CoPilot for Pricing Tools (part 1 of TBD): Ready for Action?

This week's provides my first ever video format, where I test whether CoPilot for Excel is primetime ready to make our lives easier in clinical research pricing tools. The use case here is super simple- if I ask CoPilot to export my client grid into a new standalone clean file that I can paste into my proposal and/or send to the client, with virtually zero additional effort, does it get the job done? Turn your volume up and let's see what happens:

Below is an approximate transcript of the video:

Hi everyone this is Joel White and I thought this week’s newsletter post would be best presented in a video format, since we are going to discuss Excel CoPilot and whether it’s primetime ready for pricing tool. I’m hitting this topic for a couple reasons. First, there are efforts to develop cloud based pricing tools for CROs and other clinical research providers, but none of them are gaining traction yet. Why? CRO tools require far too much flexibility compared to what cloud based solutions are providing, and they need that flexibility because CRO pricing tools have to factor in dozens and sometimes hundreds of variables to get a price out the door.

So we have the vast majority of clinical research pricing tools in Excel, so the second reason I’m hitting this topic is a question that comes up from time to time- can’t AI just create my pricing for me? Right now the answer is no, but I believe someday the answer will be yes. That inflection point, in my view, is once Microsoft CoPilot for Excel is so sophisticated, that is runs our pricing tools for us.

So this video looks at a simpler use case- can I ask CoPilot to export my client grid into a new standalone clean file that I can paste into my proposal and/or send to the client, with virtually zero additional effort?

I have on my screen a fake pricing tool that still many of you watching this will recognize as a CRO’ish format of a client grid. It has formulas, a filtering column, a button to run a macro, and so on. In the ideal scenario, I would ask CoPilot to pop this out into a new workbook that is clean and ready to go.

So first, you have to have a CoPilot subscription, which already will be a dealbreaker for many companies. If you do have it, you should see this icon up here. If you don’t, well, there’s not much you further you can go from here. Let’s assume you do.

The next possible dealbreaker is you have to have Autosave ON for this to work, AND the file I believe the file has to be on SharePoint or OneDrive, and I believe those preconditions are related. That’s tough for me personally, because I don’t like to have Autosave ON all the time. And I know a lot of companies use something other than SharePoint or OneDrive for their cloud based file systems.

But let’s say none of those are dealbreakers for you. I will paste in a prompt, and here’s what I want it to do on my behalf.

You will see that it is not willing to do that for me. Note that I’ve tried a number of variations on this, trying to find a way to do my work for me, but it’s not happening.

So that’s the bad news- it won’t do the automation for me.

Well, will it at least create the macro for me? The news is better here. I will paste in a new prompt, asking it to write a macro that does all the things I tried earlier to get CoPilot to do for me. Let’s run this.

You will see it spits out a VBA macro. At first glance, it looks good. The code is much more concise and error-proofed compared to recording a macro.

Now, if you ask it to create the macro for you, put it in the VBA editor for you, it won’t. So you need to know how to do it. I’m going to do it super fast but there are tons of Youtube videos going step by step.

Now let’s see if I run it, will it do exactly what I need it to do?

So in conclusion we have good news and bad news. Bad news is CoPilot is not going to run this export for you. And even though it will write a solid macro for you, you still have to do the dirty of work of putting it in VBA and such. The good news is that CoPilot writes a really solid macro for you, far more accurate and error-proof than what you would have gotten from recording a macro yourself. You will still want a VBA expert to review behind it though, because even this simplistic example had a couple issues, and a VBA expert will ensure you can write the best prompt possible.

So this gives me optimism towards Excel CoPilot helping making our lives more efficient in working with clinical research pricing tools. But can it take an RFP and run a budget for us? I’ll cover that in a future video. Take care.

I specialize in pricing and financial strategies for service and technology providers, and provide external benchmarking services and pricing tool validation for clinical research providers. Contact me to discuss solutions for your organization.