Why LLMs Never Worked with Excel (Until Now)
For four decades, Excel has ruled business data. Since 1985, it's been the backbone of everything from marketing budgets to billion-dollar M&A deals. Despite countless "Excel killers," its billion users continue to rely on spreadsheets for one simple reason: nothing else works as well.
Excel isn't going anywhere. Smart enterprises know it's not legacy tech – it's future-proof infrastructure that adapts to any business need.
Why LLMs Break Down with Excel
Try feeding an Excel file directly to any LLM without specialized tooling. The results? A mess.
Stanford AI Lab found a 73% error rate when raw LLMs process financial tables. That's not a typo – three out of four attempts fail.
Why? LLMs understand language, not spreadsheet logic. Feed an Excel file directly to any language model, and you're asking a poet to solve calculus. The LLM sees numbers but misses formulas, relationships, and business context.
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are building internal tooling to fix this. But here's the catch: these solutions require massive R&D investment and will only be available through their cloud platforms. Great for them, not so great for your compliance team.
The Compliance Wall
For enterprises, this isn't just inconvenient – it's impossible. Banks can't legally send sensitive data to OpenAI. Healthcare organizations face HIPAA restrictions. With 137 countries demanding local data processing, the gap between AI capability and enterprise reality keeps growing.
The companies with the most valuable Excel data are precisely those prohibited from using cloud AI.
Finally, AI Built for Excel Users
This is where Planck AI changes everything. We've built the same sophisticated parsing and tooling technology that powers ChatGPT and Claude's Excel capabilities – but designed to work with your files on your private infrastructure.
We don't train AI models. Our magic is in the parsing – the same type of advanced data processing pipelines that enable ChatGPT to understand spreadsheets, but running entirely on your hardware with proven open-source LLMs like LLaMA and DeepSeek.
Keep working in Excel exactly as you do today. When you need AI insights, simply upload your files to our private platform and ask questions:
"Why did marketing spend exceed budget by 20%?"
"Which product lines are driving the revenue variance?"
"Show me the root cause of this inventory discrepancy."
Your Excel files stay yours. Your workflow stays the same. You just gain the AI insights you've been waiting for.
Zero training on your data. Zero cloud uploads. Zero compliance nightmares. Just intelligent answers to your Excel questions, running entirely on your hardware.
Simple, Secure, Instant
Upload any Excel file – complex multi-tab models, pivot tables, intricate formulas. Our parsing technology understands it all while preserving your formulas, relationships, and business context.
Installation takes minutes. No GPU requirements. No cloud dependencies. No DevOps overhead.
The Market Wants This
Investment firms want AI for portfolio analysis without cloud exposure. Legal teams need document review while maintaining confidentiality. Retailers want to streamline Excel workflows without privacy concerns.
Every regulated industry shares the same problem: valuable data trapped in Excel formats that cloud AI can't safely touch.
Excel's Future is Private AI
Excel has been your trusted ally for decades, adapting without forcing you to change how you work. Planck AI follows the same philosophy – we meet you where you are.
Just as Excel empowered you to organize data your way, Planck AI empowers you to bring intelligence to that same data. Upload, ask, get answers. Your workflows remain intact.
The age of private, secure Excel AI is here. And it's happening through a simple interface that respects the spreadsheets you've built and the data you trust.
References
[1] Stanford AI Lab. "LLM Performance on Structured Financial Data Tasks." 2024 [2] Boston Consulting Group. "Global Asset Management Report 2024." [3] DLA Piper. "Data Protection Laws of the World." 2024.
About Us
Planck AI is an enterprise intelligence platform that turns data, documents, and systems into a single conversational and execution layer — built on open-source models, designed for control and data sovereignty.
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