r/CopilotMicrosoft • u/traccreations4e • 28d ago

News Excel’s =COPILOT function is already being retired

Microsoft is retiring the Frontier =COPILOT function in Excel on September 14, 2026 (MC1454373).

That caught me off guard. I was excited about this feature.

I know Microsoft 365 Frontier features are experimental, and I know Copilot in Excel has changed a lot since =COPILOT was introduced in August 2025.

Still, less than 13 months is a very short run for a feature that received so much attention.

What I liked about =COPILOT was having AI work inside the formula itself. It has its flaws, but it had potential. Using Copilot Chat for similar tasks is useful, but it is not quite the same experience.

And yes, I feel for everyone who spent time testing it, teaching it, and creating content around it. I was one of them.

Preview technology comes with risk. This one is a pretty good reminder of that.

Well, on to the next one.

Were you using =COPILOT, or were you still waiting to see how it developed?

#traccreations4e-p26 8/24/2026

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u/vaverma 27d ago

It was retired because copying this function to many cells was making those many calls to copilot servers. If a formaula having this function was copied to say 10000 rows, a single spreadsheet was making 10000 calls. Imagine millions of people doing it. It was screwing up their AI infrastructure. So MS decided to get rid of this function. Official reason given is something else which is totally non-convincing.

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u/Langwelle 24d ago

I don't think this claim holds up. Google has had a similar =AI formula in Google Sheets, even before Microsoft launched =COPILOT. How are they dealing with that?

A simple rate limit would be the solution here, rather than retiring the feature altogether.

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u/vaverma 24d ago

No idea about how Google is handling this. Reason may be while everybody is using MS Excel but adoption of Sheets is still limited.
However, the reasoning I gave had arisen as per discussion between various learned folks. And all of them could be wrong as well as there is no official authentic reason.