welcome to uh this broadcast about AI powered finance my name is uh Morton I'm an architect and I'm Jacob I'm also an architect yes uh I work within the Erp uh platform business Central primarily and yakob works with the the data and analytics yes yeah um so today we will uh discuss Finance processes uh primarily and we will the the product we will be looking at is business Central um there will be some additional products uh as well Excel we will have some uh some some powerbi and and other things a little bit of Outlook as well um but uh but business Central is the primary product we look at for the for the Erp processes sounds good yeah um AI in general really speaks well with our uh Mission here at fellow m we have um we have an ambition to make uh people enjoy working with technology and make technology work for them and this really speaks to AI in my opinion it's a it's it's a really uh it's it's it's really good fit uh which is also why we have a lot of focus on AI in general here at fellow mind and that would be both uh in product uh co-pilots from Microsoft but also custom buil Uh custom built AI Solutions uh to today the primary focus will be on the uh on the on the uh products that are made available for from Microsoft we are seeing more and more being pushed out to almost any application you can imagine and the small co-pilot icons are showing up all over the place this broadcast is part of a series where we focus on different processes and today the first one is about Finance processes so we are really happy to kick it off excellent yeah we start with a little bit of Statistics uh this is from Microsoft and it just shows uh what employees would like from a co-pilot or from AI um and I think it's interesting to to see in this data that uh that it's really it's really some of the more uh uh repetitive tasks that they are hoping to see uh to see uh made easier for them uh and it and actually the next slide I think is even more interesting it shows what leaders uh want from co-pilot functionality or from AI uh and they uh want many things but out of all these things what they want the least is to uh reduce the headcount of the company actually they want that only half as much as they want to uh increase productivity I think that's that's a really uh that's a really powerful uh um statement and it shows that maybe maybe we should shouldn't be so afraid about uh whether or not AI will take over our our jobs and so on I think it AI is here to help us and we're not afraid no definitely not it's a wonderful productivity tool yes sure we've seen that already and we could start uh by asking what is uh what is co-pilot uh because co-pilot is a lot of things um actually co-pilot is included in more or less all of Microsoft's products by now um so when you say co-pilot it could mean more or less uh anything in in the whole Microsoft stack from a data perspective yeah you might say that there's a naming issue with the with the co-pilot right could be uh it's h you definitely need to to say a little bit more than just co-pilot in order to identify what system you are talking about that's for sure indeed so for on this on this uh slide here you can see that we will primarily talk about the uh business Central which is uh under Dynamics 365 and uh and and power p I which is under under the Fabrics part of the circle here indeed um but there are many more co-pilots out there uh the most important thing is the uh co- piled logo look at look at it and remember it it will you will see it all over the application no matter which application you're working in most likely uh when you see it it means that that Microsoft is trying to help you with the with a suggestion to do something in the application well knowing Microsoft they'll probably change the logo in a year could be could be uh then remember the name until that and the name yes well let's see uh the agenda for today is uh some selected Finance processes uh and then we have the uh some some selected functionality that we will show for for these uh these processes uh we start with account receivables move on to account payables project accounting some reconciliation which is a primarily some Excel functionality I would like to show here yeah and uh analysis views which is in business Central that you can create analysis with a prompt and uh we finish off with the powerbi now we're talking yeah let's see let's start so accounts receivables uh what we have in the uh business Central application uh at this moment is that we can uh ask for help to create sales lines in the application and we can uh and it it can specify uh items and quantities uh based on previous invoices for instance but it's really just free text you can uh on an invoice you can open up these uh open up this this this uh co-pilot and then ask it to do something and uh we will actually do that live here so let's hope everything works well wow yeah so that's a productivity tool yes okay so uh let's go to the application here and I will try to use it to create a sales invoice you're sharing the wrong page ah I can see that let's get rid of this presentation mode okay here we go so I here have business Central where my sales invoices I can create a new sales invoice and select some customer if I go down to my lines I can actually now see the co-pilot logo and I can press suggest sales lines so here I could write uh thesee Bas lines on the last three invoices and then it will try to generate that and see what it comes up with drum roll yeah so it suggested to sell uh 10 desks