{"id":10551,"date":"2019-10-17T15:55:58","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T22:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10551"},"modified":"2023-06-15T14:47:55","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T21:47:55","slug":"using-ai-and-chatbots-to-simplify-finance-tools-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/using-ai-and-chatbots-to-simplify-finance-tools-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Using AI and chatbots to simplify finance tools at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
<\/div>\n

This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Microsoft has designed an AI driven modern Chatbot for our finance department\u2019s Procure-to-Pay service.<\/p>\n

At Microsoft, many of our core business processes (such as procurement and payment) were built around a system-centric approach. Each of these apps was in its own silo, often disconnected from each other. Without a unifying, overarching strategy, each of these apps evolved independently without considering user experience in what we call the Procure to Pay process.<\/p>\n

These complex and unwieldly apps required significant resources to maintain. The employee experience suffered because there wasn\u2019t a single end-to-end process for Procure to Pay. Employees had to work within several apps\u2014each with its own interface\u2014to complete a task. That forced users to learn to navigate and complete manual steps between certain apps, making the process even more cumbersome. This in turn slowed completion of every Procure to Pay instance, making the feature expensive to maintain.<\/p>\n

Ongoing efforts by Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) to move toward a user-centric approach gave the Microsoft Finance Engineering team within CSEO an opportunity to rethink the Procure to Pay process by designing an AI-first, services-oriented architecture for it. The Procure to Pay process would focus on the end-to-end user experience and would replace the system-centric view of services.<\/p>\n

Strategic approach<\/h2>\n

A connected user experience is what our employees are looking for. Our goal with bots is to simplify the user experience and provide important information with fewer clicks. It\u2019s a challenge to create a truly conversational and interactive bot that\u2019s able to seamlessly shift from one context to another and perform actions based on searching and on data. We started with a few fundamental goals and objectives:<\/p>\n