Claude in Excel Is the Quiet Revolution

Anthropic shipped Claude for Excel this week. Not a flashy announcement—just a quiet addition that lets you invoke Claude directly in spreadsheet cells.

This is more strategically interesting than it looks.

The chatbot interface has a fundamental limitation: it’s a separate destination. Users have to leave their workflow, context-switch to a chat window, explain what they need, then copy the result back. Every step adds friction.

Claude in Excel inverts this. The AI comes to where you’re already working. Building a financial model? Ask Claude to explain an assumption in the cell next to it. Cleaning data? Natural language transformation without leaving the sheet. The workflow doesn’t break because there’s no switch.

Apple is doing something similar by integrating Gemini into Siri rather than building a separate AI app. The pattern is clear: AI capabilities are becoming infrastructure, not products.

The implications for enterprise AI adoption are significant. Most failed AI rollouts die from adoption problems, not capability problems. People don’t use the new tool because it’s one more thing to remember. Embedding AI into existing workflows removes that barrier entirely.

This is what I mean by “integration over capability.” The companies winning the AI era won’t necessarily have the smartest models. They’ll have the smartest distribution.