Research Meets Spreadsheet
S&P's data now
flows straightinto Excel.
S&P Global's research arm Kensho has expanded its integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Analysts can now pull cited data without leaving Excel, instead of opening Capital IQ as a separate app.
What Happened
No more switching apps —
it happens inside Excel
On August 12, 2026, S&P Global officially announced that its research platform Kensho would bring the bulk of S&P Global's core content — capital markets data, earnings call transcripts, private-company financials, and global securities data — into Microsoft 365 Copilot's workflows and agentic features. The expansion builds on an existing Copilot integration that had previously covered only S&P Global's energy data.
The technical core is a system called "Deterministic Retrieval" inside the S&P Global AI Data Portal — also known as the Kensho LLM-ready API. Per the Microsoft 365 blog, both a Copilot in Excel connector for analyst workflows and a plugin for Copilot Cowork's agentic experiences are available, letting Copilot pull S&P Global content with cited, verifiable sourcing.
| Before | After the expansion |
|---|---|
| Open Capital IQ Pro in a separate app | Query it directly from Copilot inside Excel |
| Only energy-sector data was integrated | Now covers capital markets, earnings, private financials, securities |
| Sourcing pasted in by hand | Cited, verifiable sourcing applied automatically |
| Mostly chat-only usage | Also wired into Copilot Cowork's agentic experience |
Compare companies
Name companies to Copilot inside Excel and it pulls Capital IQ-grade financial data, lining several companies up side by side.
Read the earnings call
Copilot summarizes and searches earnings call transcripts, dropping the result into Excel with sourcing attached — which company, which call.
Automate with Copilot Cowork
Beyond one-off queries, routine research tasks can now run as part of Copilot Cowork's agentic workflows.
Once opening a database stops costing time,
that time goes back tothe analysis itself.
Who It Affects
Whose job this actually changes
Financial analysts
The constant back-and-forth between Capital IQ and Excel for company research, peer comparisons, and competitive analysis now happens on one screen — and auto-sourcing cuts down fact-checking time when writing up a report.
Investment / corporate strategy teams
With private-company financials in scope, early-stage M&A screening and investment research can now run much faster directly inside Excel.
Microsoft 365 admins
Organizations with an S&P Global license now need to figure out access design and rollout for this new connector on top of their existing Copilot deployment.
Why Now / Risk
From "AI answers" to
"AI answers with a source"
The persistent obstacle for AI in finance has been trust: can you actually verify that a generated number is correct? "Deterministic Retrieval," the approach S&P Global and Microsoft both emphasize, addresses this by constraining the model to search and cite pre-licensed primary data rather than letting it freely generate figures. That constraint is exactly why general-purpose chatbots have struggled to break into financial data workflows, and a data provider shipping its own connector directly into Copilot marks one resolution of that standoff.
Don't overreach on expectations, though. This integration assumes an existing S&P Global license — it doesn't make Capital IQ-grade data free. The announcement doesn't spell out how existing S&P Global or Microsoft 365 pricing changes, so cost needs to be checked case by case. And "cited" doesn't mean error-free: Copilot's own summaries and comparisons can still misinterpret the underlying data. Accuracy of the source data and accuracy of the AI's summarization are two different problems, and final judgment calls still belong to a human analyst.