2026_04_12_Episode Excel..: Hey everybody, ⁓ quick thing before we start, this is the AI Cookbook. To my knowledge, it's the only bilingual podcast about AI. We do it in English in the AI Cookbook and in German it's called Das KI-Korpor. So if you have friends and colleagues or anybody who prefers another language, send them over. Same show, same stories and most of the time relatively same bitching about people who don't use AI. This podcast is also produced by Verkota AI, that is our AI consulting firm. We work with companies from manufacturing to pharma, I don't know, family owned Mittelstand to global enterprises. A big percentage of our business is in the DAH region. So we try to bring you stories of what we see in terms of AI adoption in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, et cetera, but also abroad because we also work with international companies. What you hear on the show is what we actually learn in the field, what we see every day with customers, real problems. And most of the time when we bring stories about latest developments in AI, we try to correlate it with problems that we see with companies. So, yeah, so let's deep dive into the episode. So today you will not believe what I'm really, really excited about. I'm really excited about Excel. Okay, I'm leaving this podcast right away. Wait, hear me out. I'm going to make the thesis that Excel, co-piloting Excel is one of the most powerful AI adoption tools that you can give your employees. Now, I know Excel. It's the thing you've been using for 20 years. You don't complain. Actually, most companies run on Excel. And funnily enough, for the last three or four weeks, I've been doing a trick in every single workshop, every single workshop. Tomorrow, I'm going to go to a private bank and I'm going to do the same in front of the CEO, the head of IT, the head of HR. And I'm telling you, they're all going to fall off their chair because it's always happening in the last couple of weeks. So here's the trick. So I go into the room, I'm here for training or strategy engagement or explaining what adoption metrics that they can use. And in this case, it was by a manufacturing firm, there were about 50 people. And you know, the average age is like always 55. And I can feel that energy, that energy is like, oh, here's another consultant who's going to tell us how to use AI and this guy with his funny hair. Normally I come with a coffee or something, like bit ⁓ as though I'm preparing something. I'm going to put sugar and milk, et cetera. And before I start, I really just put down the coffee and I open Excel. And that's what I do. Like some real financial report from the company. I normally pull their financial data. You can get from the reports that they do, the quarterly reports, et cetera. And then I open Copilot and I open Agent Modus. And this is what I say, hey, I'm in front of a room of really important people. I need to finish making my coffee first. So in the meantime, make me five or six tabs. In the first tab, five to ten different diagrams. In the second tab, all the insights from the spreadsheet. In the next tab, a 90-day plan. In the next tab, show me the, I don't know, biggest errors in this business. and based on the data that you have, color-coded red and orange, and add me a Read Me tab explaining where every single error is. And I press Enter. And I go and make my coffee. So, while I'm going to walk and make my coffee, anyway they look at me like I'm an absolute chicken, you can see, especially in Windows, it's fantastic, you can see how It like glivers and shimmers, etc. and you can see how ⁓ happens, nothing happens, ⁓ then at once like, ⁓ six, seven diagrams appear. And then the next tab comes and a 90 day plan, lots of different columns, explanations, don't know, stars. ⁓ wild. It's ⁓ wild. ⁓ it's wild because in that time, I have time to drink a coffee or to start drinking my coffee. And I let it run and it's uncomfortable for anybody watching this. Why is it uncomfortable? Because A, they have people doing that. But I'm sorry, they don't have people doing the entire analysis that they see in front of them in Excel. They don't have that. They don't go to that type of depth. And what's really brutal is it's a tool that they all have. Every single person in the company in one way or another uses Excel. And most of the time, it's silence, absolute silence in the room, because this did not work one month ago. And if they know that Agent Modus in Excel worked, they never thought of parallelizing things, of doing multiple things at the same time. And they never thought of generating insights, a 90-day plan. all the next steps that they would normally do outside of Excel. For me, the Trojan horse of AI adoption lies in Excel. So yeah, little people, ⁓ episode 116 of the AI Cookbook. So yeah, action, let's go. Trojan horse Trojan horse of adoption. Okay, multiple reasons. Let's take three, know, consultants always speak in three because our brain is very small so we can remember three things. zero behavior change. Like even if you give people Co-Pilot or chat GPT or cloud, it doesn't matter. They are working in certain platforms in Word, in Excel, in PowerPoint. It doesn't really matter. ⁓ now I need to go outside and go to an AI and