Microsoft’s Copilot offerings are becoming increasingly specialized. The company has been gradually transitioning Copilot from a general-purpose AI assistant to a tool with more industry-specific skills and features. Recently, Microsoft announced over 25 new finance skills and partner-developed plugins across Copilot and covering accounting, capital markets, and more.
This builds on the finance skills launched in Copilot for Excel in June of this year. Now, instead of starting out in Excel, finance professionals can work directly in Copilot.
Copilot Built for Finance
Before we discuss some of the new skills and plugins, let’s revisit this shift in functionality. The move to embedded Copilot finance features and Excel usage across Copilot is major, because it changes how people perform their work, rather than simply making it easier to do what they were already doing.
As Brian Jones, CVP of the Excel Product Group at Microsoft, puts it:
“With Office in Copilot, Excel is embedded directly into the Copilot app, so you can analyze, edit, and co-author workbooks without leaving Chat or Cowork, with the familiar capabilities and controls you rely on. In Cowork, you can also delegate multistep work that brings together Excel models and analyses with other deliverables, from preparing a close package to developing an investment committee memo. Across experiences, Work IQ grounds Copilot in relevant organizational knowledge, like the close calendar or deal-team conversations, so Copilot can work from more than the file in front of you.”
He also says:
“From preparing a month-end close to evaluating an acquisition, we’re building Copilot for the breadth of finance.”
And, that’s the wider change: Microsoft is building Copilot, in this instance, specifically for finance. It’s enhancing critical finance workflows without taking users away from the tools and processes they are familiar with, while using capabilities like Cowork and Work IQ to make these workflows more seamless, intuitive, and accessible.
New Features
So, how will some of these essential skills be presented across Copilot?
New accounting capabilities, currently available through Frontier — Microsoft’s early-access programme — for Copilot in Excel and Cowork, help accountants spend less time on repetitive, manual tasks in the places they already work. These include tasks like reconciling accounts, preparing journal entries, and translating financial results into reports.
The Capital Markets plugin for Cowork allows users to delegate end-to-end workflows. Microsoft gives examples like preparing an investment case for review or testing an acquisition thesis. The Finance plugin for Cowork is designed for corporate finance teams to manage multi-step finance tasks, such as preparing a close review package or delivering a forecast review for leadership.
The Dynamics 365 ERP apps plugin brings more finance data into Copilot from Dynamics 365, where much of it typically resides. However, recognizing that this data is often dispersed across different systems, users can also tap into Fabric IQ to bring governed data from Microsoft Fabric and Power BI into Cowork workflows.
In terms of third-party contributions coming to users, partner plugins include accounting, planning and financial management tools from Intuit QuickBooks, Xero and Zoho Books, as well as market data, research and news tools from Fiscal AI, LSEG, MT Newswires, S&P Global, S&P Global Energy, Statista and Zacks, to name but a few.
Final Thoughts
Microsoft is doing an excellent job of making Copilot more relevant to the specific ways people work across different roles and industries. The company has been rolling out a wide range of AI-powered tools and services, but rather than simply adding more to the mix, it’s recognizing how people already work with its existing tools and bringing these capabilities together in more integrated, accessible experiences.
This is not only a smart move from an innovation perspective, bringing existing powerful technologies together to work towards a shared goal within a single industry, but also creates a compelling use case for these technologies as a unified suite.
