Accounting technology platform provider Sage announced a new AI-based tool called CoPilot to help its clients perform payments and compliance-related tasks at its Transform conference in Las Vegas on February 28.
Sage CEO Steve Hare said the company is developing a domain-specific large language model (LLM) for accounting and compliance using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Lex technologies, and working out of the Amazon Web Services cloud environment. The Accounting and Compliance focused LLM will initially inform Sage Copilot and serve as a foundation designed to help clients navigate on-premises accounting and compliance applications. Sage CTO Aaron Harris CoPilot will be trained from the data sets customers have chosen to share with Sage. CoPilot will launch later this year.
Sage also announced a suite of construction products that includes the capabilities of Sage Intacct Construction, Sage Construction Management and the recently acquired BidMaxtrix software.
“We took Sage Intacct Construction and then went back to our roots with a construction suite around finance, field operations, preconstruction, all of that is moving to the cloud,” said Dustin Stephens, vice president of construction and real estate at Sage. He emphasized that open application program interfaces with the suite’s products would allow contractors to move their data in and out.
“We are excited that this level of real-time information extends beyond finance with Sage Construction Management. Using both solutions [Construction Management and Sage Intacct Construction] together it gives us an end-to-end cloud system that can help us be more efficient across the business, from initial lead to project completion,” said Joe Murray, managing director of contractor ACT Construction, who formerly a user of Intacct Construction.
Julie Adams, senior vice president of product and technology at Sage, said the ambition of these services is to eliminate the monthly close and annual audit through generative AI and real-time analytics.
For CoPilot, Hare said generative AI will be able to create emails and communications to chase up down payments, as well as create dashboards and reports that illustrate financial data, including cash flow analysis using sol· simple language requests. For construction clients, outstanding cost overruns due to unforeseen conditions or other delays can be identified and addressed through generated weekly reports. Intacct already uses its AI to automate tasks, but Harris said CoPilot’s generative approach could write the code to create payment request letters and other similar tasks.
“Large language models have the ability to take an input and decide what steps are needed to complete that task and then execute the task, whether it’s making an API call, writing the code to interact with the database , make some data format. so that it’s human-readable, but this graduation from using AI to do one thing really well, to doing it within a connected workflow really well, will change the way automation works to businesses,” Harris said.
Hare also announced at Transform’s user conference that Sage Earth, the company’s carbon emissions compliance tool, will be available on AWS Marketplace in late March. Sage Earth uses accounting and other data sources to calculate the carbon footprint of companies and suggests emission reduction strategies for small businesses and the value chains of large companies. Sage Earth will be available on the AWS Marketplace in the UK and Ireland in April, with plans to expand to North America and across Europe over the next 18 months.
