Gemini is included with Workspace, metered in Sheets, and absent from Business Starter entirely. Business Plus costs $8 more per user than Standard and has exactly the same 100-a-month allowance.
The code is the easy part. Google gives each custom function thirty seconds to return, so filling one down a thousand rows fires a thousand simultaneous calls and fills the column with errors.
Auditing a workbook is read-only, which makes it the safest use of AI in Excel. Map structure first, then hunt the four hazards that fail silently: hardcoded values, dead links, hidden sheets and stale ranges.
A column called Amount usually includes refunds as negatives. AI assumes it means revenue received, produces arithmetically perfect output describing something else, and nothing flags the difference.
A cleanup applied to five thousand rows in one pass is also a mistake applied to five thousand rows in one pass. Which cleanups you can undo, which destroy the original, and the workflow that keeps everything recoverable.
Generating the formula is the easy part. A range that starts one row too low produces a plausible wrong number that nobody notices for a quarter. Here is how to ask well, and the four-minute check that catches it.
Microsoft’s documentation states the Excel COPILOT function stops being available on 14 September 2026, and the web rollout was cancelled. If you built anything on it, this is a deadline rather than a heads-up.
Most people who pay for Copilot in Excel cannot use it on the first attempt, and it is rarely a licensing fault. Microsoft documents several conditions that must be true first, and none appear on the purchase page.
Most lists describe what AI can do. Small businesses pay for a specific finished job inside their own systems, with someone accountable when it breaks. Here is what sells, and what the human still has to do.
Most guides answer which tool. The question that decides whether an automation survives is which task. Here is how to score candidates, what to start with, and what to leave alone.