Microsoft has rapidly deployed the software giant’s own artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant Copilot across its finance department, which is comprised of about 5,000 people, according to Cory Hrncirik, the company’s modern finance leader.
Finance professionals within the company are relying on the tool to more quickly perform routine tasks and deliver data-driven insights, Hrncirik said in an interview.
“Finance has become some of the top users of Copilot in Microsoft,” the executive said. “Along the way, we’ve created great use cases and our own prompt library as well as videos and demos.”
Microsoft’s finance organization has made Copilot adoption a high priority as part of its broader digital transformation push, which Hrncirik is helping to spearhead as the company’s modern finance leader, a role he assumed in 2018.
The software giant is also locked in a race with other big tech companies to dominate the AI market. Since 2023, Microsoft has released several different Copilots, conversational chatbots that have been embedded across the software giant’s portfolio of applications and services to assist users with completing tasks.
Last February, the company unveiled Copilot for Finance, a feature in Microsoft 365 apps such as Excel, Outlook and Teams, introduced with the goal of making financial processes more streamlined and seamless. The tool is still in “public preview” mode, a spokesperson said.
Microsoft has released similar role-specific virtual companions for professionals in sales and customers service.
Top finance use cases
Within Microsoft, one of the top use cases of Copilot for Finance has been reconciling data in Excel, Hrncirik said. “We use [the tool for] reconciliation quite a bit, especially in certain teams,” he said.
In an internal case study, accounts receivable reconciliation capabilities helped shrink the time needed for Microsoft’s global treasury and financial services team to compare data across sources, saving an average of 20 minutes per account, according to results shared with CFO Dive. In another example, a Microsoft financial planning and analysis team was able to reduce the amount of time it spent reconciling data each week from an average of 1-2 hours to 10 minutes.
Microsoft’s finance team is currently testing variance analysis capabilities with promising results so far, according to Hrncirik. Variance analysis refers to a method of comparing projected or planned financial performance to actual results.
Copilot for Finance “just helps you get those insights faster than you could in the past with traditional, manual methods,” Hrncirik said.
On Monday, Microsoft launched what it’s calling “the next wave” of Copilot, including a new feature called Copilot Pages that allows multiple users to collaborate on AI-generated content.
“Over the past 18 months, working with Copilot has become a daily habit for people everywhere, helping them complete tasks faster, hold more purposeful meetings, collaborate more effectively, and streamline business processes,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of “AI at work,” said in a blog announcing the move.
Among other cases studies cited in the post, customer service agents at virtual healthcare provider Teladoc have saved up to five hours each week using Copilot to draft responses to common client questions.
The announcement comes after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in an earnings call last month that “so many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilot because they’re not getting the accuracy and the response that they want.”
Salesforce is preparing to launch its own generative AI platform known as Agentforce.
Pushback from Microsoft
Spataro pushed back on Benioff’s in an emailed statement.
“Every customer is at a different place in their journey, but overall we are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers,” he said. “Last quarter alone, we saw a customer increase of over 60%, and daily users have more than doubled — a clear indicator of Copilot’s value in the market.”
The quality of results that Copilot produces has a lot to do with the user’s prompts, according to Hrncirik.
“I think to really become an advanced user, there’s definitely a learning curve,” he said. “The more context you provide, obviously that provides the grounding necessary to give you the best possible response.”
Microsoft has set up a public web page dubbed Copilot Lab with resources, including training videos and sample prompts, to help users navigate the technology.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s finance department is developing its own finance prompt library, Hrncirik said.
“I think we’ve curated something like 300 [sample] finance prompts, and those have been super helpful in terms of helping people to cut their teeth on doing something more advanced than just a [basic] prompt,” he said, adding that the library is private and internal for now.
