AI that was inevitable

This is a feature I’ve been waiting for for the past two years.

It was inevitable.

Google Sheets has finally added AI. And now you can call a prompt directly from a cell.

Internally, we’ve built a ton of workarounds to pull data from Google Sheets, prompt & process it with LLM APIs for analysis or categorization, and then write it back to the spreadsheet. Sure, it works, but it’s never felt smooth.

It’s funny because just last week I was working on a Series-B analysis (stay tuned!) and checked again - just to make sure - whether Google Sheets had quietly released some hidden way to use Gemini within the platform. And it hadn’t.

But now, it is here! And I’m pumped.

If you’ve logged into Google Sheets in the past 24 hours, you’ve probably seen the notification to try it out 🔥

Real Use Case

I’ll walk you through the first thing I used it for - the improvement of the actual workflow that I hacked together last week.

One of our portfolio companies is going out to raise a Series-B towards the end of the year, and the founder asked if I could pull data on recent AI funding rounds.

Before the AI feature, I collected the company description from Crunchbase and scraped the website text, ran a Python script to prompt OpenAI (the prompts were to categorize it into TRUE/FALSE an AI company, and if so, to further classify it into a high-level category) — then I wrote the results back into the sheet using the Google Sheets API.

Now? Look at this!! So clean.

Two calls:

• =AI("Is this an AI company? TRUE or FALSE?", A2)

• =AI("Can you please categorize this company into Infrastructure, Vertical AI Applications, Vertical AI Infrastructure, Foundation AI, Business Operations AI, Other", A2)

It’s beautiful.

Venture market maps aren’t going to know what hit them haha. (shameless plug in case anyone is interested: I maintain a substack and website that records venture market maps:

• Website: https://venturemarketmaps.com/

• Substack: https://substack.com/@marketmaps

Some general thoughts…

This was always going to happen.

It took Google a bit longer than expected, but I think there are a few reasons for that:

• First, they've been burned before by AI launches and likely wanted to make sure it's fully vetted before rolling it out.

• Second, Google has nine products with over a billion users, so adding Gemini to Google Sheets might have seemed high priority for me - but maybe it wasn’t for the company.

I’m also curious whether they’ll end up charging for it, since making API calls isn’t free.

From an investment perspective, this is why we’ve stayed away from general horizontal workflow solutions. The tech giants like Google have always been perfectly positioned to add AI into the tools that everyone uses. Sure, there are improvements to be made, but horizontal workflow automation is tough. Notion and Airtable are probably the rare examples of products that actually broke through - and they went prosumer first.

The broader trend - and what you’ll see in the Series B analysis I’m working on - is that vertical plays are dominating, unless you're focused on core AI infrastructure.

Anyway, pumped for this Google update and the million of use cases it unlocks.

I’m a General Partner at Chapter One, an early-stage venture fund that invests $500K - $2M checks into pre-seed and seed-stage startups.

If you’re a founder building a company, please feel free to reach out on Twitter (@seidtweets) or Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesin-seidel-5325b147/).