Grok is now inside Excel and Google Sheets, for free

On July 24, @grok posted that the assistant now runs inside Google Workspace: "Install one add-on for Sheets, Slides, and Docs." Four days earlier, @muskonomy reported that "Grok is now live inside Microsoft Excel," a Microsoft 365 add-in free to add from the Microsoft Marketplace, with matching versions shipped for Word and PowerPoint.

So inside of a week, one lab planted its model in both office suites that small businesses actually run on. Not a chatbot in another browser tab. A panel that opens beside the file you already had open.

The detail worth noticing

Most of the coverage focused on the Copilot rivalry. The more interesting line in @muskonomy's post is about scope: Grok reads only the cell ranges you pick, and it points back to the cells its answers came from.

That sounds small. It is the whole ballgame for anyone who has to trust the output. An assistant that says "revenue is down 11% in Q2, and here are the six cells I used" can be checked in about ten seconds. One that just says "revenue is down 11%" cannot be checked at all, so a careful person rebuilds the number by hand and saves nothing. Grounding an answer in a specific source, then showing the source, is the difference between a demo and a tool someone will still be using in November.

Then the price fell

Six days after the Workspace announcement, @sama posted "major price cuts today": GPT-5.6 Luna down 80% to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, and Terra down 20% to $2 and $12. Luna had shipped roughly three weeks before that.

Two companies, two announcements, one message. Getting a capable model to answer a question is becoming a utility. It shows up in the software you already pay for, and the metered version costs a fraction of what it cost a month ago. Nobody is going to win a customer by having the AI anymore.

My honest read

The distribution move is real and it will change how a lot of office work gets done. It also has a ceiling that is easy to miss when you watch the demo video.

A sidebar assistant waits to be asked. It lives in one file at a time. It does not know that your quotes sit in a spreadsheet, your leads land in an inbox, your jobs live in a scheduling app, and your invoices are in QuickBooks, and that the actual expensive problem is moving information between those four things without anyone retyping it. Grok in Sheets makes the person who opens the spreadsheet faster. It does not decide the spreadsheet should have been filled in automatically two days ago.

There is a governance question too, and it is worth ten minutes before you tell your whole team to install anything. These add-ons can connect to Drive and email for extra context. Two things to settle first:

• What the connector can reach, and whether any of it is client data you have promised to protect
• Who is allowed to install add-ons, and who checks the output before it goes to a customer

What this changes for a small business

The floor moved. Work that was too small to justify paying for last quarter now costs almost nothing to run, and the assistant is already sitting in the tool your team opens every morning. If someone on your staff is spending two hours a week reformatting a report, that is worth ten minutes of experimenting this week.

The ceiling did not move. Cheap tokens and a smart sidebar still do not answer the harder question, which is which parts of your operation should stop being manual at all. That answer comes from looking at where the work actually stalls: the callback that never happened, the quote that sat in a notebook until Sunday, the follow-up nobody owns.

We do a free process audit for exactly that. An hour, a look at how work moves through your business, and a straight list of what is worth automating and what is fine as it is. Some of it you will be able to do yourself with the tools you just installed, and we will tell you when that is the case.