and uh some chairs and uh some whiteboards as well I can uh regenerate it or I can change some uh some settings down here to uh to to to specify what I want generated and I can press insert if I'm happy and then I actually generated some sales lines so it's an it's an example of a really small and simple co-pilot that we uh probably will see many of uh coming in the future small features that you can use to uh um to to uh to prompt your way through the application instead of clicking and learning how to do things I like that yeah um let's go back to the slides another thing for uh for accounts receivables is which is not business Central it is more generic it is a a co-pilot app that has been released from Microsoft for for Outlook it's based it's built to work with the d365 finance uh but it it will be or is I cannot completely figure out if it's actually working or not but it should be possible to uh to get it to work with other Erp sources as well okay so not only Microsoft also but the idea is that you connect Outlook to your Erp platform through this app and uh it will help you to draft email replies to your customers for instance uh and get information from the Erp systems and and get the get the right answers to those emails so I have a small screenshot here it is in preview this functional you can go and download it and try to install it see how it it works if you're running d365 Finance it should be fairly straightforward to get it to work at least uh but this is an example of uh a customer writing about some uh some some inquiry and uh the uh the uh accountant here has has replied based on business Central to the or the Earp system to the right you can see that there's some information about the customer and also uh all the the in the outstanding invoices that they have ahuh um so from here on it will of course draft the text itself uh propose a reply and then you can change it you can uh pull in some files to to attach some files if you want to do that and then you can press send so that's a that's pretty cool that's a pretty cool Tool uh it's part of this uh uh co-pilot for finance product that is in preview uh it consists of uh of this app and an Excel app as well that we will look at later oo Excel yeah Excel is still a very big part of Finance processes and it's a really good tool um it's not very good to store data but uh it's a it's a really good tool to work in so um so I'm happy that we have some co-pilots there if we go next to uh accounts payables and uh here I selected some some other functionality that we have in in business Central uh we have a co-pilot chat which means that you can in the application you can chat with your data and you can also use it to uh to be told how to use the system so what kind of questions would you ask then we will try to go and do it but uh it it could be I want to find some data I want to to show me some data from the system latest invoices or top three customers or these kind of things but or even more important it could be used to ask questions about how to use the application ah um but let's uh let's try uh those in uh live here uh the other thing I will show is the bank account reconciliation co-pilot which has been in a few releases now we it it works on top of the uh current rule-based uh reconciliation rules so more or less if if the rule based reconciliation fails or something is left then you pull out the co-pilot and ask that to do that reconciliation what is Rule based con reconciliation yeah that could be yeah that could be that you base it on a rule the amount should match with within within a a variance it could be that the date matches of the transactions match within a variance okay um it could be by matching the customer number or some information from the transaction text from the bank for instance okay um all these kind of things are rule-based and they are hard they are hard configured in the system when this is uh when the customer number says this then you should try to match it to the text over here from the transaction and and that works really well but there are sometimes uh transactions left where you can have problems matching them automatically and here AI can really help especially cases where you have uh uh different languages so let's say your Erp systems transactions are booked in the transaction text is in English but the transactions on the bank is in chinesee for instance uh that's where the rule based reconciliation could have issues because it doesn't know Chinese AI is pretty much indifferent about language it knows languages really well so so that's that's one example but let's dive into it we take open up our business Central again and let's start with the copilot chat I have a co-pilot logo in the top of the screen um right now this functionality Works in US English so and and nothing else so if you want to try it out you need to be running business Central v24 and have the language set to English and maybe it would still not work because they're still rolling this out in the different countries if I press it I have I've get my copil of chat and I can now start to ask questions to my uh business Central here so I could ask uh how do I adjust currencies for instance that would be an example of something that if you haven't done it before you would need to learn how to do it maybe you would search and learn to find that information maybe you would uh call your partner to uh to get some education from them um but it's it's a really simple process at least in this product so you can this is