Microsoft released Agent Mode in Excel. This isn’t CoPilot - this is AutoPilot.
Given a prompt, the Agent begins reasoning over how to perform the task and then goes off and does it. It checks its work and self-corrects when it finds mistakes.
A lot of people have been having it build DCF models with varying degrees of success. I did this myself with a fairly detailed prompt for an industrial development model, and it worked decently well for a very basic model. It took about 45 minutes to run. You can view and download that model here: Industrial Development Model by Agent Mode.
The problem with having Agent Mode build a model from scratch is you don’t know exactly how it works, or if it works, unless you go through it in detail and check its work. In that case, you might as well build the model yourself.
A practical use for Agent Mode is having it audit and fix existing Excel models. Too often in my career I’ve been asked to review carried interest models rife with errors. I get it though - carried interest models are complex and difficult to model cleanly.
I wanted to see if Agent Mode could find and fix common carried interest model mistakes.
Let’s see how it did…
I took an existing working model and added two glaring mistakes.
The first mistake was changing the daily accrual rate from (1 + Hurdle) ^ (1 / 365) - 1 to (1 + Hurdle / 365) - 1
You can tell it’s broken because the IRR checks in the First Tier should equal the First Tier Hurdle (assuming there is enough cash flow).
The second mistake was hardcoding the First Tier day counts and then changing the dates.
Here was my prompt. I had to emphasize not to use hard-coded values - in an initial test it got the work right but it didn’t use formulas and the model stopped being dynamic.
Here’s Agent Mode in action! Spoiler: it successfully identifies and fixes the errors.
Want to try it yourself? Follow the instructions below. You will need a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription or an Enterprise subscription that allows you to opt-in to Frontier features.
Open a new Excel workbook on the web at https://excel.new
Click the dropdown next to the CoPilot button and turn on Frontier features.
Open CoPilot, click the controls button, and turn on Agent Mode.
Happy prompting and building!
-Professor Scott
P.S. Let me know what you build and how it goes.