Cooking Up AI Agents in Spreadsheets with Sarah DeAtley, on Mr. Maeda's Cozy AI Kitchen

In this episode, host John Maeda welcomes Sarah DeAtley, Senior Director of Data and Design at Microsoft, to share a powerful new tool that blends AI agents directly into spreadsheets—no coding required! Sarah walks us through how this tool simplifies working with text data, enables natural language prompts, and lets users build custom agents for everything from meal planning to data analysis. Whether you're a data scientist, designer, or product manager, this episode shows how AI can supercharge your productivity. Chapters: 00:02 - Welcome to the Cozy AI Kitchen 00:20 - Meet Chef Sarah DeAtley 00:43 - Sarah’s journey through data, design, and product 01:30 - Why spreadsheets struggle with text data 02:07 - Connecting GPT-4.1 to the spreadsheet tool 02:54 - Exploring the AI-powered spreadsheet interface 03:48 - Demo: Meal planning with agents 05:19 - Customizing agents with natural language 06:01 - Vacation planning with AI agents 07:21 - Work scenario: Cleaning and analyzing survey data 08:50 - Creating a communications agent for exec summaries 10:34 - Why every data worker needs this tool 10:55 - Sarah’s career advice for aspiring AI professionals 11:34 - Wrap-up and what’s next in the Cozy AI Kitchen What You'll Learn - How to embed and use AI agents directly in spreadsheets - Why GPT-4.1 works best with this tool - How to clean and analyze messy survey data with agents - Ways to use natural language to generate vacation plans - How to automate executive summaries from data - Career advice for aspiring AI and product leaders 🎙 Speakers Sarah DeAtley – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahdeatley/ John Maeda https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmaeda/ https://x.com/johnmaeda 🔗 Links & Resources CalcLM on Foundry Labs: https://aka.ms/CAIK-Spreadsheets CalcLM: https://aka.ms/CalcLM 🍽 All Cozy AI Kitchen episodes: https://aka.ms/CAIK-YTPlaylist 🔔 Subscribe for more episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MicrosoftDeveloper 🏷 Hashtags #AIAgents #GPT4 #MicrosoftDevelo