4 keys to the future of public finance with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance

Every day, the work of public finance professionals provides the financial foundation upon which all government activities can be assured, from delivering basic services to ensuring overall economic stability. In a world of rapid change, however, public finance organizations at all levels of government are straining to meet new demands.

Across industry sectors, 80% of finance teams report challenges in their ability to do strategic work beyond operations.¹ For public finance organizations, this is made even more difficult due to the pressures unique to government: budgetary constraints, revenue volatility, public demands for transparency, complex regulations, and workforce challenges, to name just a few.

Modernization plays a major role in helping public governments navigate this landscape. New cloud and AI solutions are helping governments reignite economies by simplifying taxation, improving budgeting, and mitigating fraud and corruption. Now, a new level of impact is at hand with the Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance, an AI-powered, role-based Copilot agent designed to help government agencies accelerate time to business impact. Copilot for Finance is now in public preview and will be delivered in the coming months.

Helping government finance organizations take full advantage of this new opportunity is core to our work at Microsoft for public finance, where our focus is to help governments achieve more through technology.

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How Copilot for Finance empowers finance professionals in new ways

Imagine a typical day for a budget officer or a procurement operations manager. These professionals spend hours each day reviewing emails, preparing for meetings, and analyzing data. Despite their best efforts, much of their time is consumed by drudgery—essential tasks that demand complete and precise attention—time that is not available for more strategic (and satisfying) work.

Generative AI has already proven effective in easing the burden, with Microsoft 365 Copilot delivering significant productivity gains in just its first year.² Users reported it made them 29% faster in doing such time-consuming tasks as searching, writing, and summarizing.² The power to explore financial data with natural language, reduce time spent on financial processes, and turn raw data into presentation-ready visuals and whitepapers—all integrated into everyday productivity applications such as Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams—is truly transformative for public finance.

Copilot for Finance extends the core power of Copilot with new features designed specifically to enhance financial operations. By drawing on a complete range of financial data sources, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the organization’s complete Microsoft 365 data, it’s built to help professionals and teams accelerate their impact by speeding time to financial insight.

Here at Microsoft, we’ve seen the value firsthand. A group in our treasury and financial planning and analysis team piloted Copilot for Finance to automate and simplify the data reconciliation process and improve productivity. The results were impressive. The team realized a 22% cost savings in reconciliation tasks, reducing what used to take one to two hours down to only about 10 minutes.³

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4 important benefits of Copilot for Finance for public finance

Copilot for Finance is designed to be an everyday assistant for finance professionals to reimagine how they operate and serve the public. Here are four ways it aims to deliver new benefits to improve cost as well as impact.

1. Optimizing processes

Copilot for Finance helps automate many labor-intensive tasks that finance professionals typically do manually, such as data consolidation, verification, and updating financial data across systems. This can significantly reduce the time and effort required, freeing people to do more strategic work. For example, during financial period close, Copilot for Finance can streamline data reconciliation by using intelligent data structures comparisons and guided troubleshooting in Excel. It analyzes results with an auto-generated report summary that highlights discrepancies and provides recommendations and actions to resolve them. This not only speeds up the reconciliation process but also helps ensure higher accuracy and reduces the risk of errors.

2. Controlling expenses

Beyond saving time and money with optimized processes, Copilot for Finance helps organizations focus better on expense control with AI-powered reconciliation and data set preparation. By using new methods of cost variance identification, analysis, and reporting, teams can find more opportunities to save costs, earlier than they might have otherwise, thanks to variance analysis and insights drawn from myriad supplementary data sources.

3. Improving collections

Copilot for Finance gives public finance professionals new ways to work with taxpayers and drive productive communications that lead to better collections and reporting in less time. Drawing on information from multiple sources about an individual’s or organization’s status, a collections manager can quickly review payment history and any issues or details relevant to collection activities. Generative AI summarization can also expediate communication and reporting on multiple fronts.

4. De-risking revenues

Copilot for Finance helps improve the strategies and processes to reduce financial risks associated with revenue streams. With AI monitoring and summarization, it can shift the focus from reporting to planning and forecasting, with less time spent closing books, and more for ad hoc analysis that can lead to better outcomes. Revenue forecasting and budgeting can be improved by more accurately spotting external macro-economy signals and using revenue variance analysis to spot revenue softness earlier and enable macro-analysis collaboration.

Learn more about Copilot for Finance

The future of public finance is here, and for many governments it’s powered by AI. Copilot for Finance offers a powerful new opportunity for finance teams to operate more successfully and efficiently than ever before. Learn more about how Microsoft is helping governments solve society’s biggest challenges and how we’re helping to drive financial accountability with public finance technology solutions.