I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push

It really is super obvious that the winning move for most apps is to add an text interface with LLM capabilities. Like autocad - but LLM accessible.

The tech is arguably not there yet. From my own observations, normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software. And they tend to be way less interested in it in general, especially when I’m breathlessly telling them about this and that latest development.

> "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph" Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen? Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.

Having recently watched a corporate trainer spend 15 minutes trying to figure out why Copilot wasn’t correctly importing a CSV with headers when “it worked fine when I showed this 2 weeks ago” — my guess is that the tech isn’t quite there yet to sell (reliable) AI-powered Excel

> It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this. Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.

Check out Sourcetable, you might like it for your AI spreadsheet work. It's much better than Excel copilot in every aspect (financial modeling, data science, data cleaning, agent tools, etc.)

I asked o3 pro to do something like this a few months ago when I paid for a month of ChatGPT Pro. It got very excited and said it was on it and spent 20 minutes absolutely cranking. Then it spit out the world’s saddest excel file with no formatting, and half the data truncated.

Not quite the thing you're describing, but I saw this demoed recently and thought it was pretty cool: The AI function in Google Sheets[1]. Call Gemini with the context of individual cells and have it respond in the same cell. Take a look if your company is in Workspace Labs. 1. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15820999 Disclaimer: Googler, opinions my own.