Scaling the reach of finance: what’s next with Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

In most organizations, finance is a small but mighty strategic partner to the business, supporting enterprise-wide decisions while managing core processes from record-to-report and source-to-pay to forecast-to-plan. The insights and guidance finance teams produce are more than just outputs of these processes; they form the foundation for critical decisions that shape how the business operates and grows. On any given day, finance teams are expected to: Deliver accurate and timely financial reporting, while maintaining controls and compliance. Guide business performance by proactively identifying opportunities and risks. Support operational decisions across business units, regions, and functions. Enable planning and forecasting in fast-paced environments where assumptions change quickly. As businesses grow and become more complex, expectations can become harder to meet. Finance teams must navigate increasingly fragmented data—pulling together insights across systems, reports, and stakeholders to form a clear picture. At the same time, they’re asked to support more stakeholders, make more decisions, and operate on faster timelines—without growing at the same pace. To keep up, finance teams must scale. But scaling isn’t just about doing more with the same tools. It requires a fundamental shift in how finance operates . This is the shift that underpins Microsoft’s vision for agentic ERP, where enterprise systems move beyond just recording transactions and generating reports, to helping organizations reason over data, coordinating decisions, and taking action. In this model, AI agents work alongside finance teams to extend their capacity—handling routine work, surfacing issues, and helping them focus on what matters most. Empowering finance at scale: Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot delivers on this vision by connecting financial data, insights, and actions directly in the flow of work, helping finance teams scale their impact. First introduced as Copilot for Finance, Finance Agent is purpose-built for the structure and rigor of modern financial operations. Rather than requiring extensive customization like general-purpose AI tools, Finance Agent is designed around core finance workflows and grounded in ERP data—so organizations can move from insight to action faster, without compromising financial controls, governance, or auditability. As innovation with AI accelerates, Finance Agent continues to evolve. Today we’re announcing new Finance Agent experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed to give both finance teams and the stakeholders who rely on them the insights they need to act with confidence. Announcing new ways to experience Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot At Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo™ 2026 , we’re showcasing a new Home workspace and Chat experience for Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, in public preview today. These new experiences make it easy for finance teams and their stakeholders to get a centralized, role-aware view of financial performance and activity. Instead of relying on static reports or ad hoc requests, users can access up-to-date financial insights tailored to their role with the appropriate permissions and context built in. The Home workspace acts as a financial command center, proactively surfacing key metrics, emerging risks, and areas that require attention. For example, a finance leader can quickly identify variances impacting forecast accuracy, while a business unit leader can monitor performance against targets without needing to request or reconcile multiple reports. The Chat experience lets users interact with financial data and processes using natural language, moving seamlessly from question to insight to action. Whether investigating performance, resolving issues, or executing next steps, users can work directly in the flow of work. For example, they can enter prompts in Microsoft 365 Copilot like: Analyze this project report and help me identify the key drivers for the variance between budget to actuals. Help me respond to this customer’s question about an unpaid invoice by pulling their transaction history and identifying unmatched invoices. Help me assess this new vendor’s compliance with our onboarding guidance and update the vendor record if approved. Together, these experiences help finance teams scale how insights are delivered across the organization—reducing ad-hoc requests, improving consistency, and enabling faster, more informed decision-making. Speed, clarity, and control across core financial workflows Alongside these new experiences, Finance Agent continues to support the core processes that define finance operations, helping teams move from analysis to action with greater speed and confidence. Financial reconciliation streamlines one of the most time-intensive aspects of the close cycle. By identifying unmatched transactions, surfacing exceptions, and guiding resolution, Finance Agent reduces manual effort while maintaining financial control and auditability. Variance analysis accelerates the path from actuals to explanation. When performance deviates from expectations, Finance Agent identifies key drivers and produces structured summaries that support faster decision-making and stakeholder alignment. Financial data preparation accelerates the path from raw data to reliable insight. When financial data is inconsistent or incomplete, Finance Agent automatically cleanses, standardizes, and enriches datasets—ensuring they’re ready for reconciliation and analysis, while reducing manual effort and improving confidence in outcomes. These capabilities are purpose-built for finance and designed to deliver outputs that reflect the structure, precision, and context required for financial decision-making, while operating within defined latency constraints to ensure timely responses. We’ve recently run evaluations to measure the outputs and found that Finance Agent scored meaningfully higher on Accuracy, Depth, and Structure compared with OpenAI and Anthropic. In addition to the strong results in our core metrics, we also demonstrate clear differentiation in metrics for citations, clarity, relevance, recency and groundedness. Get started with Finance Agent and see it in action at Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo™ 2026 If you haven’t already explored Finance Agent, now is a great time to get started. The solution is generally available, ready to connect to your existing ERP environment, and continually evolving with new capabilities and experiences. To learn more: Explore Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot by visiting Agent Store and clicking “All Agents” within Microsoft 365 Copilot. Review Microsoft Learn documentation for setup and administration guidance. Discover more about Microsoft 365 Copilot and how role-based AI agents across Sales, Service, and Finance are transforming business processes. Connect with us at the Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo TM , where we’ll be sharing our vision for agentic ERP and demonstrating the latest innovations, including Finance Agent in Microsoft 365. Add our session to your agenda. We’re excited about the opportunity to reshape finance with AI and agents, and how Microsoft 365 Copilot can help you scale your organization, accelerate decision making, and empower your team to achieve more.