Insight announcements
Why the Biggest Copilot Revolution
is About to Excel
By Stan Lequin / 16 Dec 2024
Image created by generative AI in Shutterstock.
With each day, AI evolves.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is among the most visible signs, having advanced significantly as an AI-powered assistant — with nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies having rolled it out already. And there was no bigger spotlight of its growing capabilities than at the recent annual Microsoft Ignite conference, with several new features announced.
However, only one prompted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to use the word “revolutionize” in his keynote. It was a powerful new tool released into public preview a month before Ignite began: Copilot leveraging Python in Microsoft Excel.
Python Takes Copilot in Excel to the Next Level
“Revolutionize” is an eye-catching word that might be prone to hyperbole. Yet Python, which is used by 51% of developers worldwide as one of the most popular programming languages available, has the potential to be a game-changer when combined with Copilot’s AI advantage, especially in the world of finance. With Python’s predictive forecasting, what would take hours to analyze can be done in seconds. For example, evaluating years of your company’s sales data.
Now, by adding Copilot to the equation, you can:
- Ask it a question, such as, “Which region sold the most in the fourth quarter?”
- Extrapolate your sales projections based on historic trends.
- Rank your customers based on upsell opportunities.
Using the same sales data, you only need to click on “Advanced analysis” in Excel. Specify the type of analysis you would like to perform on the financial data, and it provides relevant suggestions, such as assessing sales performance by segment and country. Then visualize it by asking Copilot to present it in a graph. You can also ask it specific questions, using natural language, instead of parsing through the data yourself, such as, “Which market had the most sales in 2024?”
Before, if you were using Copilot in Excel, you could have asked it to “Create a pivot table for me,” or “Create a formula that compares XYZ.” But you would have to know the functions in Excel and tell it the insights to expect, and you would have had to find the information you needed on your own.
Through the integration of Copilot and Python, Excel now gleans insights for you, deriving the formulas and functions on its own. Just ask it to show you the sales for whatever you need — as long as it’s in the data, it will tell you.
A Glimpse into the Future, Care of Copilot
Recent Copilot improvements to Excel aren’t just limited to Python. They also include:
- The ability to add filters and split text
- Support for complex formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF
- A formula look-up in your spreadsheet (instead of searching online)
- Analysis of textual data (like product reviews) that Copilot can transform into actionable insights
Altogether, Excel has undeniably been made much more user-friendly, where Copilot and Python make for a dynamic duo doing the lion’s share of soul-sucking work that only a real Excel geek could love.
On its own, Python in Excel is more useful than ever even without Copilot. It can be as simple as opening a new workbook, selecting “Formulas,” and clicking to “Insert Python.” That opens the door for you to process data using Python code regardless your level of programming chops. However, with Copilot adding AI to the equation in natural language, enabling the aforementioned advanced analysis becomes even more universal to any Excel user, potentially taking decision-making in your organization to a new level.
Imagine what someone in finance analyzing commonalities in fraud cases can get done, leveraging AI in Excel. Or an efficiency team, trying to modernize a call center and drive down call volume by addressing customers’ most common reasons for calls. Or even how a junior supply chain team member can drastically improve their forecasting models, analyzing inventory data. Copilot’s advanced capabilities help empower teammates to do more, freeing up senior leadership to do more too in the process.
Considering the sheer degree to which we rely on spreadsheets today, the term “revolutionize” starts to feel pretty accurate given Excel’s many table-stakes uses, from maintaining customer records, bookkeeping, and financial analysis to forecasting sales trends and business performance. Copilot and Python make the tool more purposeful to more people across your business, even the most casual users.
But for greater depth, it will even break down its work and how it derives its answer. It’s completely transparent in that way — you can see the code and run checks on it. And the data visualizations you ask for, whether you’re looking for a scattergram or bar graph or something slightly more exotic, such as a heatmap or violin plot, are written in Python. You can take and integrate that code elsewhere, such as Microsoft Fabric or Databricks, as a viable Data Platform as a Service alternative.
That’s one more thing that we’ll likely see more of thanks to Copilot: integration with pretty much everything.
Much of the hype at Ignite focused on the introduction of out-of-the-box and mostly autonomous AI agents. Their potential boon to productivity is impressive. However, I’ve heard some say Copilot will become an operating system on its own in the future, albeit there’s a long way to go there. But simply considering how widely used Excel already is — as many as 1.5 billion people across the world use Excel — the practicality of Copilot in this context may be the bigger gamechanger.
Turning Excel into more of a natural language thanks to generative AI opens the door to even wider spread uses. Those who take advantage will become the drivers of revolution; By drastically improving the tools we most regularly use, AI is indeed set to completely transform how effectively we can work.
Stan Lequin
President, Insight Solutions
Stan leads Insight’s team of 5,000 deep technical experts — engineers, architects and software developers — who create and deliver integrated solutions dedicated to helping organizations accelerate their digital journey. His team solves clients' greatest pain points spanning the modern workplace, modern infrastructure, modern applications, data and artificial intelligence, the intelligent edge and cybersecurity. Insight Solutions cover consulting and managed services designed to help clients first visualize and strategize how they will innovate — including the organizational change management side of digital transformation — then fully execute and manage a fully digital business over time.