a good example you could you could just ask co-pilot for this and and maybe get yourself to the answer and start doing it cool so it's uh it tells me where to go and uh and and what to do and it of course has references to the sources where it found it which is learn ah excellent yeah another example is I could ask it about some data so I could ask uh what are are the top three vendors this month and then it will need to think with and this time it it thinks a little bit longer because it actually needs to go down into the Erp data and uh and and validate that and scan everything yes okay yeah but uh so we have been waiting for this co-pilot chat for quite a while we are happy that it's here so the results are in now soell top three vendors apparently are these vendors um yeah the functionality is really nice we we are hoping for it to grow over time which of course it will so um but it it definitely contains some uh some some easy value already so this whole technology is still in its infancy what you say and we need to remember that that we are still in an early phase with all these things so many of much of the functionality we are seeing will have uh we could we could maybe think it could work better and it will at some point yeah we see Daily Progress Within These uh platforms I Can See For say that Microsoft's own uh in their own words they have saved uh they said 40% of their development cost on uh U on using AI I can relate to that yeah and and that's major I think we can see it directly on the release plans that we are be getting functionality pumped out like never before yeah so exciting um let's look at the uh bank account reconciliation yeah another thing I didn't mention about the chat is I can actually chat with the co-pilot and uh continue working in my environment I didn't have to actually wait around for it to answer it would it would run in the in the background so to speak oh that's cool yeah let's find some bank account where are you at that's because I'm sing searching wrong yeah yeah okay here so here I have a what is called a bank account reconciliation you would have these running for every bank account that bank account that you are have hooked up to the system uhhuh or tracking in the system yeah and uh the button is actually already here but let's open it up and and look at the reconciliation here first so on the left side I have my bank statement lines on the right side I have my bank account letterer entries and this is what I want to match I could do this manually or uh the system will try to match them automatically based on the rule base but I can now also press uh reconcile with co-pilot here is no prompt because it's obvious what I want to do yeah so uh it will just tried to do it it said that it has matched 100% And that there are uh we can see here that one out of the three lines here are uh Auto matched and the last two are co-pilot matched ah and then you would need to validate those yourself or then I will need to uh to of course validate what it has found here see if it looks correct and I can press keep it if I want to keep it and it has now been fully matched this bank account reconciliation wow of course this is mostly valuable if you if you're experiencing trouble with uh reconciliation having a lot of leftovers from the rule based reconciliation but otherwise pretty strong tool if I had leftovers I would be able to press uh this button underneath where it will suggest which G accounts to actually post the differences to okay um and that would be based on the descriptions of the G accounts ah so the description that actually have real value now uh yeah yeah it could have so it would it would know that if it says uh food on the transaction and it says uh it says some other description on the G account it will know that it probably food that should go down there ah yeah so that's the first example we actually see where the system really suggests accounting choice of accounts in the system and it's I think it's a good start all you need is a co- pallet that would add the description for you then and no it will add the description oh it will once it found the right account it will take the description from that account and transfer to but what if there weren't any description if there weren't any there is some kind of description on okay but of course if it's just some uh random code you it would not be able to decipher it but yeah um but it will take whatever is on the transaction and try to translate that into a g account excellent yeah so that was uh accounts payable and I know it's a little bit far stretched we don't have that much for the actual accounts payable processes but it was the closest we could get to it so let's look at project accounting and this would then be an example of a custom co-pilot that we have built and put into business Central uh business Central as a platform is really extensible you have uh uh you can you can install apps uh firstly there are over 4,000 apps on app source for business Central and if nothing of that matches your needs then you can you can custom build Solutions and this is an example of that so in the recent a recent release we got a new uh object type in the product which is called a prompt dialogue um so this means that we can now start to build these Solutions and this is an example of that it's a it's quite a really uh low hanging fruits in the kind in investment wise we have uh this solution that I will show now it it could have been developed in about 20 hours is my my developer s yeah wow