Microsoft and Google Bring AI Agents to Spreadsheets to Drive Enterprise Adoption

Skills, budgets and system integration are often barriers to enterprise adoption of generative AI, while financial planning and analysis (FP&A) remains heavily reliant on spreadsheets. A January 2025 survey by the Association for Financial Professionals found that 96% of teams still used Excel for planning. By embedding AI directly into familiar work interfaces, Microsoft and Google could lower deployment barriers and accelerate model building, forecasting and analysis.

Microsoft launched Excel Agent Mode in late 2025, enabling users to plan, execute and verify multistep tasks within a workbook while automatically creating tables, formulas and charts. Google, meanwhile, allows Gemini in Sheets to create or edit an entire spreadsheet using natural-language instructions. Google said on March 10, 2026, that the tool achieved a 70.48% success rate on the full SpreadsheetBench test set. The competition was reported on March 18.