Welcome to this blog, where we explore the dynamic capabilities of Microsoft Copilot within Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365 F&O). As organizations increasingly seek ways to streamline operations and boost productivity, Copilot emerges as a cutting-edge solution, offering intelligent support that automates tasks, simplifies workflows, and empowers users with data-driven insights. From task automation to acting as a smart chat assistant, Copilot helps users resolve challenges efficiently, freeing up valuable time and enhancing productivity.
Copilot’s versatility extends across various user experiences within Dynamics 365 F&O. It integrates seamlessly within the application to automate processes, serves as a conversational sidecar that provides real-time assistance, or functions as an external agent, leveraging the power of Dataverse to help users visualize and interact with their data across multiple platforms. Whether embedded within the app, as a supportive sidecar, or functioning externally, Copilot’s capabilities enable users to navigate complex business environments with confidence and ease.
In this blog, we delve deeper into these features and examine how Copilot transforms the way users interact with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, driving efficiency and innovation.
How Copilot helps its users in different ways
1. Sidecar Interface: Conversational Assistance at Your Fingertips
The Sidecar Interface within Microsoft Copilot revolutionizes the way users engage with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Integrated as a sidecar, this conversational assistant sits alongside the main application, providing real-time, interactive support. The intuitive chat experience enables users to effortlessly navigate through the application’s functions, while also offering detailed insights into the available data.
By understanding user inquiries, Copilot delivers the right information at the right time. Whether users are seeking assistance with a specific process, need clarification on a complex financial transaction, or are unsure of how to proceed, the sidecar provides context-aware guidance. Its natural language processing capabilities allow users to ask questions conversationally and receive relevant answers that help them resolve issues quickly and effectively. This proactive guidance helps reduce time spent searching for information, enabling users to maintain their focus on high-value tasks.
2. Embedded AI: Intelligence Built Directly into the Application
In addition to offering real-time chat assistance, Copilot integrates Embedded AI features directly within Dynamics 365 F&O’s application. These intelligent capabilities bring AI to the heart of the user experience, enhancing decision-making by providing valuable insights without interrupting the workflow. For example, in the Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes workspace, built-in AI identifies and analyzes changes made to confirmed orders, helping users understand the implications of those changes and guiding them toward appropriate actions.
By embedding AI capabilities within the application, Copilot ensures that users can rely on continuous support that proactively flags potential issues, suggests optimizations, and reduces the likelihood of errors. The AI is designed to seamlessly blend into the application’s processes, offering suggestions and insights in a way that feels natural and intuitive, further streamlining operations.
3. External Agents: Seamless Orchestration Across Platforms
External Agents extend Copilot’s functionality beyond the boundaries of Dynamics 365 F&O, enabling users to coordinate tasks and data across multiple applications within the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Copilot connects seamlessly with other tools like Microsoft Teams, Excel, and Outlook, providing users with easy access to financial and operational data in real time. This cross-application functionality allows users to leverage their data wherever they are working, streamlining collaboration and decision-making across teams.
Other Features that use Copilot and its Generative AI to speed up by automating processes
Collection Coordinator Workspace in Dynamics 365 F&O:
The Collection Coordinator Workspace within D365 Finance and Operations is a powerful tool designed to streamline the daily operations of collection agents, particularly in handling overdue customer balances. This feature significantly enhances productivity by consolidating critical customer account information, reducing the need for manual searches and offering AI-driven assistance. Here’s how it assists:
- Centralized Customer Information: The workspace consolidates essential data—outstanding invoices, latest payments, and other relevant customer account details—on a single page. This centralization eliminates the need for agents to search across multiple screens, enabling them to access and analyse customer information quickly and efficiently. This comprehensive view helps agents manage customer accounts more effectively by giving them a clear snapshot of overdue balances and payment history.
- Improved Decision-Making: With all relevant data presented in one place, collection agents can make informed decisions about how to approach each customer. They can prioritize customers based on overdue amounts, payment behaviour, and overall account health, leading to more strategic and effective collection efforts.
- AI-Powered Reminder Emails: One of the standout features of the workspace is its ability to generate AI-drafted email reminders. Based on customer payment history and overdue balances, Copilot can create a personalized email draft that collection agents can quickly review, edit if necessary, and send to customers. This automation drastically reduces the time spent manually composing reminder emails, allowing agents to focus on more complex or urgent cases.
- Increased Efficiency: By automating routine tasks such as generating email reminders, the Collection Coordinator Workspace increases the overall efficiency of collection agents. The ability to generate and send reminders directly from the workspace means fewer manual steps, faster follow-ups, and improved communication with customers. This results in quicker responses and higher chances of recovering overdue payments.
