Good morning, {{ first_name | 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 in the workflows of virtually every knowledge worker on the planet.
In today’s AI rundown:
Anthropic expands Claude for Excel access
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Create ads and marketing videos in minutes with Remotion
Gallup: Half of U.S. workers never use AI on the job
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ANTHROPIC
Image source: Anthropic
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 details:
Claude for Excel initially launched in October in research preview, bringing the assistant directly into a text sidebar of Microsoft’s spreadsheet platform.
Users can now pull in several spreadsheets at once and work longer without hitting session limits thanks to behind-the-scenes memory management.
The update also adds safeguards to preserve existing cell contents, so Claude won't accidentally overwrite data while making edits.
Why it matters: 2026 has been the year of getting ‘Claudepilled’ — with Code, Cowork, and now a broader Claude for Excel release going down the line of taking on major knowledge work. Just like coding is becoming completely automated, the days of needing to know complex formulas and shortcuts are also coming to an end.
TOGETHER WITH CONCIERGE
The Rundown: Today’s buyers use AI every day to answer their questions, and have no patience for a scavenger hunt on your website. Concierge is a custom Perplexity-style answer engine, trained on your company’s brand & content, that delivers accurate, personalized responses to any questions your website visitors have.
Modern B2B brands use Concierge to:
Handle any buyer question (no matter how technical) with advanced RAG on your content, media, and documentation.
Control and visibility over every conversation, with guardrails and sentiment analysis.
Build trust with website visitors before they are willing to commit to a demo.
Use Concierge to turn every question into an opportunity.
THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.
Rowan, CEO & Founder: I spend way too much time staring at screens, so I try to consume my content by listening while I’m out walking (usually podcasts).
Lately, 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 into a mini audiobook using AI-generated voices. It’s super simple, but genuinely really useful.
Rishi, Head of Growth: Claude Cowork has been a huge help in creating growth forecasts for our paid media channels. I just plug in our metrics, tell it what goal I'm trying to achieve, and it's able to create an Excel sheet for me with exactly what I need. This saves me a bunch of time because I can create multiple scenarios just by chatting with Cowork.
Shubham, Editor: My sister asked me to check if my niece's name appeared in the preliminary school enrollment results. But the list uploaded online was a PDF with 50+ page photographs. Going through all of it would have been a headache — so I put Manus to work. I provided a link to the results, and Manus searched through all of it, checking each document page by page.
After about 15 minutes, it found her name and all the relevant details. This saved me from having to manually search through pages of results across multiple categories.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to programmatically generate ads and marketing videos with code — enabling you to conceptualize, template, and generate dozens of videos in minutes.
Step-by-step:
Open NotebookLM, add pictures of your website/product as sources. Tell it to "Interview me about my brand to generate 5 concepts for promotional videos”
Tell NotebookLM to write a PRD for creating each concept using Remotion
Create a Remotion project by running
npx create-video@latest, install dependencies, start the editor withnpm installandnpm run dev, then initialize Git and place the PRD markdown in the project root for contextPrompt Codex to read PRD, generate components, and create the video; preview it at
http://localhost:3000/and export via the rocket icon
Pro tip: Add royalty-free mp3s to your project and tell Codex to include them via Remotion, with music and sound effects baked into your video scripts for faster reuse.
PRESENTED BY IBM
The Rundown: IBM’s latest report reveals five predictions that will help to shape the future of business. By 2030, success will hinge on speed, bold bets, and AI-first design. Learn how leaders can hard-code transformation into every process and prepare for quantum disruption.
Big bets win: speed beats perfection.
Tailored AI portfolios: build unique advantage.
Quantum readiness: next seismic shift is coming.
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Gallup
The Rundown: Gallup published its ‘AI in the Workplace’ report for Q4 2025, showing that workplace AI adoption is starting to plateau, with nearly half of American workers saying they never touch AI tools, even as frequent users are deepening their habits.
The details:
Tech workers lead adoption with 60% using AI frequently, though growth has begun to stall after surging between 2024 and 2025.
Finance, education, and professional services follow tech, while retail and manufacturing trail significantly in workplace AI use.
Remote-capable roles are pulling away with 66% adoption and 40% frequent use, compared to just 32% and 17% for jobs that require physical presence.
Leaders are using AI far more than their teams (69% vs. 40% for individuals), with Gallup citing "lack of clear utility" as the main barrier for non-adopters.
Why it matters: AI’s mainstream arrival has completely reshaped certain areas of the workforce, but the gains aren’t being evenly spread. This gap is only going to continue to expand. But those who DO adopt AI in sectors currently behind the curve are going to sprint ahead and create more intense competition than ever before.
QUICK HITS
⚙️ Tasklet — AI agent that connects to any app or API, triggers automatically 24x7, and uses a computer to get work done*
📊 Claude in Excel - Use Claude to create and edit spreadsheets
🗣️ Qwen3 TTS - Alibaba’s family of open-source, SOTA text-to-speech models
🧠 Slackbot - Slack’s personal AI agent for work
*Sponsored Listing
KREA introduced Realtime Edit, a 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 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 be releasing new Codex launches this week, saying its models will soon reach the highest 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 use 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, and then logging into our admin panel to find the player by email and update their rating accordingly."
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: Inside the Thinking Machines meltdown
Read our last Tech newsletter: Amazon’s second axe is falling
Read our last Robotics newsletter: A crawling, detachable robotic hand
Today’s AI tool guide: Create ads and marketing videos with Remotion
RSVP to next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