how do I get my information in there, et cetera. Now there is zero behavior change and there's zero behavior change not for two people. There's zero behavior change for 750 million people. Because currently 750 million people use Excel. Your CFO lives in Excel, your sales team reports everything in Excel, and it doesn't matter if you're in production R &D controlling sales marketing, you use Excel. And Co-Pilot shows up right there. Boom, the ribbon, no new app, no new login. The smallest possible behavior change. Now, the second reason is what's the reason why people come and pull out their laptops? you know, I've really done now hundreds of workshops, AI workshops, AI adoption workshops, C-level workshops, it doesn't matter. Usually people nod. Sometimes, you know, they'll take out their phone and, you know, take a picture. But with Co-Pilot in Excel, last month since I started doing that trick, every time you have a few people who pull out their laptop in that moment because they see the easiness of doing it. Hey, I was in a call with a banker, somebody working at the bank a few days ago, where I was showing that also. And at the end of this entire demonstration, that lady said, hey, I just did it also. I'm flabbergasted. In that moment. Like she didn't wait until the end of the call. She did it in that moment. So this is a way for them to right away try it. and they can't go back to work in the same way. Because they now have to think out of the box, ⁓ my god, I did not know that I have all these capabilities in Excel. And for those way it doesn't work, like maybe you're listening to this podcast and you're trying this right away, you say, ⁓ it doesn't work what this guy is doing is you need to switch to agent modus. Now, agent modus is you need to press on the button, And you need to, there's a drop down which might, I don't know, the problem is I can only tell you in German because my Excel is in German, right? But in Excel in German, you have a ⁓ button which is kind of saying like edit with Excel. Sometimes it's still written, you know, agent modus depends a bit on the version that you're using. But funnily enough, one thing that does not pop up at all when people use Excel as a co-pilot in Excel is the data security dinosaur. You know that data security question when you teach people how to use Co-Pilot properly or don't know, chat GPT or cloud, it doesn't really matter. ⁓ what about my data security or somehow the data security dinosaur does not exist in Excel. Yes, normally the question comes like, can I trust the data? An AI can basically not even do one plus one. How can it do all this analysis? Well, one of the things that will comfort you is it uses Python scripts. But why don't they ask about the data security dinosaur? It's because it's their environment. It feels safe. It is safe GDPR compliant. The data stays in their tenant. It's not used for training. But they know the same when you show them copilot. But somehow these questions don't pop up with Excel. Now, I know that not many AI evangelists are making this case. Gartner isn't saying this, Forrester isn't saying this. Why? Because consultants make a lot of money on complexity. Like, ⁓ you have a use case that's super difficult, we're going to work on it for half a year. Yes, consultants love this. We make a lot of money on these super difficult use cases. recommending an enterprise architecture for AI. My god. I mean, that's a half a year project, if you want. But what I'm seeing in the field every week in the last month, Banks in Vienna, manufacturers in Falbeck, food producers in Switzerland, Pharma companies in Switzerland. They all somehow did not know that since last month, co-piloting Excel has become a weapon. So, let's be a bit honest about the competition because I'm not only a Microsoft fanboy. ⁓ Anybody listening to this who's a bit clever is going to say, yeah, but cloud for Excel works better. So, for those who don't know, Anthropic, company that makes cloud has rolled out a plugin that you can download and you can also use the same way you use Copilot, you use cloud in Excel. Now, they are direct test by AI tool briefing. that found that for example when they took a DCF calculation like a financial model and they planted errors on purpose, Claude found three out of the three errors and Copilot only found one out of the three errors and I think Gemini didn't find any, right? But we don't need to talk about Gemini today. So, now I disagree and we tested this, we tested this for our customer. We had chat GPT open, we had Claude open in Excel. and we had copilot. And it was quite a long file, like 150,000 lines or something like this. Now, Claude will start running and reading, reading, reading, and then its brain, short-term memory, the context is going to be full, and then it's going to start compacting. So it's kind of reading a book, the middle of the book, it forgot everything and it restarts thinking. And somehow it gets in a feedback loop where it just doesn't stop. But copilot in Excel does it. It runs through the 150,000 lines. It was absolutely wild. So 100 billion percent, it was the winner on large datasets. Now, Chars GPT for Excel, it's really good. I mean, we don't need to discuss this. It's really, really good. But