Excel AI: how to use artificial intelligence in Excel — Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude in 2026

What AI in Excel is and what changed in 2026

Artificial intelligence in Excel is an assistant to which you describe a task in words, and it carries it out in the spreadsheet. Instead of searching online for how to combine XLOOKUP with SUMIFS, you write: “calculate sales by region and month, then show the three regions with the biggest drop”. The assistant suggests formulas, a PivotTable (a summary that groups and totals the data by itself) or a chart.

The most important change this year is agent mode (Agent Mode). According to the Microsoft Excel blog from January 2026, this mode is generally available in Excel for Windows as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The agent does not just make suggestions but edits the workbook itself: it adds formulas, new sheets and charts, and then checks whether the result is correct. The second change: Excel is no longer closed to other providers, as OpenAI has released ChatGPT for Excel and Anthropic has released Claude for Excel, both as add-ins installed in the spreadsheet.

The third change is less talked about, but important for anyone who had come to like it. The =COPILOT() function, typed directly into a cell, had been tested in the preview programme since August 2025. Microsoft Support states that from 14 September 2026 the function is no longer available: old results remain in the cells, but after recalculation a #NAME? error appears. If someone in your company built a report on it, it needs to be rewritten. It is a good lesson: you do not base permanent processes on functions in a test version.

Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude in Excel? Comparing three options

In practice, a company today chooses one of three routes. They differ not so much in “intelligence” as in where the data goes, how the licence is bought and who in the company will manage it. You will find a broader comparison of the assistants themselves, including outside Excel, in our round-up ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot for business, and the whole topic, from strategy to tools, is laid out in our guide to AI for business. Here we stick to spreadsheets.

Who Excel AI is for and where it works well

Those who gain the most are people who do the same thing every week: copy data from several files, clean it up and add it up, then paste it into a presentation. AI does not invent a new analysis for them. It shortens the path to the first draft.

A few typical situations in a mid-sized company.

• Marketing: combining campaign results from several channels into one table with the cost per customer acquired and a comment on what has changed.
• PR: a list of articles from media monitoring, grouped by topic and sentiment, ready for the monthly report.
• Sales: a CRM pipeline exported to Excel and the question of which stages stall the longest and for which sales reps.
• Finance and controlling: comparing budget with actuals, explaining the variances in words, a first draft of the commentary for the board.
• HR: an employee survey in which open-ended answers need to be sorted into categories.

How to add Copilot to Excel, step by step

The question “how do I add Copilot to Excel” comes up often, because the Copilot button does not appear for everyone automatically; the order below saves both the IT team and users a lot of frustration.

1. STEP 01Check the licence

   Copilot in Excel requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence assigned to the account. From 15 April 2026, Microsoft switched off the free Copilot Chat in Word, Excel and PowerPoint in organisations with more than 2,000 seats; in smaller companies basic access remains, but the full features, including agent mode, are in the paid licence.

2. STEP 02Save the file in the cloud

   According to Microsoft Support, Copilot in Excel works on files saved in OneDrive or SharePoint, so a file from a local drive or an email attachment has to be moved there first.

3. STEP 03Organise the data as a table

   Select the range and use the Format as Table command. One header row, no merged cells, no subtotals in the middle of the data – this is the simplest way to stop AI from losing rows.

4. STEP 04Open the Copilot pane and write in Polish

   Polish is on the list of languages supported by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Be specific: what to calculate, what to group by, what result you want to see and where to put it.

5. STEP 05Compare the result with the manual one

   For the first reports, calculate in parallel the old way, and change the process permanently only once the results have matched for several weeks.

What AI in Excel does well, and where it gets things wrong

According to Microsoft’s documentation, Copilot in Excel suggests formula columns, surfaces insights in charts and PivotTables and highlights interesting data. Agent mode goes further and builds entire sheets. In day-to-day work, the tasks that work best are those whose result is easy to verify: a formula you can see, a table you can recalculate, a chart from data you know.

It is weaker where AI has to guess the context. The model does not know that in your company “revenue” is calculated without end-of-season discounts, or that an “active customer” is someone who has made a purchase in the last 90 days. If you do not spell it out, you will get a result that is technically correct but wrong for the business. It is the same mechanism that lies behind AI hallucinations: the model answers confidently even when it is wrong.

How much AI in Excel costs and what drives the budget

The licence is only part of the cost. The table shows the situation as of 24 September 2026, based on the Microsoft Poland price list (net prices, annual payment) and the OpenAI and Anthropic websites.

Copilot in Excel and Power BI for controllers

A controller has two tools: Excel for models and quick analyses, and Power BI (Microsoft's tool for reports and management dashboards) for regular reporting. Copilot works in both, but for different things. In Excel it helps build a variance model, check a predecessor's formulas and write a first draft of the commentary; in Power BI it describes a report in words and answers a question put to an existing data model.

A sensible split: in Excel you work on an analysis that is still changing; once the report has stabilised, you move it to Power BI and let Copilot describe it there. You can read about other areas where AI helps the finance team in the article AI in company finance. If reports are to go to the board as a standing decision dashboard, see also the approach of Commplace® AI analytics.

Excel AI agents and automation: where the spreadsheet ends

Agent mode in Excel is a first step towards what, more broadly, is called an AI agent, i.e. a program that plans and carries out several steps of a task on its own. In a spreadsheet this means, for example: pull the data from three tabs, check for gaps, build a summary, add a chart and describe the conclusions.

The boundary is simple. If a task starts and ends in one file, Excel is enough. If data has to be pulled every week from the CRM, the ad platform and accounting, and the result sent to three people, the spreadsheet is no longer enough. You then need automation outside Excel; we show how to build it using the example of automation with AI and n8n.

An Excel AI course or learning on the job? When to get training

The search terms “Excel AI course” and “Excel ChatGPT course” are popular because many people try on their own and get stuck after a few days. The reason rarely lies in the tool. What is most often missing are two skills: preparing data and writing precise prompts. The rules for writing prompts are the same everywhere, so you may find it useful to use our set of marketing prompts.

A good course works on files similar to yours, not on perfect demo data, and ends with one report that the participant actually puts into use at work. We give tips on how to tell good training from a feature demo in the guide AI training for companies, and if you want proof of your skills, take a look at the overview of AI courses with a certificate.

When to roll out AI in Excel, and when to wait

The best moment is a quiet month before the quarter-end close or before planning next year's budget, because there is time to run calculations in parallel and compare the results. The worst is the week of the year-end close. Nobody has time then to check what the machine has done.

Signs that the time is right: the same reports put together every week, reasonably tidy data, files already in the Microsoft 365 cloud. Signs that it is better to wait: data scattered across personal drives, no single definition of the basic metrics, nobody who will be responsible for the quality of the results. In that case start with tidying up the data and with marketing planning with clear KPIs. You can add AI later.

If you are thinking about Copilot more broadly than just in Excel, we have described licences and the implementation process in the guide Copilot for business.

Data security: what you can paste into AI in Excel

In the Copilot documentation Microsoft states that Copilot only surfaces the organisation data that the user has at least view permission for, and that prompts and responses are not used to train models. That is good news and a warning at the same time: if the payroll spreadsheet in SharePoint is open to the whole company, Copilot will “see” it for everyone too. Review permissions before rollout.

The same documentation (as of August 2026) states that data of EU users stays within the EU Data Boundary, except for Anthropic models used as a subprocessor. For companies in regulated industries, this is a topic to discuss with the legal team. With the ChatGPT and Claude add-ins, the rules depend on the plan. An employee's personal account is no place for client data.

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