In any organisation, the Finance team is naturally driven by data and analytics but they have often been slow to adopt new technologies because of risk/governance (working with the most sensitive data in the firm!), challenges with climbing the steep learning curve, over reliance on IT teams, and the complexities of applying finance logic which most commonly exists in people’s heads or in spreadsheets!

The self service nature of Microsoft Fabric (which includes Power BI) and Copilot studio makes it accessible to business users, but it needs to be deployed as part of an overall data/AI strategy in order to address all the concerns and avoid building additional technical debt

In this session Rishi and Leon will show:

- Low/no code approaches to connecting to finance data (e.g ERP systems amd spreadsheets) in a secure and performant manner
- Consolidating, cleaning, and re-shaping transactional data using Fabric Copilot and notebooks
- Using pre-defined data schemas to ensure data is represented in a consistent format for analytics
- Securely sharing data and reports at different stages of the data pipeline (raw, cleaned, conformed) to ensure a single version of the truth
- Building AI solutions on top of the data models (e.g AI skills linked into Copilot/agents)

The end result of this will be a month end board pack in Power BI which stakeholders can self serve on through visual interactions and Power BI copilot, which is supported by a set of connected artifacts in Fabric that can be maintained by the finance team.

Attendees will learn techniques to ensure that their data is clean, accessible (by both Gen AI and humans!), enriched with metadata such as descriptions/ relationships and with appropriate business context embedded into logic. These are all essential elements to ensure that companies can take advantage of the Gen AI revolution in the finance sector and beyond!