(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
Here are five things in small business technology news that happened this week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?
This Week in Business Tech News
Small Business Technology News #1 — Excel’s new Agent Mode can fix your broken formulas — proving AI can be useful.
Agent Mode is a new AI-powered assistant inside Microsoft Excel (part of Microsoft 365 Copilot). Agent Mode can fix broken formulas and generate new dynamic formulas that work across your data; generate data analysis and identify anomalies; create pivot tables, charts, dashboards, and other typical Excel artifacts — all by asking with normal language. Microsoft has also integrated web search into Agent Mode for access to updated information from the web — and is available in Excel on Windows and macOS. (Source: Windows Central)
Why this is important for your small business:
Why is this so valuable? Because very few people really take advantage of all the capabilities that Excel has to offer. And if our people used Excel better they’d be more productive to us as employees. All the training in the world won’t help for some people. But if there’s a way to make the interface easier to use — giving it natural language commands through a Copilot interface, for example — then employees better leverage the powerful features of this very important financial tool. How? The next item has some ideas.
Small Business Technology News #2–11 more cool things Copilot can do in Excel.
Speaking of Excel, how about some ideas? Copilot can clean up messy spreadsheets by removing duplicates, trimming extra spaces, and highlighting missing values; it can create pivot tables from selected data automatically; generate charts and graphs. Copilot will explain how a formula works for previously created spreadsheets and generate formulas from user prompts. Copilot can scan and highlight trends that the user might have missed and summarize spreadsheets. (Source: Computerworld)
Why this is important for your small business:
The article provides visual examples for a bunch of features that appear in the Copilot sidebar (via the Copilot icon), and many action ideas. Employees can change the spreadsheet (using Agent Mode) so Copilot can write edits back into a workbook and to make it easier for users to activate specific commands.
Small Business Technology News #3 — Home Depot launches AI tool to automate contractor material lists.
Home Depot has debuted “Material List Builder AI” — an AI-driven tool that helps builders, remodelers, and contractors quickly create detailed materials lists for construction projects. The software uses domain-specific language models to understand written or voice project descriptions and produce accurate lists in minutes instead of hours. Users can create a materials list using a voice-to-text tool or paste an existing list to see inventory availability, pricing preferences, and order materials directly after creation. Indicating a wider trend in the construction industry, tools like Material List Builder AI are being launched to accelerate planning, reduce administrative burden, and protect profit margins in a sector under pressure. (Source: HousingWire)
Why this is important for your small business:
This looks like great tool and I’m betting Home Depot invested heavily to develop it. Obviously if you’re a customer — and so many small contractors and other small businesses are customers — you should take advantage. But what will be really interesting is to see how other software companies take what Home Depot is doing and incorporate it into their own mobile apps to sell to small retailers.
Small Business Technology News #4 — Gusto’s ChatGPT gambit: Payroll goes conversational.
HR platform Gusto used by 400,000+ small businesses, has launched a ChatGPT app that lets business owners interact with their payroll data using conversational language. Users connect their Gusto accounts via OAuth (meaning passwords stay with Gusto and aren’t shared with OpenAI). Business owners can ask questions or explore trends about their payroll right inside a ChatGPT chat — for example, getting summaries, cost breakdowns, and trend insights — without exporting spreadsheets or switching apps. Based on the company’s research, Gusto says many small businesses adopting AI tools have seen up to 20 percent productivity gains and improvements in revenue. Co-founder and CTO Eddie Kim said, “We’ll continue expanding capabilities so more of your Gusto workflows can happen directly in ChatGPT.” (Source: WebProNews)
Why this is important for your small business:
I’ve watched demos of this and it looks great. But in the end it’s a conversational, GenAI interface to do what payroll and HR people are doing with their keyboards. It will certainly be an easier interface for many. What will be more disruptive will be when Gusto and other innovative companies rollout agentic AI functionality that automatically does payroll, payroll reconciliations, payroll reporting and payroll compliance with little or no human involvement so our HR people can spend more time focusing on higher level issues, like coming up with good health insurance and retirement benefits.
Small Business Technology News #5 –How Americans are using AI at work, according to a new Gallup poll.
New data has been published on AI adoption rates in the US workforce. According to a Gallup workforce survey of more than 22,000 U.S. workers found roughly 12 percent of employed adults use AI daily, about 25 percent use it multiple times a week, and almost half a few times a year — a big jump from 2023 levels. By industry, the tech and finance sectors are seeing the highest AI adoption, followed by college or university professionals. The article cites specific quotes from workers who are using AI and what they use it for, e.g., a Home Depot store associate who says he uses AI to help him “better answer questions about supplies he’s not 100% sure about.” A notable group of about 6.1 million workers — especially older women in clerical jobs — may struggle with AI adoption due to fewer transferable skills and fewer financial resources. (Source: AP News)
Why this is important for your small business:
This must — and will — change. Your employees should be leaning heavily into AI chatbot/assistants this year to help them create policies, communications and review key documents. You and your employees are under-using Copilot and Gemini in your Office applications. The more you invest in training and the better you leverage these resources the more productive your employees will be. Then we will use daily usage skyrocketing.
Each week I round up five small business business technology news stories and explain why they’re important for your business. If you have any interesting stories, please post to my X account @genemarks
