Dive Brief:
- Microsoft is further expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities for finance teams, equipping its Copilot assistant with new features that can help automate accounting tasks and support more complex analysis, the company announced Thursday.
- The update includes more than 25 new finance skills and “partner-built plug-ins” across Microsoft Copilot, according to the announcement. While Excel has long been a central tool for finance professionals’ analysis and modeling, the new capabilities let users start broader workflows directly in the Copilot app and bring in Excel when needed, Microsoft said.
- “From preparing a month-end close to evaluating an acquisition, we’re building Copilot for the breadth of finance,” Brian Jones, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the Excel product group, wrote in a blog post.
Dive Insight:
The new finance features arrive as Microsoft reports wider adoption of Copilot across its products. It also comes in the wake of the tech giant announcing that it was making susbtantial cuts to its workforce amid heavy AI spending. The company is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
On the company’s Wednesday earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said automated tasks in Copilot had nearly doubled since July. Daily users rose nearly 50% from the previous quarter and more than fivefold from a year earlier, he said.
Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said Copilot revenue growth accelerated from the prior quarter across Microsoft 365, GitHub and Security.
The software giant’s expanding AI business requires substantial investment in infrastructure, including data centers and computing equipment. The company reported $45.2 billion in capital expenditures for its most recent quarter.
“We feel good that the return on every dollar of CapEx we are spending, we are confident in that,” Hood said.
In his Thursday blog post, Jones said Microsoft’s new accounting capabilities can help finance professionals compare balances and transactions, identify discrepancies, draft journal entries and analyze financial performance against plans.
Jones said accountants are already putting the capabilities to work. “In seven days of limited Insiders availability, more than 8,000 unique users invoked accounting skills more than 44,000 times across more than 18,000 Copilot conversations,” he said in his post.
Beyond accounting tasks, Microsoft’s finance plug-in for its Cowork tool can assemble materials for a close review or forecast review, including supporting spreadsheets, presentations and follow-up communications. Other workflows include preparing audit evidence packages, organizing quarterly work and analyzing datasets.
A separate capital markets plug-in can help users prepare investment cases, assess acquisition theses and build comparable-company analyses and leveraged buyout models, Jone said.
Microsoft is also connecting Copilot to enterprise systems and outside data providers. Integrations include accounting software such as QuickBooks, Xero and Zoho Books, as well as financial information providers such as FactSet, Morningstar, LSEG and S&P Global.
