Field-Tested Resources
Explore a searchable library of practical tools, guides, and insight shaped by real-world lessons from our Frontier Finance journey.
What steps can Finance leaders take right now to embrace the new era of AI
What are the key blockers to becoming frontier and how are you overcoming them
Our AI Journey In Finance
This presentation showcases how Microsoft’s finance organization is modernizing operations through digital transformation, with a focus on automation, centralized procurement, and integrated platforms. It highlights the launch of several Microsoft AI solutions and highlights the outcomes. It invites finance professionals to engage in peer-to-peer discussions and collaborate on leveraging emerging technologies to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and drive performance.
CEO Summit - CFO perspective on how to unlock business value with AI
This presentation highlights how AI is transforming finance to unlock business value. It outlines the evolving role of CFOs in driving innovation, efficiency, and measurable outcomes across functions—from quote-to-cash and record-to-report to tax, treasury, planning, and compliance. The deck showcases real-world AI-enabled use cases within Microsoft Finance, quantifying impact through time savings, accuracy gains, and process improvements. It also provides actionable insights on data governance, cultural transformation, and AI adoption strategies, supported by examples of Microsoft Copilot prompts and integrated Azure solutions. This resource is designed to inspire finance leaders to lead with AI and reimagine value creation across the enterprise.
Security and Responsible AI Considerations for Finance professionalss
This Brief outlines how finance professionals can adopt Generative AI securely and responsibly by applying Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) and Office of Responsible AI (RAI) frameworks to real finance scenarios. It explains why security and responsible AI are critical in finance given the sensitivity of financial data and the rapid expansion of AI-driven use cases, emphasizing the need to manage risk while unlocking value. The brief introduces SFI’s core principles - secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations and highlights how they help protect identities, data, networks, and systems across AI-enabled finance solutions. It also describes how Responsible AI principles such as fairness, transparency, privacy, and accountability can be practically applied through tools like Finance Agents and Copilot Studio to build ethical, trustworthy AI in finance.
Data Driven Innovation
This brief outlines how finance professionals can responsibly and securely integrate AI into their workflows by aligning with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) and Office of Responsible AI (RAI). It emphasizes the dual imperative of protecting financial data and ensuring ethical AI deployment, guided by principles such as fairness, reliability, privacy, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. The document also highlights practical applications using Microsoft Finance Agents and Copilot Studio, encouraging finance teams to champion responsible AI practices that build trust and uphold compliance while driving innovation.
Driving AI Success with Microsoft: Real-World Business Impact
This LinkedIn Learning course highlights how Microsoft is using AI to transform core business functions such as HR, Finance, Customer Service, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and IT. Featuring insights from senior Microsoft leaders, it presents real-world use cases—like demand forecasting, content generation, and document processing—that demonstrate how AI delivers measurable ROI. The course emphasizes the value of human-AI collaboration in boosting productivity, reducing costs, and building a future-ready workforce.
Define a Microsoft AI strategy to create business value in finance
This module is designed to help finance professionals understand and adopt Microsoft AI solutions. It covers key AI use cases in financial services, introduces relevant tools like Azure OpenAI Service, and shares real-world success stories from companies such as Swift and Manulife. The content is structured to guide users through defining an AI strategy that creates business value, with short lessons and an assessment to reinforce learning.
2025: The Year the Frontier Firm is Born
This report explores how AI is reshaping the future of work, introducing the concept of the "Frontier Firm"—organizations powered by AI agents and human-agent teams. It outlines a three-phase journey where AI evolves from assistant to autonomous collaborator, transforming workflows, roles, and organizational structures.
The Art and Science of Working with AI
This article from Microsoft WorkLab explores how AI—particularly Microsoft 365 Copilot—is transforming the way we work. It emphasizes that effective use of AI is both an art and a science, requiring thoughtful prompting, iteration, and collaboration. Drawing on insights from Microsoft leaders and real-world usage data, it outlines best practices for crafting prompts, highlights the evolving role of AI as a productivity partner, and encourages leaders to foster new work habits that embrace AI’s potential to reduce cognitive load and enhance creativity.
Copilot Prompt Gallery
This page showcases a curated collection of ready-to-use prompts designed to help users get the most out of Microsoft Copilot across various business scenarios. It includes categorized examples for tasks like drafting financial reports, creating presentations, writing emails, and conducting risk assessments. The gallery also offers tips for crafting effective prompts—such as being specific, providing context, and guiding the tone—to help users tailor Copilot’s responses to their needs.