so that not that's not uh that's not really much in uh in Erp terms so you you could build this I would just say that before you run out and start customizing and building co-pilots for all your processes in business Central keep track of the release plan uh because there is so much function coming out we see even on minor releases we see co-pilots being released now so so before you build it and pay those 20 hours or how much it will be for that project try to figure out if it's something that is generic and would probably be added at micros from Microsoft site at some point but I guess with an investment of 20 hours development this would fall into uh what many companies would consider learning hours or true true uh and then also you are modifying the system so so whatever you build here needs to be maintained so if you start pumping the application full of of custom extensions like this then your uh maintenance budget will will go up as well okay because of course it needs to be tested with every release and um yeah okay and that's for falls on you you as a as a customer if it's your extension I guess so yeah but it's really good tool we can build really cool things in a very short time so whenever you have a process where you are doing things manually uh typing in things these these kind of solutions could definitely help let's look at it we go back in business Central and this time I will go into the project module and here I will create a new project oh I will actually not I will start right here because I have under the new button I now have suggest with co-pilot and this is a custom built co-pilot and another co- pilot button yes it's a Hidden Gem isn't it yeah and and you can see that they really made it so you can't really tell the difference here it's uh it's the same look and feel as the Microsoft uh uh co-pilots even though this is custom made so so they really added it as a new kind of layer to the application where you can develop it yourself and so on okay let's try here to prompt something create a project for customer number 10,000 oh You misspelled customer it will probably uh it will probably work let's see uh let's say for installment and testing okay spelling is all wrong but it will probably get it of five coffee machines let's try it out and see what it says yeah drum roll exciting exciting I'll bring my drum next time so it cre yeah it's done it created a a suggestion for a project here it's called installment and testing of coffee machines um and it suggested some job tasks down here which is the activities in the project wow so I could regenerate as many times as I want or I could press keep it when I'm happy I can also edit the lines remove something here and say this I actually don't need um but when I'm happy I can press keep it and it will okay it will it actually just didn't get the customer number so I guess I didn't uh didn't understand that well I think it's a very good start though yeah okay let's say let's see choose it manually keep it now I have my project created which is installment and testing of five coffee machines I can of course was edited from here so uh but it's it will definitely save me some time in in creating these activities um the next step is to actually assign some resources to this uh to this project and uh I would do that by opening up one of the uh maybe the install coffee machine activity here I would want to look at that uh uh this is an item but if I change it to a resource yeah then I should be able to say suggest resource and and P it po up yes and I could here specify some kind of uh some kind of thing I would want to find in that resource now I will just press generate to see but it will look it will look up and see who has capacity uh and Mike does Mike has a capacity so we can say here he has the skills and he has the capacity excellent he's an expert in electric wiring it says so that's really good I will confirm and now Mike has been assigned to to this task here so this was a um really fastly built custom co-pilot and you once it's in there you can't really see the difference it looks like something Microsoft has built themselves I'll say and this copilot is based of your previous project history no this this one is actually based on examples from Microsoft okay to use this uh new uh object type but if you were to implement this were to implement we we would estimate that something like this would be about 20 hours of development so it's a it's fairly fast I think it's very impressive yeah I think so too let's move back to our slides okay so now we uh run we go to the reconciliation part and and it's really a more General Excel functionality I would say we currently have two co-pilots we can use for Excel uh I have both of them installed for this demo purpose but uh but and you can have that uh one is called Excel co-pilot for finance specifically tailored for finance processes it supports reconciliation right now it's not dependent on any yourp system uh even though it should the name should could indicate it it only works with the data that is in the Excel sheet that you're working with okay and uh and most Erp systems today have a high uh collaboration with Excel there's it's it's very normal that you can pull almost anything out in Excel work with it and and maybe push it back uh indeed Excel connections yeah so so I think it's a really good good tool and it looks like it will be developed in in a really good direction as well um currently it's reconciliation U Next Step looks like they will add some variance