A new chatbot for finance workers is being introduced by Microsoft in Excel and Outlook called Copilot AI Chatbot

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will launch Copilot, a chatbot that can handle important duties for those in the finance industry. The tool will initially be available as a public preview from the software business. Details on prices will be added later.

In an effort to increase customer efficiency, a number of commercial software suppliers, such as HubSpot and Salesforce, are using generative artificial intelligence to enhance their current solutions. The ChatGPT chatbot, developed by firm OpenAI in 2022 and capable of producing natural-sounding text and other content with a few human input words, is credited with starting the trend.

Specialized work is performed by personnel in a number of groups that make up a typical organization. Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna stated, “We want every department to be enabled and enriched with a Copilot,” during a Wednesday interview in San Francisco with CNBC.

Microsoft has already released Copilots for sales and customer support representatives in addition to a general-purpose industrial Copilot for usage in Office applications.

This example photo, taken in Krakow, Poland on October 30, 2023, shows the Microsoft logo on a phone screen and the Copilot logo on a laptop screen.

Initially, the Copilot for Finance will speed up the Outlook collections process, do a variance analysis, and reconcile data in Excel. The application can access data that is kept in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP. Later this year, according to Lamanna, the finance Copilot will get upgraded features.

According to Lamanna, the Copilot will be used for financial tasks by the Japanese advertising agency Dentsu.

Microsoft indicated that it saw some early benefits from adopting the new Copilot and that its finance department contributed to its development.

Data comparison from disparate systems is “something every finance team on the planet does a lot of,” according to Cory Hrncirik, the modern finance lead at Microsoft’s CFO office. Reconciliation takes one or two hours per week for a couple thousand members of a financial planning and analysis team, but with 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 interesting projects that will benefit the company more than hours of costly ones. However, according to Hrncirik, Microsoft’s finance staff is not compelled to utilize the new Copilot.

However, a corporation may be able to close its books faster if a large number of its financial specialists use those automations.

Lamanna stated, “That is one of the big pitches for CFOs.”