Claude for Excel opens the gates

Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. Developers got Claudepilled first, and now the spreadsheet crowd is next.

Anthropic just expanded Claude for Excel access — and while Code and Cowork have dominated the hype cycle, this one lands directly within the workflows of virtually every knowledge employee on the planet.

In today’s AI rundown:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

The Rundown: Anthropic just expanded access to its Claude for Excel integration, making the AI spreadsheet assistant available to Pro-tier customers after a three-month beta period that was limited to Max and Enterprise plans.

The small print:

Why it matters: 2026 has been the 12 months of getting ‘Claudepilled’ — with Code, Cowork, and now a broader Claude for Excel release taking place the road of taking over major knowledge work. Identical to coding is becoming completely automated, the times of needing to know complex formulas and shortcuts are also coming to an end.

The Rundown: Today’s buyers use AI day-after-day to reply their questions, and haven’t any patience for a scavenger hunt in your website. Concierge is a custom Perplexity-style answer engine, trained on your organization’s brand & content, that delivers accurate, personalized responses to any questions your website visitors have.

Modern B2B brands use Concierge to:

Use Concierge to show every query into a possibility.

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature during which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and each day lives.

Rowan, CEO & Founder: I spend way an excessive amount of time watching screens, so I attempt to devour my content by listening while I’m out walking (often podcasts).

Currently, I’ve been digging into more long-form stuff from X articles and old blogs, and ElevenLabs’ free app, ElevenReader, turns any wall of text right into a mini audiobook using AI-generated voices. It’s super easy, but genuinely really useful.

Rishi, Head of Growth: Claude Cowork has been an enormous assist in creating growth forecasts for our paid media channels. I just plug in our metrics, tell it what goal I’m trying to realize, and it’s capable of create an Excel sheet for me with exactly what I want. This protects me a bunch of time because I can create multiple scenarios just by chatting with Cowork.

Shubham, Editor: My sister asked me to envision if my niece’s name appeared within the preliminary school enrollment results. However the list uploaded online was a PDF with 50+ page photographs. Going through all of it will have been a headache — so I put Manus to work. I provided a link to the outcomes, and Manus searched through all of it, checking each document page by page.

After about quarter-hour, it found her name and all of the relevant details. This saved me from having to manually search through pages of results across multiple categories.

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the best way to programmatically generate ads and marketing videos with code — enabling you to conceptualize, template, and generate dozens of videos in minutes.

Step-by-step:

Pro tip: Add royalty-free mp3s to your project and tell Codex to incorporate them via Remotion, with music and sound effects baked into your video scripts for faster reuse.

The Rundown: IBM’s latest report reveals five predictions that can help to shape the long run of business. By 2030, success will hinge on speed, daring bets, and AI-first design. Learn the way leaders can hard-code transformation into every process and prepare for quantum disruption.

Read the Enterprise 2030 Report.

The Rundown: Gallup published its ‘AI within the Workplace’ report for Q4 2025, showing that workplace AI adoption is beginning to plateau, with nearly half of American staff saying they never touch AI tools, at the same time as frequent users are deepening their habits.

The small print:

Why it matters: AI’s mainstream arrival has completely reshaped certain areas of the workforce, however the gains aren’t being evenly spread. This gap is simply going to proceed to expand. But those that DO adopt AI in sectors currently behind the curve are going to sprint ahead and create more intense competition than ever before.

QUICK HITS

KREA introduced Realtime Edit, a brand new feature allowing users to edit images via text prompts and make granular changes in real-time.

Cursor rolled out version 2.4, introducing subagents that break coding tasks into workstreams for faster execution, alongside image generation and custom agent skills.

Epoch AI announced that OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro set a brand new record on its hardest FrontierMath benchmark at 31%, nearly doubling the previous high.

Japanese lab Sakana AI secured a strategic partnership and investment from Google, with plans to deploy AI solutions in Japan’s regulated industries using Google’s models.

CEO Sam Altman revealed that OpenAI will likely be releasing latest Codex launches this week, saying its models will soon reach the very best cybersecurity capability level.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Justo I. in Spain:

“I take advantage of Comet (Perplexity’s AI-powered browser) to automate the workflow in our sports company by reviewing support emails requesting rating changes, extracting key player details, after which logging into our admin panel to search out the player by email and update their rating accordingly.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

See you soon,