AI Chat Agent in Google Sheets: Multi-Step Work in One Message

We just shipped SheetMagic v6.0.0, and it's the biggest release yet: the AI Chat Agent is now front and center. You type what you want done in your sheet, and it does the sorting, formatting, charting and scraping for you, so multi-step chores take one message instead of a dozen clicks.

Picture a sales ops lead who builds the same Monday report every week: sort customers by revenue, highlight the top 10, chart them. Say that is 15 minutes of clicking (an example figure). Over a year it adds up to 13 hours (15 minutes x 52 weeks) spent on a report nobody remembers making.

You already know the formula game. Write =AITEXT(...), drag it down 1,000 rows, and watch it generate unique content for every one. That's incredible for repeatable, bulk work. But not everything you do in a spreadsheet is repeatable. Sometimes you're exploring a dataset you've never seen before. Sometimes the task is "clean this up, highlight the outliers, and chart it", three operations, not one formula. Describing that as a formula chain is awkward. Describing it in plain English is natural.

That's what the Chat Agent is for.

Just ask

Open the sidebar, type what you want, and the agent reads your active sheet and acts on it directly. No formulas, no copy-pasting between tabs, no figuring out which function does what.

The Chat Agent works differently. Instead of a formula, you just say what you want:

"Find my top 10 customers by revenue, highlight them in green, and build a bar chart."

That's one sentence. In the old world, that's a sort, a conditional format, and a chart: three separate manual steps, or three formulas stitched together. In the Chat Agent, it's one message, and it's done in your sheet before you finish your coffee.

A few more examples of what "just ask" looks like:

"Scrape the pricing table from these 12 competitor URLs in column B and put the results in new columns."

"Reformat this sheet: sort by close date, freeze the header row, and add a pivot table summarizing revenue by rep."

"Read this data and tell me which rows look like duplicates."

Read operations, like exploring or summarizing your data, happen instantly. Actions that write to your sheet or spend scraping credits (like web scraping) ask for a quick confirmation first, so nothing changes or gets spent without your say-so.

Update (September 2026): sheet edits now apply directly, since they are free and reversible. Only scrapes that spend scraping credits still ask for confirmation.

What can you do with the time the agent saves?

The agent's output is a finished sheet, so the gain is the work you no longer do by hand. A few places that adds up:

• Recurring reports. The Monday report above becomes one saved sentence you paste each week. That is the 13 hours a year back, and the sort is the same every time instead of depending on who did it.
• Cleaning before you spend money on it. Ask "which rows look like duplicates" before you send a mail merge or load a list into an ad audience, so you do not pay to email or target the same person twice.
• Competitor pricing on demand. The 12-URL pricing scrape from the examples above writes new columns you can compare against your own prices the same day, instead of opening 12 tabs and copying tables.
• Exploring a sheet you inherited. Ask for a summary of what the columns hold and where the gaps are before you build anything on it, instead of scrolling through every tab yourself.

Formulas and the Chat Agent, together

These aren't competing tools. Formulas are your assembly line: define the pattern once, scale it across hundreds of rows. The Chat Agent is your analyst on call: describe a one-off or multi-step task, and it handles it. A typical workflow might start in the Chat Agent to explore and clean a new dataset, then switch to formulas for the repeatable processing step.

Getting started

This post is the announcement. For the working guide, with the confirmation model, the multi-step workflows, and when a formula still beats a conversation, read how to use the AI Chat Agent in Google Sheets.

Try it today

The Chat Agent is live right now on every plan. Open your sidebar, ask it something you'd normally do by hand, and see what happens. Free runs it on a one-time allowance; if you want more room, visit pricing. Paid plans start at $20/month.