For most of my career the spreadsheet has been the place where AI hype goes to die. Plenty of tools promised to "talk to your data," and almost all of them meant a separate web app you pasted a CSV into, got a chart back, and never opened again. The interesting shift over the last year is that the assistants finally moved into the spreadsheet — the same grid where the work already lives. So I spent two weeks running the same analyst tasks through three of them: Claude in Excel, Gemini in Google Sheets, and Rows AI. Same messy revenue export, same cohort question, same "build me a formula I half-understand" requests I get from teammates every week. I am not an engineer, and I deliberately tested as the non-technical person these tools are sold to. I wanted to know which one actually reduces the number of times I have to interrupt a data analyst, and — more importantly — which one I can trust without becoming the bottleneck myself.…