analysis as well but it's a it's a co-pilot tailored for specific operations and not U not a general help with the with pivoting and then so on okay and then the other one is called co-pilot for M365 co-pilot for Excel and that is part of the M365 co-pilot Suite um so we will look a little bit about on look look at that as well and then maybe just look at what the differences are and what you can use it for I'm signed yeah let's open up Excel this is my Excel file I have uh two different uh data sets here I have my one called demo trip budget another called demo bank statement this is just an example of us being able to reconcile something so I want to take entries on the on on my first pane here and and reconcile it with the entries on the second pane so that makes sense in the top of my Excel I have a co-pilot for finance preview installed if I open up this I will get co-pilot for finance here it's very personal isn't it yeah it is it says uh hi [ __ ] and that's good uh I can only reconcile data at this point but uh that's fine that's what I will show that I can do if if I press it it it will try to look at the different panes on the Excel sheet and see it's suggests what it is I want to to actually reconcile and it suggestion is correct in this example here it wants to take these two different uh data sets and uh and uh and reconcile it do you need to format your data as a table for this to work uh no NOP um if I press next I can uh yeah so here it actually says I want to add columns it didn't I will try again because usually it it's able to pretty much predict what I want so I just press prob pressing here let's see please stand oh there we go now it worked so it figure out which columns it's it is is likely for me wanting to reconcile definitely see it has some dates and it has some amounts so that should work uh if I'm not happy with it of course I can I can edit it or regenerate or I can edit uh the specific Fields here wow so impressive yeah they not even named consistently or anything no no wild guess just tries to predict uh that it's probably something about dates or probably something about amounts that I want to yeah to to match up that makes sense if I press keep it and press next then it will generate a report for me nice and that's a new page in your Excel sheet yes and uh this page cons it tries to sum up what has been uh what has been matched it also generates a description of what was matched so it says what it could match and what it couldn't match and so on uh and if I wanted I could press include the summary in the report then it will take this summary and add it to the actual page meaning I could now maybe print it and or I could save as PF PDF and send it to someone Excel and PDF in one yeah happy excellent really good yeah so this is uh more or less what it can do at this point but I think it's really strong tool um I think it's very impr if you work a lot with reconciliation of different data doesn't have to be Bank like it is here it could be anything uh then this tool is is is actually really cool I think it saves you a bit of a vlookup or index matches I would say so yes yeah um so that was co-pilot for finance and that's what it can do at this point I think it's cool yeah I think I will uh certainly install that on my you need to run by your it Department first to get the uh to get it approved most likely but uh but from there on it's uh it's just installing it from appsource okay it's not Visual Basic is it no I don't think so okay it's it's an app that is on an app source and you don't actually get any uh scripts or anything you just install it and it show it doesn't have to be a macro enabled Excel sheet oh I don't think so no any Excel sheet with data should work as far as I have been have tested the least the other product in Excel is of course the M365 co-pilot which is more General I would say where cobal for finance is focused on specific tasks uh Finance related then the co M365 co-pilot is is focused on on many other things and uh whop let's go to some uh place where we have some data it gives me a pretty good overview of what is included or what I can use it for and that's more or less what it can do it can add formulas it could uh highlight some data it could sort and filter data and it could analyze some data so that's pretty cool yeah I think so um so if I wanted to ask it to add a new column um and we could do something really simple we could say add a column with a unique ID for each line let's say see what it comes up with so more or less all of the Excel formulas that you can use this will also be able to use uh bo what did you do no it didn't didn't work okay that's really strange that worked yesterday so not so consistent I guess but uh we could try something else and we can uh I guess it's always a bit wonky of course and it's a live demo as well mhm so let's try to uh see if we can add a column where we multiply the amount with two okay maybe that would work no no okay oh well you wrote multiplied okay that would definitely not work unless it would uh understand what I tried to say I think let's give it one last shot here one last shot I'm holding my breath and I can I can uh um inject at this stage these are functionalities that we have in powerbi as well yeah um and they're good and they're getting better every day certainly yeah uh but you don't always get the uh the result that you expect but uh no so for instance right now I'm definitely not getting anything so I think we should call quits on this demo it usually I think