From Manual Month-End to AI-Powered Finance: Building Self-Service Analytics in Fabric

Finance teams work with the most sensitive data in any organization, yet they're often stuck in manual, spreadsheet-driven processes.

The challenge isn't just technology adoption—it's about navigating steep learning curves, maintaining governance and control, overcoming IT dependencies, and translating complex finance logic that lives in people's heads or Excel files into scalable, secure solutions. Without a clear strategy, attempting to modernize these manual processes risks creating more technical debt rather than solving the underlying problems.

Microsoft Fabric and Copilot offer a path forward—low/no-code tools that finance teams can own and operate, with AI assistance to accelerate development while maintaining full control. Recent innovations like Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers enable AI agents to help not just design but to actually build and maintain a solution through natural language, dramatically reducing implementation time while preserving governance and quality standards.

In this session, we'll build a complete month-end reporting solution from scratch, demonstrating how finance teams can transform manual processes into AI-powered, self-service analytics.

You'll see how to securely connect to ERP systems and spreadsheets, use AI-assisted notebooks and Copilot to consolidate and transform transactional data, implement medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold layers) with appropriate security at each stage, enrich data models with the metadata and business context that makes AI effective, and integrate Copilot and Data Agents for natural language financial insights and commentary.

By the end, you'll understand the practical steps to move from manual spreadsheets to a governed, AI-ready finance function—with a clear implementation path that finance teams can execute without having to become data engineers.

- Implement medallion architecture with financial-grade security: row-level security, column masking, and audit logging across bronze/silver/gold layers. - Use Agents and MCP servers to accelerate lakehouse deployment, DAX measure development and notebook creation through natural language while maintaining code quality as well as adherence to corporate/industry standards and best practices. - Integrate Fabric Data Agents (which can be surfaced to MS Teams via Copilot Studio) for conversational financial analysis grounded in actual corporate data/logic (thereby reducing the risk of hallucination!)