AI Trends
This LinkedIn Learning course offers a dynamic, ongoing series where top AI experts explore the latest developments in artificial intelligence. With contributions from professionals like Morten Rand-Hendriksen, Vilas Dhar, and Xavier Amatriain, the course covers topics such as prompt engineering, ChatGPT plugins, GitHub Copilot, and the ethical and practical implications of AI in the workplace. Designed for beginners and updated regularly, it helps learners identify the most relevant AI tools and strategies for their organizations.
Leveraging Generative AI in Finance and Accounting
This LinkedIn Learning course offers a practical and strategic overview of how generative AI is transforming finance and accounting. It covers foundational concepts, ethical and compliance considerations, and real-world applications such as analyzing SEC filings and generating financial forecasts. Designed for beginner to intermediate learners, the course emphasizes the integration of data science with domain expertise.
Microsoft Policy Assistant
The Microsoft Policy Assistant is an AI-powered tool designed to help employees quickly and accurately find policy information and guidance. It centralizes access to policy content and provides a guided experience that clarifies policy questions, offers exception pathways, and enables feedback to improve future interactions. This solution addresses the challenge of navigating complex policy documentation and reduces the need for manual support from compliance teams.
What does Frontier Finance mean to you
Analyst, Researcher and Finance in M365 Copilot
This Brief introduces Microsoft’s role-based AI solutions. Analyst, Researcher, and Finance in M365 Copilot are designed to help finance professionals simplify and accelerate daily work. It explains how Analyst enables advanced quantitative tasks like forecasting, variance analysis, and financial modeling without requiring coding expertise. It also describes how Researcher synthesizes large volumes of internal and external data to generate insights, strategies, and executive-ready reports in minutes. Finally, it highlights how Finance in M365 Copilot streamlines variance analysis and reconciliation, enabling finance teams to deliver faster, clearer, and more data-driven insights for leadership.
Invoice Generation Automation
Invoice Generation Automation is a Python-based solution that automates compliant invoicing for scenarios not supported by SAP, such as intercompany transactions and asset transfers. It auto-generates invoices from Excel templates, converts them to PDF, merges government-issued IRN and barcode data, and logs errors to SharePoint for review.
Collections Email Agent
The Collections Email Agent is a GenAI-powered capability that intercepts and resolves customer emails end-to-end within the intelligent collections platform. It identifies intent, generates automated responses, extracts structured data, and auto-resolves standard cases, enabling touchless processing for routine requests while freeing agents to focus on complex exceptions.
Integrated Collection Solution
The Integrated Collection Solution is an AI-powered virtual assistant in Teams that delivers an on-demand consolidated view of a customer’s credit and payment standing. It replaces manual data gathering across aging, disputes, holds, financing exposure, and pipeline context with a curated report and direct links into D365.
Credit Risk Agent
Credit Risk Agent automates manual credit request reviews by collecting information from various systems, applying SME knowledge built into the AI agent, and emailing a decision recommendation to the credit risk team. Analysts remain in control and make the final call, but the heavy lifting of searching, collecting, and aggregating data is handled automatically.
Treasury Intelligence Agent
Treasury Intelligence Agent helps corporate treasury teams proactively manage financial risk by monitoring external market and geopolitical events in real time, mapping them to company-specific financial exposures, and delivering AI-driven insights and recommendations tailored to treasury roles through a centralized intelligence hub.
Financial Insights Platform
Finsight is an AI-powered FP&A platform that automates recurring financial reporting processes including close and forecast cycles. It generates executive-ready outputs, such as variance analyses, narratives, visuals, and presentation decks directly from governed finance data models, with a conversational Teams interface for querying financial data.
Close Commentary Agent
The Close Commentary Agent standardizes the Azure Finance month-end close process by using GenAI to write initial analysis drafts, which Finance Managers then enrich with field insight. This enables vertical consolidation of insights at scale and speed, replacing the fragmented, geography-dependent approaches previously used across teams.
Revenue Planning Platform
Revenue Planning Platform is an internal platform that consolidates revenue forecasting, planning, and reporting into a single experience. It supports multi-methodology and driver-based modeling, AI predictive modeling, real-time self-serve reporting, and role-based security, replacing the patchwork of first- and third-party tools that previously created data reconciliation issues and steep learning curves.
