the ERP system, get help when they craft email responses, and save communication summaries and action items for scaled impact.

In Outlook, Copilot for Finance is natively integrated within Dynamics 365 Finance ERP. Additionally, it’s independently adaptable, so that it provides the flexibility to integrate with existing investments in third-party ERP systems and finance solutions such as SAP.

In Excel, Copilot for Finance enables more streamlined data reconciliation. Users get Copilot support to help them reconcile their financial data by using Excel. This support includes intelligent prompts when financial data structures are compared, automated reconciliation report creation, and automatically generated insights and suggestions for possible ways to address discrepancies.

The reconciliation report summary and documented action items are automatically prepared and available and can be saved for future reference and auditing purposes. Copilot for Finance in Excel can be used with financial data users bring in from a multitude of the financial systems, including ERP and FP&A solutions.

Powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and integrated with your business data from Microsoft Graph, Copilot is designed to spark creativity, enhance productivity, and develop new skills.

Basically the Copilot for finance will initially run a variance analysis, reconcile data in Excel and speed up the collections process in Outlook.

Helps financial analysts quickly conduct a variance analysis in Excel using natural language prompts to review data sets for anomalies, risks and unmatched values. This type of analysis helps finance provide strategic insights to business leaders about where it is meeting, exceeding or falling short of planned financial outcomes and why.

Simplifies the reconciliation process in Excel with automated data structure comparisons and guided troubleshooting 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 statements and invoices, to expedite the collections process.

Enables customers to turn raw data in Excel into presentation-ready visuals and reports ready to be shared across Outlook and Teams.

So if you use Excel a lot this might make a lot of sense.

Unfortunately even Microsoft’s “studies” feel like a sales pitch.

Microsoft with its $13 Billion investment in OpenAI has seen a fairly good ROI on integrating GPT-4 in its business and Azure AI thus far. However OpenAI and Microsoft are under antitrust investigations about the deal. This is especially true in Europe.

Microsoft is already the most valuable company in the world by market cap, so why does it sound so desperate for us to use its Generative AI Copilots? The reason likely is Satya Nadella thinks they found a winning horse in Sam Altman. In business terms this means Microsoft’s cloud is growing significantly faster than Amazon Web Services of late, thanks in part to its cozy OpenAI relationship.

This really should frighten Amazon and AWS. For instance:

Analysts estimate Azure, which was about half as big as AWS five years ago, is now three-quarters its size.

Revenue at Azure increased 30% in the quarter, compared with 13% year-over-year growth at AWS.

Amazon however is beating Microsoft when it comes to growing Advertising revenue.

Microsoft has been adding graphics processing units (GPUs) to its data centers so that clients can run AI models in Azure. Microsoft was likely the biggest buyer of GPUs in 2023/2024 from Nvidia.

Source.

This means Nvidia’s stock rally into 2024 is also thanks to Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta and other Cloud providers like Amazon and Google directly.

In the Copilot Era, everything is connected. OpenAI’s stunning growth is directly also the result of TSMC, who Nvidia relies on. For example:

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Microsoft Copilot for Finance, Sales and Services are a good start for utility from Generative AI for general professionals.

Microsoft has made 365 more essential with Microsoft Teams and other innovations. Copilot for Finance includes Copilot for Microsoft 365, which means it supercharges Excel, Outlook and other widely used productivity apps with workflow and data-specific insights for the finance professional.

Microsoft’s Copilots are Basically Merging Subscriptions with Gen AI Tools

Github Copilot is likely Microsoft’s best performing Copilot as far as I’m aware. Github Copilot for Enterprise is now generally available as of February 2024.

Microsoft is the most diversified BigTech company because it’s the best at implementation subscription and recurring revenue models. It’s huge partner network and global customer base makes it fairly easy to upsell any new product. Azure looks like it might catch AWS sometime around 2031 at the current pace, although it could be sooner.

Goldman Sachs and Microsoft Appear to be Aligned

If the projects of Goldman Sachs are right, Microsoft should be working on a Legal Copilot as well. OpenAI Fund has invested (owned by Sam Altman) in Harvey AI. There’s also a promising Copilot for Legal out of London called Robin.

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Microsoft Recently Partnered with Mistral

Microsoft partnered with Mistral with a $16 million investment, but important addition of Mistral Large on Microsoft Azure.

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Microsoft is covering all of its bases and ticking all the right boxes in 2023 and 2024. The stock is up 68% in the past year.

Microsoft’s Copilot approach for Generative AI has a legit first-mover advantage globally that increases Azure AI and its products as a whole. However with that it’s also entering monopoly territory that’s not overly healthy for the ecosystem. It’s acquisition of Activision really hurts the future gaming innovation in my opinion.

Leveraging innovation to accelerate fiscal stewardship 

Since Microsoft is a major player in Generative AI, we will track its Copilot strategy more closely moving forwards.

Copilot for Finance is the next-generation AI assistant for finance professionals. According to a blog post from Microsoft, Copilot for Finance was tested by thousands of the company’s own financial professionals and in the finance departments of numerous business partners.

Meanwhile, Copilot, the original version, has been hot-patched into Windows 11 users’ taskbars by default. The usual Microsoft tactics.

Read More in  AI Supremacy