- AI Business Insights
- Posts
- Excel is quietly becoming a different tool
Excel is quietly becoming a different tool
Most people haven't noticed yet
The first time I watched a spreadsheet clean itself up I almost spilled my coffee
Ten sheets. Broken formulas. Random duplicates. Zero structure. The kind of file that usually eats half a workday before you even start the actual analysis.
I came across a breakdown this week from someone who got handed one of those dumpster-fire workbooks by a founder friend. Normally that's two to three hours of cleanup before the real work begins. This time they fired up AI inside Excel and watched the chaos organize itself in front of them.
Formulas built instantly. Trends surfaced in seconds. Full reports generated without touching a single pivot table. That's the moment something clicked for them, and for me reading it: Excel isn't a tool anymore. It's becoming an assistant.
The shift nobody is talking about
Here's the line that hit hardest. You don't really need to know Excel anymore. You need to know how to prompt AI for Excel. That's a different skill, and the gap between people who get it and people who don't is widening every week.
Most folks are still asking, which formula should I use. The other half has already moved to, build me this entire report. Same software. Wildly different output.
In partnership with
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
Three flavors of AI in Excel, side by side
Not all "AI in Excel" works the same way. There are actually three flavors, each with its own personality. Here's how they line up.
Microsoft Copilot
Lives natively inside Excel, no copy-paste
Generates formulas like XLOOKUP, IF, nested logic on demand
Surfaces trends and insights without being asked
Cleans messy data fast
Runs multi-step workflows end to end
ChatGPT for Excel
Strong on financial modeling and what-if scenarios
Explains every formula step by step (great if you're learning)
Handles large, complex workbooks without choking
Connects out to external data sources
Acts more like a tutor than an autopilot
Claude in Excel
Reads the entire workbook structure, not just one sheet
Holds deep context across multiple files at once
Tracks changes transparently as you go
Saves reusable workflows you can run again later
Best when your work spans many files and many sessions
10x the context. Half the time.
Speak your prompts into ChatGPT or Claude and get detailed, paste-ready input that actually gives you useful output. Wispr Flow captures what you'd cut when typing. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
*Ad
Pick the tool to match the job
Once you see the three side by side, the decision gets simple.
Pick Copilot if you live inside Microsoft 365 and want the lowest-friction setup. Native means native. No tab-switching, no context juggling, no copy-paste tax.
Pick ChatGPT if your work leans on financial modeling, scenario planning, or you want a tutor that explains the why behind every formula.
Pick Claude if your workflows span multiple files, need long context, or you want repeatable processes that survive past one session.
There's no universal winner. The winner is the person who knows which tool to reach for and when.
Why the cleanup story matters
If you're still manually cleaning data, writing formulas from scratch, or rebuilding the same report every Monday, the gap between you and the AI-leveraged crowd is widening.
This is one of the easiest leverage upgrades you can make. You're not learning a new platform. You're not migrating data. You're just changing how you talk to a tool you already use every day.
Prompts to try this week
If you want to feel the shift yourself, drop one of these into whichever AI lives inside your Excel.
Clean this sheet. Remove duplicates, fix broken formulas, flag inconsistent date formats.
Build a summary report from this workbook. Trends, top 5 outliers, one-paragraph executive summary.
Rewrite this XLOOKUP into a more readable formula and explain what each argument does.
Run a what-if scenario. What happens to gross margin if COGS rises 12% next quarter?
Compare these two sheets and tell me what changed, row by row.
Each one of those used to be a 30-minute task. Now they're a 30-second prompt.
My honest take
The old skill was Excel mastery. The new skill is prompt fluency on top of Excel. That doesn't mean formulas are dead. It means they're now the output, not the input.
Spreadsheets aren't going anywhere. The way we use them is changing fast. Catching up now is cheap. Catching up in twelve months won't be.
Pick a tool. Run one of those prompts. See what happens.
Payroll errors cost more than you think
While many businesses are solving problems at lightspeed, their payroll systems seem to stay stuck in the past. Deel's free Payroll Toolkit shows you what's actually changing in payroll this year, which problems hit first, and how to fix them before they cost you. Because new compliance rules, AI automation, and multi-country remote teams are all colliding at once.
Check out the free Deel Payroll Toolkit today and get a step-by-step roadmap to modernize operations, reduce manual work, and build a payroll strategy that scales with confidence.
*Ad