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Generative AI and Agentic AI are transforming businesses of all sizes, including those in financial services, helping everyone in the company work smarter. Microsoft Copilot can help increase productivity, reduce costs, and accelerate time to market, making it a strategic investment for growth.
Copilot has been a game-changer for many small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) looking to gain a competitive advantage in their sector. Microsoft Copilot allows companies to be more agile and to free up their employees’ time to focus on strategic work, where their new-found time can help deliver tangible results on a daily basis.
As a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Partner, we’re experts at integrating Copilot with your ERP systems. We offer unparalleled expertise in every AI implementation and have the knowledge and experience to guide your business through each stage of AI adoption.
Whether you are a financial services company or a finance department, the undeniable truth is that you juggle a myriad of critical, yet complex tasks – from quote-to-cash processes like credit and collections to risk management and compliance. Financial teams are not only responsible for these mandatory, labour-intensive operations; they are also increasingly expected to provide real-time insights into how a business is performing and make recommendations for future growth.
However, in Microsoft Future of Finance Trends Report 2023, it was found that a significant 80% of finance leaders and their teams struggle to take on more strategic work beyond the operational side of their roles. Further research has also shown that a whopping 62% of finance professionals are stuck in the drudgery of data entry and review cycles instead of spending the majority of their day on analysis or cross-team collaboration. It’s clear that while teams are ready and willing to play a bigger part in shaping business growth strategy, they cannot simply abandon their essential responsibilities.
This is where Microsoft Copilot for Finance comes in handy – it is a new Copilot experience that unlocks AI-assisted competencies for financial professionals, right from within the productivity applications they use every day. This is done through the connection to the organisation’s financial systems, including Dynamics 365 and SAP, to provide role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and recommendations in Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications. This saves you time and enables you to focus on what truly matters: guiding the company toward success.
While the basic Copilot is free and accessible to everyone, organisations have the option to upgrade to Copilot Pro, which offers enhanced services for a monthly fee. This premium tier provides additional functionalities and priority access during peak times. It’s crucial to distinguish these features from the Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is specifically built to enhance productivity in applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Not sure which version of Microsoft Copilot best suits your organisation’s needs? 365 Copilot is deeply integrated with the Microsoft suite, offering tailored assistance for professional environments, focusing on workflow automation and intelligent recommendations based on user behaviour. On the other hand, the general free version of Copilot provides a broader range of assistance but lacks the deep integration necessary for enterprise-level productivity enhancement.
Copilot for Finance provides AI-powered assistance while working in Microsoft 365 applications, making financial processes more streamlined and automated. Copilot for Finance can simplify audits by pulling and reconciling data with a straightforward prompt, make collections easier by automating communication and payment plans, and speed up financial reporting by effortlessly spotting variances. The potential time and cost savings are substantial, transforming not just how finance professionals work, but how they drive impact within the organisation.
Here are three ways in which Copilot for Finance can support your business:
Audits of a company’s financial statements are crucial to ensuring accuracy and mitigating risk. Traditionally, the process is labourious: accounts receivable managers were required to pull account data manually from enterprise resource planning (ERP) records, reconcile it in Excel, and look for inaccuracies manually.
Today, with Copilot for Finance, these steps can be done with a single prompt, cutting the time taken to complete the task by more than half, allowing AR managers to act on inconsistencies and any delinquencies found with Copilot’s suggested copy and relevant invoices.
The collections process is another important responsibility as it affects cash flow, profitability, and customer relationships. Collection coordinators spend their time reviewing outstanding accounts and attempting to reconcile them in a timely manner. This is done through phone calls, emails, and negotiating payment plans.
Copilot for Finance streamlines this process by supporting the collections process end-to-end through priority account suggestions, summarising conversations to record back to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP platform, and providing customised payment plans for customers. This way, collection coordinators can focus their time on more meaningful client-facing interactions and leave the mundane and tedious tasks to Copilot.
Rather than manually reviewing large financial data sets for unusual patterns which is an incredibly tiresome task, users can prompt Copilot to detect outliers and highlight variances for investigation.
Copilot for Finance streamlines variance identification with reusable natural language instructions in the enterprise context. A financial analyst can direct Copilot to identify answers for variances, and Copilot will gather supporting data autonomously.
Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to understand the potential return on investment (ROI) of Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMBs. The study projects that over a three-year period, businesses can expect an ROI ranging from 132% to 353%.
Additionally, AI for financial services can bring transformative results: a 6% increase in net revenue, a 20% reduction in operating costs, and a 25% acceleration in new-hire onboarding. That’s not all – Forrester’s study demonstrated that businesses using Copilot reported a 1% to 10% decrease in supply chain costs, while 59% saw operating costs reduced by 1 to 20%. These are all indicators of Copilot as not only a productivity tool but also a strategic investment for long-term growth.
Agentic AI is Microsoft’s new pioneering advancement that is reshaping the way businesses operate, compete and thrive. Agentic AI, developed by Microsoft, is designed to operate autonomously, learn dynamically from its environment, and collaborate seamlessly with humans and other AI systems and automations. It is unlike traditional AI systems that rely on predefined rules and static algorithms, enabling businesses to benefit from the full potential of AI in a more flexible, intelligent, and context-aware manner.
As business leaders, understanding the significance of the Agentic Era and the transformative potential of Agentic AI is key to steering your organisations toward sustained profitability and growth.
AI Agents operate within the framework that is set out for them, interacting with the environment and data sources that they need to do their job. What sets AI agents apart from other AI technology is their ability to adjust their behaviour, using memory and machine learning to continually improve efficiency and surface patters within data that can be valuable to the team members that use them.
There are many different types of AI agents, ranging from Project Management AI Agent for Construction, to Facilitator AI Agent for Healthcare and Self-Service AI Agent for HR in Retail.
As a Microsoft Partner, our deep expertise across the Microsoft ecosystem means we can help businesses get the most out of Copilot, setting them up for growth and success in this increasingly AI-driven world.
We offer complete support to help businesses like yours fully embrace AI. We’ll guide you through the preparation, making sure your data is structured correctly and your security protocols are robust. This groundwork is essential for seamless and effective AI integration. Our expertise ensures Copilot is deployed smoothly within your organisation, and we can extend its capabilities using the ecosystem and Power Platform, creating a tailored solution to meet your specific business needs.
More importantly, as your business changes, so do your requirements. We customise AI solutions to address the unique challenges of your industry, ensuring you get the maximum benefit from Copilot and other Microsoft AI resources. Like any new technology, having best practices, strong security, and top-notch governance and cultural change management in place is vital for success. That’s what we’re here for: to help your organisation navigate the exciting world of AI integration and generate real, measurable ROI.
Being a Microsoft Partner, we are well-equipped with the ongoing research, development, deployment and maintenance experience in emerging technology such as Agentic AI, putting us in a prime position to help with its application.
We bring unparalleled expertise to every AI implementation. With a team of over 400 staff and more than 1,600 clients, we have the knowledge and experience to guide your business through every stage of the AI adoption process. We specialise in industries like healthcare, manufacturing, legal and social housing, offering tailored solutions that meet the unique needs of your sector.
Get started today by taking advantage of our Copilot Readiness Assessment to ensure your business is fully prepared for the AI revolution. Let us help you harness the power of Copilot and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
