Microsoft launches Copilot for its ERP solutions

Microsoft has introduced new capabilities to its Dynamics 365 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. The latest capabilities will enhance back-office work across domains like project management, finance, and supply chain. The artificial intelligence-based assistance would now be available across platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

ERP systems are instrumental in providing centralised data from core functions like finance, human resource, procurement, and supply chains, for better business insights. A lot of the processes within ERP are complex and rigid. With the introduction of copilot capabilities, Microsoft claims that managers and procurement professionals will be freed from manual data entry and other repetitive tasks, and derive faster insights.

The Copilot is being introduced mainly in three platforms – Dynamics 365 Project Operations for productivity and delivery of projects; Dynamics 365 Finance for quick access to credit and payment history; Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for managing purchase orders and optimising sourcing decisions. 

To be sure, Microsoft, in March, announced the Dynamics 365 Copilot, natively built into both customer relationship management (CRM) and ERP applications. It offers AI-powered assistance in sales, marketing, and supply chain, among other functions. 

Copilot is an AI assistant, built on top of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to offer users an ease to perform several tasks like search, content generation, and coding. At present, Copilot has been included in several other Microsoft products like Windows, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft BI. The company also launched Security copilot, an AI assistant for security professionals.

Tracing back, it started with an AI-pair programmer called Copilot, developed jointly by Microsoft, OpenAI, and GitHub in 2021, to help programmers to code faster and more efficiently. The company has recently introduced GPT-4 based capabilities for chat and voice support, branding it as Copilot X.