Introduction to Vena Copilot

For those of you not familiar with the Vena Solutions software, you may well ask ‘what is Vena ?’ and ‘why is Microsoft Copilot such a significant part of it?’ In a nutshell, Vena is a complete FP&A platform which lives within the Microsoft ecosystem.

That’s significant because what makes it really different is its use of Agentic AI. This is AI that doesn’t just respond to requests, but actually takes action. It automates workflows and gives Finance Teams the agility to be able to focus on things like strategy. And because of its’ integration with Microsoft, it’s all built within an Excel environment which of course is another significant factor for Finance Teams. Here's the highlights:

• What is Agentic AI ?
• Vena Copilot Agentic AI
• Types of AI Agents Used by Vena Copilot
• How Might You Use Vena Copilot ?
• Conclusion
  
  

What is Agentic AI ?

We’re all used to reading and hearing about AI generally and many of you will be using AI in their day-to-day work. We’re also used to the term Generative AI, where we use our AI of choice to create content for example. Now, Agentic AI is a term that we’re hearing more and more about, so it’s useful to have an understanding of the difference between Generative and Agentic AI.

So, if as touched-on above, Generative AI can be viewed as producing content – things such as summarising reports. However, it relies on a human prompting it to take actions to (for example) create a report. Agentic AI on the other hand acts autonomously and drives analysis, forecasting, and reporting on its own. Quite simply, Generative AI ‘creates’ whereas Agentic AI ‘delivers’. 

Vena Copilot Agentic AI

Digging a little bit deeper into using Copilot within Vena, you can think of this as being a virtual FP&A partner. It’s literally like having somebody in the room with you who is an FP&A guru. It works directly inside of Vena and within Microsoft Teams and is now using well over 1000 natural language prompts that can be used to trigger your sophisticated financial tasks instantly – from automating reports to advanced analysis. Therefore, Copilot really brings that financial expertise to everyone, not just the Finance Team.

As mentioned earlier, Copilot is natively embedded within Microsoft Teams, where many of us are already working. That facility means that all stakeholders can obtain instant insights during your meetings, whether or not that’s using chats or in planning sessions. You ask a question, and Copilot can respond with data, visualisations or forecasts right inside the conservation and environment within which you are currently working . 

Types of AI Agents Used by Vena Copilot

Vena Copilot currently uses two separate AI Agents. Used together, they deliver accelerated reporting for your management team. There are also many more agents currently in development which will be released for general use soon. For now, here’s a brief overview of the current agents:

Analytics Agent

The Analytics Agent itself helps you surface what really matters. It’s really about instantly highlighting the most relevant insights from your financial and operational data. This will allow you to focus on what is driving performance; whether or not you are simulating a scenario, or responding to potential macroeconomic shifts,  it will help you accomplish this in seconds. You are able to spot trends, identify variances, and build strategic what-if models on the fly, which is a huge time-save.

Reporting Agent

The Reporting Agent unlocks data in new ways, so anyone within the business can generate reports. You can drill-down using the full capabilities of the Vena software - and the agent will do this on its own - meaning fewer ad-hoc requests for FP&A, and thanks to Excel Live, teams can collaborate on reports in real-time, directly with Microsoft Teams. 

How Might You Use Vena Copilot ?

For me, the real benefits of Vena Copilot come from the fact that you’ve now got an ‘FP&A Manager’ on your shoulder. You can ask it questions, which for example could be ‘which product was the most profitable in Q4 of last year, and which campaign influenced that the most’? You ask that question in plain English (plain English business sense in that respect) and the Agent goes across multiple data sources, which could potentially be ledgers, CRM, and maybe marketing automations, to deliver your answer, all in real-time. 

Most importantly, the answer to the question might not be where I actually finish up, or where I expect to finish up, because typically, once I’ve started to interrogate my data, the first answer might lead to another question. Without AI, I typically might ask the question of somebody within finance and I may need to log that question because they may not be available to help me straight away. When I do actually get hold of them and sit down with them and ask my question, I may already have the answer or an evolution of it, but actually, we then get into the realms of I’ve asked the question and know what it was that I asked, but it’s not what I meant. So, my requirements have moved on as well. Vena Copilot will enable you to easily navigate that situation. 

For example, as a CRO, what you might want to do is to ask that question and be able to have that information immediately available to you and then say, right I want a report because I’ve now got a Board meeting in a couple of minutes.

Conclusion

The reality is that Copilot Agentic AI is now in use with over 100 Vena customers, and the exciting thing is that these agentic prompts are growing. Having started off with 200, which quickly expanded by another 500 quite recently, they are now well into the thousands and still growing. 

For comparison, if for example you have used Google Gemini or ChatGPT to attempt similar queries, what you’ll find is that first-off you ask your chosen AI a question – then the answer you receive may not be particularly relevant for you. What you then do is to go through a number of processes to help that AI evolve by asking additional questions which may eventually get you somewhere near to answering your question.

These prompts on the other hand, are prompts built all around the finance function and your own FP&A solution. So, rather than using ChatGPT which goes out and retrieves all the information that it can find in a structured way, what it cannot understand, is your FP&A environment, and that is where Vena Copilot really scores. It understands your data because it is built on that.

So in summary, Agentic AI within Vena does the heavy lifting. It automates routine tasks, and surfaces real-time insights. It’s embedded in your workflows, making your entire organisation more agile, more collaborative and better informed.