it works really well you can add uh you can add columns formulas it can it can pivot your data if you wanted to do that really uh so and I think it's it's it is a really good good tool but uh but I would leave it up to you guys to to look into it and uh and and test it out yeah it it certainly works for me in my yeah no I I actually like that yeah yeah the the variance that you get something new and so um so we've gotten this uh a few months back but uh oh we have a little bit of a technical issue but it's it's it's working really well um so I guess uh I um talking I I am talking I will be talking about power then because I know more about that uh we have the co-pilot in Pia no and you're you're not back online yet okay okay okay looking on your screen in PBI uh we have we have a uh with my count five um different versions of the co-pilot and I expect the co-pilot to really just be one thing that's why they call it co-pilot even though it exists many places um um and the star of the show is uh certainly the the co-pilot that we have in GitHub that co-pilot will um will help us with uh uh a writing code and um and it's it's surprisingly good it it's uh it's been a a game Cher for for all the developers in uh yeah that I know and uh and that's also what Microsoft says this is the co- pallet that really helped their productivity we're back yeah we need a co-pilot for the um for the microphone yeah for the batteries for the batteries okay but uh so co-pilot in powerbi it contains of the GitHub co-pilot we use that I can say we use that as well in the in business applications works really well saves a lot of time many developers do right yeah and and even converting between different coding languages uh is also done by by the co-pilot to to great extent okay and then report generation yeah yeah we have report generation and uh um something that I will demo shortly and uh we have uh uh also a uh functionality of data exploration um and we can ask questions to our um uh uh to our data and uh um and uh uh finally we also have um the documentation of our business logic which is done in the in Dax the uh data analysis expression language okay let's uh let's let's have a look at it yeah well um I will show you my screen then when I have a um semantic model I can use the um the uh uh explore data and generate an autogenerated report this is um this is a functionality that's been improved over over some time and uh I can pre-select my data and say uh let's uh let's do something by uh maybe uh what every year and uh let's go with the uh not the product color but the uh uh let's go with the uh English product name based on a data model it's it redefin some reports for you yeah and then it will adjust that to the individual tables that you then take off here and this is a standard powerbi report as a as any power report that you'd see it it can cross filter it has all the uh standard functionality and wonderful performance that you'd expect and um and uh if I save this let call it a demo and save here we go then I can actually use this report with my co-pilot and start asking questions um like you did in Excel yeah um to my data and this is not just one table as you saw in in the list this is a a full data model of a of a uh uh much more data that you could ever fit into uh any Excel sheet and uh and um I can get an explanation of the uh visuals on my page and uh and I can even start um asking questions and uh uh uh I learned uh the hard way that you can't always trust the prompt down here you can basically ask questions of what you see on your report page um and since I have a very large data set might have questions about uh my uh inventory or or or some other things that weren't shown on my report page and the co-pilot at this stage would probably not give me a good answer but I could ask it questions like uh how um what was my sales amount at the year uh 2013 because it's readily there on the page yeah okay maybe I don't know where to look so what it really means is that the uh the the end user of the system Sy can now start to produce these kind of reports themselves yeah yeah exactly and and you can when when you get the uh insights on your page you can you can press the little number at the end of the insight and get a highlight of where the data was situated on your page okay and I think this helps new um users of powerbi greatly um to to uh get started with uh and then once we have generated this uh this report I can uh try to embed it in business Central yeah let's go uh let's go to my screen here if I on my front page here go down to some powerbi reports and see if I can select it or that requires that you have shared it with me but let's see I called it demo it was a great name wasn't it yes let's try and it's loading loading yeah are we coming full s oh ah no no it gave you the wrong the wrong report okay but but you could do that you could you could embed it uh we are running out of time here I will just uh I will just quickly uh run back on the analysis view functionality that I promised to uh to talk about uh in business Central on more or less any page now I can uh I can go to analyze list and I can ask uh please pivot customers by balance for instance and I can press generate and it will try to create me an analysis view based on the data on this page aha so and an an in in client uh uh analysis functionality so and this I can actually take the URL and send to a colleague okay and they would see the same view okay we are done we're done thank you for today wonderful bye-bye e e