People data lookups

You can do various things like use String (and RegEx) functions to check if the strings match or if the first x characters match and such but because of names being things like Robert or Bob, that could be a problem.  You mentioned Copilot and that is sor tof the way I was thinking is you could ask AI to give you best match and then double check that list.  You could also do a hybrid approach where maybe you first check if maybe both the emplyee number and last name match and if so just use that info but if not then ask copilot to try a match.  I don't have and haven't used copilot but something like this should get you started:

=IF(last_name = XLOOKUP(emp_id, db[ids], db[last], ""), emp_id, COPILOT("Find best match for Employee ID " & emp_id &" and last name " & last_name & " and first name " & first_name " in this data set", db) )

where last_name, emp_id, and first_name are the entries on that line and the db is a table of all the emplyee information with db[ids] being the emplyee ID column and db[last] being the emplyee Last Name column.