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AI at work

Microsoft removed Excel's COPILOT formula on Monday. Spreadsheets using it now break.

The change landed on Monday.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by Microsoft support documentation · Edition no. 8
Photo: Coolcaesar/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 · original

Microsoft's own support page for the function says: "Starting September 14, 2026, the COPILOT function is no longer available in Microsoft Excel."

The function "previously let you provide a prompt and references from the grid to generate a response from an AI language model directly in a cell". According to the same page, it was "previously available only in the Frontier program and the Microsoft 365 Insider program".

Existing work remains as cached values, but no longer updates. When a cell containing the function recalculates, it returns a #NAME? error.

Microsoft's stated replacement is the Copilot pane, which "supports many of the same AI-powered tasks".

That difference matters if you wired the function into a model. A formula can be audited and reviewed in a versioned file. A side pane is a conversation.

If you built a spreadsheet on an AI function that was still in preview, who signed off on that dependency?

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Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
  2. 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
  3. 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.

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