Microsoft is using Excel as a gateway drug to AI

We all interact with artificial intelligence every day: It builds our Google searches, our Facebook feeds, and predicts the next word we'll type. But many of us use Excel. In an attempt to make it easier to work with machine learning on a daily basis, which Microsoft has repeatedly claimed will improve our lives rather than kill jobs, the company is adding a slew of machine learning tools to its Excel spreadsheet software, according to TechCrunch. Spreadsheet jockeys will be able to import machine learning models to analyze data within Excel, and the program will automatically recognize items such as company names and locations, and pull in additional data. The models could predict future sales numbers given different scenarios, or stand in for any number of software-as-a-service analytics tools that have become popular in sales and marketing.