Here’s how Collection Coordinator operates:
Search for the Collection Coordinator in the search menu. And it gives you a form like this.
Here, from the customer accounts drop down you can look for a particular customer and it will give you the details regarding that customer’s previous orders. To view details of an outstanding, simply click on the customer’s name under the Highest balance grid and it gives you the details of the customer. The details include a profile review of the customer that describes the customers on their previous transactions, rating them based on their timely payments, balance and credit.
Moreover, you can also generate a sample email with the details given in by clicking on the Create Reminder Email under the Copilot Summary section. Copilot would create a sample email template, providing you the necessary details regarding the order.
Workflow History Summary in Dynamics 365 F&O:
The Workflow History Summary in Dynamics 365 Finance, powered by Azure OpenAI, offers an AI-generated summary of workflow history across all document types. It enhances the Workflow History page by displaying a concise overview of the most important information, such as the submitter, submission date, workflow status, approvers, due dates, and comments. This summary helps approvers by bringing recent workflow changes, such as approvals, rejections, or resubmissions, to the forefront, improving decision-making efficiency.
The AI-generated summary relies on existing workflow history data and is evaluated based on the most recent actions performed within the workflow. This feature is especially useful in speeding up review processes by presenting the key workflow information first, followed by a detailed record of recent workflow actions.
While the feature provides valuable insights, it does have certain limitations. The summary is based only on the most recent actions and may vary in language accuracy depending on user interactions or system settings. Additionally, users can’t modify the workflow data or processing; the system handles this automatically via the Azure OpenAI model.
Administrators can enable or disable the Workflow History Summary in Feature Management, allowing businesses to tailor the use of AI-generated summaries and ensure responsible deployment of this tool in alignment with their operational needs.
Here’s how Workflow History Summary operates:
The need of this history summary is to summarize the status of the workflow and provide a brief information regarding the workflow itself.
workflow history grid shows the workflows, and they can be filtered based on their status from the dropdown. The details of the workflow look like this.
The summary understands the comment written by the submitter and the copilot summarizes accordingly, adding the other details like the approvers name, the time of approval the assigned to along with the due date.
Customer Page Summary in Dynamics 365 F&O:
The Customer Page Summary in Dynamics 365 Finance, powered by Azure OpenAI, provides an AI-generated summary at the top of the customer page. This feature consolidates key customer data, including historical invoices, payments, sales orders, agreements, rebates, overdue invoices, and delayed order lines. All data comes directly from the customer’s Finance environment, offering a clear snapshot of the customer’s status and account insights.
By summarizing customer transactions, this feature helps users quickly access essential information without navigating through different modules. It enhances efficiency by offering an immediate overview of the customer’s financial health and transaction history, allowing for more informed decision-making.
The summary is generated using data from the past year, focusing on key metrics like invoices, payments, overdue balances, and delayed orders. While it offers valuable insights, it only covers yearly aggregated data and may vary in accuracy depending on language settings or user interactions.
System users cannot alter how customer transaction data is processed, as it’s automatically handled by Dynamics 365 Finance via the Azure OpenAI model. Administrators can control the availability of this feature through Feature Management, ensuring its use is aligned with organizational needs.
Here’s how Customer Page Summary operates:
The need for this Customer Page Summary is to summarize the recent transactions in which the customer has been engaged. From the customer master go into the customer details by pressing the customer and in the form, there appears a section of summary where these details are summarized.
It gives brief information regarding the customer’s invoiced sales orders, outstanding amount and other related information.
Other Similar Summaries in Dynamics 365 F&O:
Other Similar summaries include:
- vendor summaries which are just like the customers summary.
- Released products summary.
Discussing about the inventory in warehouse, sales and purchase details of the item.
This can also be viewed by hovering on the item from vendors form
- Workers employee summary.
It can be seen from Human Resources menu from the menu at left. It tells about leaves count and other related information with their respective timelines.
Microsoft Copilot within Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations enhances business productivity by streamlining workflows and simplifying tasks. Through features like the Sidecar Interface for real-time assistance, Embedded AI for data-driven decision-making, and External Agents for seamless cross-platform data management, Copilot helps users handle complex tasks more efficiently.
By automating repetitive tasks and delivering critical insights when needed, Copilot enables better decision-making and supports proactive management strategies. This allows organizations to optimize their operations and stay competitive in a constantly evolving business landscape.
Unlock the potential of Microsoft Copilot to transform your business processes and achieve lasting productivity gains.
