Microsoft introduces Copilot AI chatbot for finance workers in Excel and Outlook

Microsoft on Thursday announced that it will release a Copilot chatbot that can perform key tasks for people working in finance. The software company will first offer the tool in public preview. Pricing details will follow.

Many business software providers, including HubSpot and Salesforce, have been working to supercharge existing products with generative artificial intelligence, in the hope of making clients more efficient. The craze began after startup OpenAI in 2022 launched the ChatGPT chatbot, which can spit out natural-sounding text or other content with a few words of human input.

The typical company comprises a variety of groups in which employees perform specialized work. "We want every one of the departments to be enabled and enriched with a Copilot," Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft corporate vice president, said in an interview with CNBC in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Microsoft already has a Copilot for general-purpose industrial use in Office applications, and it has released Copilots designed for sales and customer-service workers.

The Copilot for finance will initially run a variance analysis, reconcile data in Excel and speed up the collections process in Outlook. The software can draw on information stored in SAP and in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Additional features will come to the finance Copilot later this year, Lamanna said.

The Japanese advertising agency Dentsu will use the Copilot for finance tasks, Lamanna said.

Microsoft said its finance department provided input into the development of the new Copilot and that it's seen some early benefits from using it.

Comparing data taken from different systems is "something every finance team on the planet does a lot of," said Cory Hrncirik, modern finance lead in