Spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are used worldwide to organize and analyze data, but getting the right information into them isn’t always straightforward.
Businesses often need engineers to write code that pulls information from cloud systems and databases, then clean and process it before it’s ready for Excel.
AI spreadsheet company Sourcetable is trying to simplify that process with what it calls Superagents: AI tools that connect to different systems across the internet, fetch relevant data, and make it ready for analysis. Technically, Superagents manage a collection of AI agents that link to databases and cloud services like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Stripe.
Once connected, Sourcetable’s agents can answer questions directly, such as analyzing customer spending data from Stripe or website traffic from Google Analytics. They can insert raw or processed data into a Sourcetable spreadsheet, which users can work with just like Excel. To do this, the system can run Python number-crunching libraries on a virtual machine, avoiding the math errors that generative AI often produces.
“There’s a full Python ecosystem under the hood,” says Sourcetable cofounder and CEO Eoin McMillan. “Basically every data science library you could possibly want or ask for is just embedded in the product, just rolled in for free.”
McMillan says the idea came from his experience at startups, where accessing and analyzing data was always a heavy lift.
“The conclusion that I came to was that everybody was trying to patch a broken ecosystem for data, and the reason for this was because Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets were not built correctly for the modern information environment,” he says.
Despite its advanced features, Sourcetable still looks like a traditional spreadsheet and supports hundreds of familiar formula functions. It can import and export Excel files, too. Earlier this year, the company launched an “autopilot mode” that lets users ask the AI to answer questions, generate graphs, or build visualizations. McMillan says this helps spreadsheet users who’ve struggled with more complex features, like those pesky pivot table operations and VLOOKUP, or vertical lookup, functions.
“Most people in the world use spreadsheets, but they don’t know how to use VLOOKUP or pivots, and having a spreadsheet that can combine data, and summarize data, and analyze data for them is a huge unlock in terms of this new capability they have,” he says.
For power users, the built-in Python libraries can replace hours of manual spreadsheet work or external coding, producing results in seconds. While the product is most popular with operations and analysis teams, McMillan says it’s also used for everything from scientific research to fantasy football, where Sourcetable even built specialized tools.
In a demo for Fast Company, McMillan showed how Sourcetable could pull data from the web, downloading and processing a sitemap file listing each of the Sourcetable website’s individual pages, then visiting each page and cataloging page titles and descriptions in a spreadsheet. While the platform includes prebuilt connectors for popular cloud services and databases, the AI can also fetch data from other systems using standard API documentation.
Generally, connections to outside services cost $100 each per month, though one per organization is included with Sourcetable’s $20-per-user-per-month “Pro” plan and five per organization with a $200-per-user-per-month “Max” plan. A promotion celebrating the launch of Superagents makes connectors added the week of September 8 free forever.
Currently, users can edit the SQL code Sourcetable generates but can only view—not rewrite—the Python scripts. McMillan says that will likely change in the future. For now, if Python doesn’t produce the desired results, users must re-prompt the AI.
The AI also asks permission before overwriting spreadsheet contents. It can, in some cases, push data back to cloud systems, but McMillan stresses that’s still a beta feature. In the future, Sourcetable will likely allow outside systems—including other AI agents—to connect proactively as well.
Sourcetable, which has raised $5.5 million in funding, isn’t the only company trying to use AI to modernize the spreadsheet (Excel and Google Sheets each offer their own AI features). But McMillan says Sourcetable has an advantage in being created with AI and integration with online data in mind, rather than having such features added on well into the product’s life.
However, he says, the AI chat interface alone is unlikely to replace the tabular spreadsheet format that people have been using for thousands of years.
“The reason why Sourcetable is powerful,” McMillan says, “is because you have this Excel-like spreadsheet interface, which is the data tool that everyone knows how to use.”