GitHub Copilot Forecasting Model
The GitHub Copilot Forecasting Model applies machine learning to revenue forecasting by enabling rapid evaluation of multiple models, automated back-testing against actuals, and transparent forecast ranges with confidence intervals. Model logic and documentation are embedded directly in code, improving clarity, governance, and trust in outputs.
Self-Sourcing Agent
The Self-Sourcing Agent redesigns Microsoft’s procurement platform for lower-complexity spend into a conversational, AI-guided experience. It provides intelligent supplier recommendations and supports end-to-end sourcing workflows, from project scoping through request for bid, consolidating previously fragmented capabilities into a single interface.
Procurement Analytics
Procurement Analytics uses the Microsoft SQL BI stack to develop spend cubes that integrate data from various purchasing channels with corporate reporting hierarchies. It serves as a centralized solution for spend queries and deep analytics across Microsoft’s supplier spend, supporting key metrics for supplier diversity, Scope 3 emissions, cash flow, and data privacy.
Supplier Q&A Agent
The Supplier Q&A Agent streamlines the procurement bid Q&A process by enabling real-time, anonymous communication between suppliers and business owners. It automates the compilation, follow-up, formatting, and removal of supplier-identifiable information that was previously handled manually through Excel and email workflows.
Intelligent Quote Agent
The Intelligent Quote Agent continuously monitors millions of pricing and bill-of-material relationships within the quote process, proactively identifying discrepancies, triggering corrective actions, and validating pricing inputs in real time, replacing the fragmented manual audit processes across the device supply chain.
Sustainability Value Chain Solution
The Sustainability Value Chain Solution automates supply chain emissions data collection, review, and gap remediation for Microsoft’s supplier decarbonization program. Built on Microsoft Sustainability Manager, it collects custom emissions data and decarbonization plans, automates data validation and ingestion, and uses AI-driven testing to simulate real user interactions on the supplier portal.
Terms and Conditions AI Agent
The Terms and Conditions AI Agent centralizes contract expertise into a scalable system that allows users to query contract issues, redlines, or scenarios and receive structured guidance including positions, responses, and fallback language. It captures insights from complex deals and embeds them into reusable guidance, shifting from reliance on individual expertise to a consistent, queryable knowledge base.
Investment Agent
The Investment Agent is an AI assistant that answers questions related to End Customer Investment Fund and Azure Credit Offer programs using internal knowledge sources. It centralizes access to guidance that was previously fragmented across multiple tools and documents, enabling deal teams to quickly retrieve accurate, context-relevant information for investment and deal structuring decisions.
Statement of Work Agent
The Statement of Work Agent analyzes SOW documents and surfaces structured insights such as cost validation, funding alignment, and policy compliance, while flagging potential risks or ineligible items. It supports Deal Managers by breaking down key elements of each SOW and guiding interpretation and action, reducing the back-and-forth with the Deal Desk Investments team.
Contract Intelligence Agent
Contract Intelligence Agent delivers guided, role-based contracting and compliance assistance for Professional Services teams through an AI agent built with Copilot Studio. It uses curated SharePoint knowledge sources, defined logic flows, and governance controls to ensure responses are accurate, compliant, and aligned with approved Microsoft policies, with escalation to human reviewers where needed.
Sales Enablement Agent
The Sales Enablement Agent accelerates deal execution by analyzing contextual data, surfacing relevant enterprise insights, and generating clear summaries, approvals, and next steps. It centralizes context and translates complex deal inputs into structured outputs, enabling consistent and efficient decisioning across complex commercial engagements.
Customer Opportunity Agent
The Customer Opportunity Agent automates financial modeling for Azure Consumption Commitment sales opportunity evaluations. It collects key deal inputs from sellers, runs automated financial modeling, initiates approval workflows with standardized analysis, and packages results - all in seconds - replacing decentralized spreadsheets and manual processes that previously led to inconsistent assumptions and delays.
Sample Selection Agent
The Sample Selection Agent replaces manual, judgment-heavy partner audit selection with objective risk scoring across countries, partner types, revenue, discounts, and control indicators. It aggregates and synthesizes signals across approximately 16 data sources to produce standardized risk scores, enabling auditors to quickly identify high-risk partners and deals worth deeper investigation.
