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November 15, 2023
As a trusted provider of financial and tax services, the EY Global Tax team processes, manages, and protects huge volumes of data so they can gain insights to help thousands of clients around the world thrive in a rapidly changing and unpredictable business environment. To focus those efforts even more precisely, while addressing security, the EY Global Tax team previewed Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and developed a plugin to evaluate the ability to extend the capabilities of Copilot to fit the Tax organization’s specific, internal needs. The EY Global Tax team built a proof of concept of the plugin on a developer tenant provided by Microsoft. The goal is to use Copilot to add an AI-powered productivity layer to Microsoft 365 apps. This productivity layer will allow authorized users to query specified data sources in their natural language to generate a single, unified view of all relevant information—and all within security and compliance guidelines. Once the plugin for Copilot is fully deployed, the EY Global Tax team expects to spend less time hunting for information and more time using the latest, most relevant data to drive smarter business decisions for itself and its clients.
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In late 2022, the EY Global Tax team learned about the soon-to-come Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Copilot provides an AI-powered productivity layer that users access from within Microsoft Teams. They can run a natural language query across multiple internal data sources across the enterprise to create a single, unified view of results. Copilot can summarize data, generate first drafts of reports, and unlock the full potential of data to accelerate the path to new insights. It not only reduces manual search time, but also harnesses a powerful language model to provide information in a more usable context.
“The first time I heard about Copilot was a year ago when Microsoft announced it to all their clients, and my mind was blown away with the power that it can bring and the changes that it's going to make in our tax organization,” says Coskun Cavusoglu, EY Americas Financial Services Tax AI Go-to-Market Leader.
The EY Global Tax team collaborated with Microsoft to build a proof of concept for a plugin that is used to directly ask questions through Copilot to expedite analyses and report creation. The plugin—tested on a developer tenant provided by Microsoft—redefines the report creation experience for EY Global Tax senior executives. Instead of using Power BI and waiting for data to be populated, they can ask questions directly through Copilot to get the information immediately. The proof of concept demonstrated the ability to seamlessly extend Copilot using Microsoft Graph connectors and EY proprietary sample data to bridge connections and insights across various business disciplines, using the security technologies built in to the Microsoft platform.
EY executives can now have the power of real-time business insights, through simple, natural-language queries in Copilot. “Having access to all that data through Copilot and Teams is now just a matter of seconds for them to be able to just go in, open up Teams, and as they're chatting with maybe a senior executive, they're actually chatting with Copilot, which knows our language, speaks our way, has our DNA embedded in it, and it's basically directly coming back at them with answers that they're looking for,” says Cavusoglu.
