We’ve Had Two Massive Excel AI Launches This Week But ZERO Useful Prompts—I Built 18 That Save 100’s of Hours

Source: Nate’s Newsletter Date: 2025-10-02 URL: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/weve-had-two-massive-excel-ai-launches

Summary

The concurrent launches of Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Microsoft CoPilot for Excel introduced transformative capabilities — including the first ability to edit existing Excel sheets with AI — without practical guidance on how to use them. Nate fills the gap with 18 deliverable-focused prompts (board decks, financial models, variance analysis) that demonstrate completing 3-4 day analysis tasks in ~5 minutes.

Implications

Enterprise adoption thread. Excel is the most widely deployed enterprise software in the world, and AI that can edit existing sheets (not just create new ones) changes the adoption calculus significantly. Financial analysts and controllers are now in scope for AI-driven automation in ways they weren’t before.

Agent-product positioning thread. Vendors shipping major capability launches without practical prompts reveals the marketing-to-practitioner gap Nate consistently exploits: companies optimize for announcement coverage, not user activation. That gap is his product.

Watch: Whether AI-in-Excel adoption follows the “AI slop” pattern (rapid adoption, quality problems surface within months) or whether structured, deliverable-focused prompts like these produce genuinely durable workflows that stick in enterprise finance teams.