Looking for advice on leveraging AI for Excel in a price-sensitive, third-world country

I'd build it on the free chatbots, but sell the skills around them, not the chatbot itself. Your participants already paste a problem in and try what comes back. What most of them can't do yet is ask well, spot a wrong answer and fix it. That's teachable, and it won't date as fast as a tour of Copilot buttons.

Modules I'd include:

Asking well: describe the layout (sheet names, columns, which row holds the headers), paste 5 to 10 sample rows, show the result you expect for those rows, and say which Excel version you have. That last part matters more than people think.

Version and region traps: chatbots often answer with XLOOKUP, FILTER or UNIQUE, which don't exist in Excel 2016 or 2019. In regions that use a comma as the decimal separator, formulas need semicolons between arguments, and a localized Excel uses translated function names. Give them exercises where the AI answer fails for exactly these reasons and have them fix it.

Checking the answer: test the formula on rows where you already know the result, include the awkward cases (blank cells, numbers stored as text, duplicates), and step through it with Evaluate Formula on the Formulas tab. "It gave me a number" stops being the test.

Data safety: no client, salary or customer files in a free chatbot. Teach them to make a small fake sample with the same structure, which also tends to get better answers.

The tools they already paid for: Flash Fill (Ctrl+E), Quick Analysis, Recommended PivotTables and Power Query come with their licensed Excel and cover a lot of what people ask a chatbot for. Pair them: let the chatbot explain a formula or write the Power Query steps, then do the work in Excel.

A short optional Copilot demo for the few whose employers pay for it is fine, but I wouldn't build the course around it.

(Drafted with AI assistance and checked before posting.)