Charles LaManna, corporate vice president of business applications and platforms at Microsoft, speaks at a press event in San Francisco on February 28, 2024.
Novi Jordan | CNBC
Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will launch a chatbot Copilot that can perform key tasks for people working in finance. The software company will first offer the tool for public preview. Pricing details will follow.
Many business software providers, including HubSpot and Salesforce, are enhancing existing products with generative AI, in hopes of making customers more efficient. The craze started after OpenAI in 2022 launched the chatbot ChatGPT, which can post natural-looking text or other content with just a few words of human input.
A typical company consists of a variety of groups in which employees perform specialized work. “We want to empower and enrich every single department with Copilot,” Charles LaManna, a Microsoft corporate vice president, said in an interview with CNBC in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Microsoft already has a pilot for general-purpose industrial use in Office applications, and has released Assistants designed for workers in sales and customer service.
Copilot Finance will initially perform variance analysis and data normalization in Excel and accelerate the collection process in Outlook. The software can draw on information stored in SAP and in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Lamanna said additional features will come to Financial Copilot later this year.
Japanese advertising agency Dentsu will use the co-pilot for financial duties, Lamanna said.
Microsoft said its finance department provided input into the development of the new Pilot Assistant, and that it saw some early benefits from using it.
Comparing data from different systems is “something every finance team on the planet does a lot,” said Corey Hrencirek, a modern finance lead in Microsoft's Office of the CFO. A few thousand people on the financial planning and analysis team spend an hour or two doing reconciliation each week, and with the new co-pilot, it takes about 10 or 20 minutes a week, he said.
The idea is to help these employees spend fewer hours on tedious tasks and free up time for more engaging work that can contribute more to the company. Microsoft finance employees are not required to use the new Copilot, Hrencirek said.
If multiple financial professionals at a given company take advantage of this automation, the company may be able to close its books more quickly.
“This is one of the big playgrounds for CFOs,” Lamanna said.
He watches: AI offers 'incredibly powerful tools' for banking, finance and insurance industry: Microsoft CVP
“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”