SOX Change Management Testing Agent
The SOX Change Management Testing Agent automates core audit activities through two AI agents: an Attribute Extraction Agent that ingests ticket data and structures compliance attributes into standardized audit tables, and an Evidence Annotation Agent that identifies and visually marks where each attribute was validated within source evidence.
Audit Automation Tool
The Audit Automation Tool automates partner audit testing on Dynamics 365 by ingesting large volumes of partner-submitted documents, extracting critical attributes such as partner details, pricing, and reseller relationships using AI, and running automated validation and rule-based checks against predefined audit criteria for corruption-related risks.
Compliance Readiness Agent
Compliance Readiness Agent automates the maintenance of Treasury’s quarterly compliance metrics by extracting balance data from emailed PDF bank statements and compiling it into an audit-ready Excel file. It replaces a manual process of opening 90 emails, clicking through 90 PDFs, and performing 90 copy-paste operations every quarter.
Investigations Briefing Tool
The Investigations Briefing Tool accelerates collaboration between the Business Conduct Investigations team and Internal Audit by using AI to generate draft briefings from sanitized investigation data. Users can dynamically select relevant cases using filters like geography, investigation type, and time period, with data always read directly from the production database.
Risk Signal Agent
Risk Signal Agent is an AI-powered notification tool that delivers targeted, monthly visibility into audit issues aligned to Enterprise Risks. It aggregates findings into key themes, business impacts, and individual issue highlights, with per-risk subscriptions so stakeholders follow only the risks relevant to them without being overwhelmed by broad reporting.
Automated Journal Entry Posting
Automated Journal Entry Posting streamlines the financial close process by automating JE template upload, validation, and posting through integrated JEM and SAP workflows. It includes duplication checks, audit logs, automated email notifications, and near real-time reporting to provide up-to-date JE status during close cycles.
Procedure Orchestration Platform
Procedure Orchestration Platform is an AI-driven financial close platform that converts documented accounting procedures into governed, repeatable workflows. It automates core accounting activities such as journal preparation, reconciliations, intercompany processing, reporting, and controls through AI-enabled ingestion, deterministic execution skills, and dashboards providing execution visibility and exception guidance.
Enterprise Risk and Mitigation System
Enterprise Risk and Mitigation System is a centralized operational risk management platform built on Azure DevOps that replaces fragmented risk registers with a single system for proactive risk identification, prioritization, and mitigation. It enables teams to assess risks before they materialize, track mitigation actions, and surface emerging risk themes across organizational silos.
Contract Analysis Tool
The Contract Analysis Tool accelerates contract and document-intensive finance workflows for the Revenue Recognition team through AI-driven document comparison, summarization, and structured data extraction. It automates accounting and compliance analysis with actionable recommendations and provides portfolio-level insights with capacity planning to focus effort on highest-impact work.
Credit & Cash Collection
Our internal Finance and Finance IT teams have leveraged Microsoft tools to build custom AI solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, tailored to our underlying systems and data. These solutions support the full credit and cash collection process, securely, at every step from invoice creation to cash in hand.
Financial Planning & Analysis
Our internal Finance and Finance IT teams have leveraged Microsoft tools to build custom AI solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, tailored to our underlying systems and data. These solutions enable FP&A teams to connect data, analysis, and storytelling end-to-end from data ingestion and transformation through executive-ready insights for each of their close cycles.
Sales Enablement
Our internal Finance and Finance IT teams have leveraged Microsoft tools to build custom AI solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, tailored to our underlying systems and data. These solutions enable Sales teams to convert manual, expertise-driven steps into standardized, scalable processes
Internal Audit
Our internal Finance and Finance IT teams have leveraged Microsoft tools to build custom AI solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, tailored to our underlying systems and data. These solutions enable Audit teams to focus their expertise on critical judgement, interpretation, and decision support that drive trust in the company’s financials.
Accounting & Finance Operations
Our internal Finance and Finance IT teams have leveraged Microsoft tools to build custom AI solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, tailored to our underlying systems and data. These solutions enable accounting processes to keep pace with growing transaction volumes and increasing regulatory scrutiny in their continued mission of timely, reliable financial reporting.
Sourcing
Our internal Finance and Finance IT teams have leveraged Microsoft tools to build custom AI solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, tailored to our underlying systems and data. These solutions enable Sourcing teams to re-architect procurement workflows end-to-end from intake and sourcing decisions through contracting, pricing, and enterprise-wide spend visibility.