Dive Brief:

• Microsoft is rolling out a corporate finance version of its virtual assistant known as Copilot, which is powered by generative AI technology, the company said Feb. 29.

• Microsoft Copilot for Finance, which is now in “public preview” mode, has been embedded into Microsoft 365 apps such as Excel, Outlook and Teams, with the goal of making financial processes like accounts receivable collections and forecasting analysis more seamless, according to a blog post.

• “We’ve been testing it ourselves as customer zero, you could say, for several weeks now,” Cory Hrncirik, modern finance lead at Microsoft, said in an interview.  

Dive Insight:

Microsoft will share the pricing for Copilot for Finance later this year when it reaches the “general availability” stage, a spokesperson told CFO Dive. 

Generative AI refers to technology that can create high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data it’s trained on. Big tech companies are betting heavily on the market, with revenues projected to reach $36 billion by 2028, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

A key milestone for the market was the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, created by San Francisco, California-based startup OpenAI. Within months of its debut, the tool surpassed both Instagram and Spotify as the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

Microsoft is among companies that have moved quickly to capitalize on ChatGPT’s rapid rise. In January 2023, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant announced a multi-billion-dollar investment deal with OpenAI.

Soon after that deal, Microsoft developed Copilot, its own ChatGPT-like chatbot, which has since been added to a vast array of products and services offered by the software giant, including its Bing search engine; its suite of office software products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook; and its Windows operating system.

According to Microsoft executives, these investments are paying off. AI-enabled offerings helped drive $62 billion in sales at Microsoft for the second quarter of the company’s fiscal 2024, according to results released on Jan. 30.

“By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we are winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during an earnings call at the time.

Microsoft’s various Copilots provide AI assistance “in virtually every aspect of the workflow across the different Microsoft applications,” according to tech news website ZDNET. 

Last week’s announcement follows Microsoft’s recent release of similar role-specific virtual companions for professionals in sales and customers service. It also comes on the heels of Microsoft’s roll out of an AI-powered financial planning and analysis tool as part of the company’s Dynamics 365 Finance platform.

The Sales and Service Copilots are currently available for $50 per user per month when paid annually, or $20 per user per month for existing Copilot for Microsoft 365 users, according to tech news site VentureBeat.

The latest tool, Copilot for Finance, “is well versed in what finance professionals care about, augmenting user queries with additional prompts and insight to better automate processes and reduce the time spent on repetitive actions,” according to the blog post, which was penned by Emily He, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of business applications marketing.

The tool can also help financial analysts to reduce the risk of reporting errors and “missing unidentified variances,” according to the executive. “Rather than manually reviewing large financial data sets for unusual patterns, users can prompt Copilot to detect outliers and highlight variances for investigation,” her post said.

For every $1 companies invest in AI, they are realizing an average of $3.50 in return, according to a 2023 study conducted by research firm IDC and sponsored by Microsoft, as previously reported by CFO Dive.

Generative AI in particular could enable automation of up to 70% of business activities across almost all occupations between now and 2030, adding trillions of dollars in value to the global economy, according to McKinsey.

However, while generative AI adoption is seeing rapid momentum, it’s also running into challenges.

Microsoft has said that it’s investigating concerns that Copilot is generating bizarre and, in some cases, harmful responses, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Copilot told one user claiming to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder that it didn’t “care if you live or die,” according to the report.

Google, meanwhile, has faced public scrutiny over its Gemini image-generation AI tool, which was recently taken offline for further testing after some controversial mistakes, as reported by CNBC.