How PwC and AI combined to help Microsoft transform its finance function

As companies grow, it’s only reasonable to expect support groups like finance to grow with them. If you make more money, it takes more people to keep track of all the accounts receivables, payables, taxes, and so on, the thinking goes.

For Microsoft, which has seen revenue growth of some 300% in the last decade, that has not proven to be the case. The reason is the company is using technology, especially generative AI (GenAI), to improve productivity, says Cory Hrncirik, senior director of Frontier Finance Transformation at Microsoft. “We lean on technology to streamline the way people work,” he says.

Leaning on AI to make better decisions

Microsoft is a prime example of how technology, including AI, can be used to free up employee time to focus on efforts that create value for the organization as a whole, or what PwC calls insights.

“It’s a shift from reactive to proactive,” says Jim Berres, a PwC principal focused on financial solutions. Rather than simply reporting on what happened in the last month or quarter, “finance is there to help the business make better decisions.”

AI-assisted Frontier Finance

As detailed in a recent webinar, PwC worked alongside the Microsoft finance organization to employ AI to achieve its “Frontier Finance” vision, which involves leveraging advanced technology to transform the culture, capabilities, and impact of finance.

PwC envisions AI agents involved in nearly every process within finance and other departments at one of three basic levels:

• Human-led, with some AI enablement for day-to-day tasks
• Agent-assisted
• Agent-driven

Processes that fall into the human-led category require human insights, intelligence, and decision-making, Berres says. Shared services or those currently outsourced are likely good candidates to be agent-driven or assisted.

“A big part of establishing this new operating model is finding which processes you’re looking at changing … and redefining them with AI at the center,” he says. From PwC’s experience with clients, that’s the model that delivers the most dramatic results.

Mapping an AI strategy at Microsoft Finance

Microsoft’s finance team came up with no fewer than 130 ideas for using GenAI to automate processes, Hrncirik says. The team boiled those down to the top 12, built business cases for each, and presented them to the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood.

She shortlisted six, including the eventual first target, a deal document inspector. The application uses GenAI to perform various functions, such as reviewing document contracts, comparing them to other Microsoft contracts, checking them against company policies, and translating them if necessary. PwC helped the company build the application in just 3 months using Microsoft Foundry Tools as well as the PwC AI Factory.

The AI Factory is a PwC concept intended to drive down development costs over time, says Diego Jarne Munoz, principal for data and AI with PWC. It’s built to enable composable, self-service development such that business stakeholders can create their own AI applications, he says.

That is a great fit with the growth culture that Microsoft encourages among all its employees.

“We have finance people leaning in to be the change agents now, to rearchitect processes, to find bottlenecks and blockers, to find ways to tackle those changes,” Hrncirik says. “We are enabling all of our people to build agents, become fluent in AI, and share best practices. It’s a super-important cultural shift.”

Take a deeper dive into how PwC helped Microsoft employ GenAI to reshape its finance groups—and how you can do the same. View the webinar, “Transforming finance functions into future-ready powerhouses with the power of AI.”