it's the same problem. It's an external layer You know, try to go to your head of IT and say, ⁓ I've seen a demo video how Claude in Excel and Chad GPT in Excel works. I mean, he's going to look at you like you're the biggest chicken, not me. So again, it doesn't really matter if this one is a bit better than the other one, but the beauty is that in Co-Pilot now, Claude and Chad GPT are integrated. Satya Nadella made a bet on both of them. And by the way, I think we will do the next episode on co-work. This is not going to be a Microsoft podcast but very rarely am I impressed with what Microsoft is doing. And Agent Modus in Excel really brings the best of both. Now, your opportunity is the following. Out of the 450 million M365 users, only 3 % have a copilot license. Out of these 3%, only 7 % use Excel daily. mean, copilot in Excel. Which means copilot in Excel the last two years was an absolute disaster. People tried it and they gave up and they're not gonna go back to it. But Microsoft is like cloud now. They're shipping features like, I don't know, every two, three days. Nobody can keep up. That's why somehow you're hearing about cloud in Excel and chat GPT in Excel. but not often co-pilot in Excel because somehow with co-pilot the narrative is still stuck in the past. Okay, so what are you going to do Monday morning or tomorrow morning when you go back to the office? First of all, open Excel and check if you have the button. You know that ribbon, that copilot ribbon. And if you don't have it, it's because you don't have an M365 license. So go back to your head of IT and say, hey, I need an M365 license because I want to blow your socks off and I want to show you stuff on Excel. And by the way, it's possible that you might have had a license, but you know, in the big consulting firms, People who don't use their copilot license for 28 days, they just revoke your license. So go and talk to IT. The second thing that you're going to do is don't forget to switch to agent mode. Switch on editing, right? Because if you switch on editing, allow editing, that's agent mode. That is where the entire magic happens that we were speaking about. The third step is probably don't start with your best spreadsheet. Start with a ugliest spreadsheet. You know that calculation excel that you have since 10 years that has 10 tabs that nobody ever wanted to touch because you know it kind of works? Throw it into copilot and say hey, this is a spreadsheet we've had for 10 years. Find the broken links. Check for discrepancies. Show me it sells that are wrongly referenced. That thing will work for 20 minutes, even half an hour. And you will be shocked because every time I have like a head of engineering or sales director they always find five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten problems in a spreadsheet that they're using for their cost calculation. Isn't this crazy? I mean, they're doing cost calculations with spreadsheets that are essentially broken. And we know most companies actually run on Excel. And I claim that most companies run on Excel, which are not good, which are not good calculations, which are not maintained very well, where we are not able to get out insights. For me, the fourth step is really the third, see. The fourth step is really go big. Don't go small. Don't ask for one formula. Don't ask for one pivot table. Ask for 10 charts, a 90-day plan, the insights, color code everything, et cetera. Make me a read me tab at the end where you explain everything that you did. Because for me, agent modus is not handholding. It plans. executes it, show you what you did. You can undo steps. You can create real Excel objects, real pivot tables, real charts, formulas, etc. It's fantastic. Try the formatting trick, by the way. Take any messy table or just a table when you open it and then say, hey, no joke, make this beautifully sexy. Top 10 % in green, bottom 10 % in red, add percentages, bars, etc. And in two minutes, even just this, will make your data look really incredible. And alone, this changes the way that people engage with numbers. So coming back to our Trojan Horse of Adoption, what happens in these workshops since a month is during the coffee break, people don't come up and talk about AI strategy. I mean, you get called in to talk about, I don't know, how to segregate data, how to prepare data for LLMs, different data formats, but they come and they ask about Excel. Hey, show me that Excel thing again. And for me, that is real adoption. It's not a strategy deck, it's not a one prompt, it's not a prompt library. And that moment, that Trojan horse of adoption of AI, it's already on your desktop. Teach it to your five friends. Teach them to switch the dropdown from chat only to allow editing. And then go and get your coffee. I'm Malcolm Wechota. This is the AI Cookbook Show, live from Bregenz. Actually we have a brand new studio set up, you don't see it but around me are lots of diffusers and absorbers and a new mic set up. Thank you to my wonderful friend Che B for having set up everything, who himself owns a I mean a music studio, new console and everything. I hope the sound is better, I hope it's gonna be more consistent from now on. And yeah, most wonderful greetings from Austria. Take care, all the best.