Abiodun Adetona, a former software engineer at Flutterwave, noticed a persistent challenge, as colleagues from non-technical teams frequently struggled to extract insights from spreadsheets without technical help.
“I used to assist them [his colleagues] with pulling data from various sources every day for almost a year, it was hectic, and there was no easier way to do it than the technical way,” Adetona told TechCabal.
This frustration led Adetona and a three-person team to build Decide AI in 2025, an artificial intelligence assistant designed to analyse spreadsheets through natural language prompts.
Inside Decide AI
The platform’s interface feels immediately familiar to users of modern AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Gemini. Users can select between two AI agents:
- Fast agent: Prioritises speed for quick analysis.
- Pro agent: Handles complex, multi-dataset calculations and deeper analytical tasks.
Decide AI also connects to external data sources beyond local spreadsheet files, including Google Sheets, Metabase, Google Analytics, and Google Ads.
This enables practical use cases like marketing teams analysing campaign performance or developers exploring traffic patterns across platforms.
How it works
Adetona explained that Decide AI begins with a preprocessing stage, where the system maps the spreadsheet structure, including sheets, headers, tables, formulas, and interrelationships.
This step ensures that the AI can analyse data reliably, avoiding errors that commonly occur when spreadsheets are misinterpreted.
The system then uses frontier language models, including offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to generate Python code that executes calculations in a secure, sandboxed environment. This approach minimises the risk of “hallucinations” that can occur when AI models reason directly from prompts without structured computation.
The AI can iterate through additional calculations until the user’s request is fully addressed, then verifies the output against the original spreadsheet before delivering results.
Monetisation and user growth
Decide AI is currently operating on a hybrid pricing model:
- $7: 20 prompts per month.
- $15: 100 prompts per month.
- $25: Unlimited prompts and full access.
Since its public launch in February 2026, the platform has attracted 3,000–4,000 users, with a smaller subset converting to paid plans. Early development was supported by a $15,000 friends-and-family round, with the focus prioritised on product development over revenue.
Limitations and competitive landscape
Adetona acknowledges that Decide AI is not flawless, datasets with missing context or inconsistent formats can produce imperfect results. The team analyses the AI’s execution path to refine its processing and improve future outputs.
While general-purpose AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can perform spreadsheet analysis, Decide AI’s advantage lies in its specialisation, focusing exclusively on spreadsheets and structured datasets.
On SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark testing real-world spreadsheet tasks, Decide AI achieved 82.5% accuracy, ranking fourth globally.
The road ahead
The startup is exploring deeper integrations with business workflows, including BigQuery, Meta Ads, and API connections, to analyse spreadsheets within existing organisational systems.
Adetona recognises the challenge of competing with major AI companies. As spreadsheet analysis becomes a standard feature in general-purpose assistants, Decide AI will need to demonstrate that its specialised approach is faster, more accurate, and more reliable than embedded features in larger platforms.
Whether Decide AI remains a niche tool or is absorbed into broader AI ecosystems will ultimately depend on its ability to deliver superior performance and integration for spreadsheet-focused tasks.
According to industry experts, Decide AI represents a compelling example of African innovation in AI, leveraging local insight to tackle practical business challenges while operating in a globally competitive AI landscape.
Talking Points
It is impressive that Decide AI has built a specialised AI tool focused on spreadsheets, addressing a persistent challenge many non-technical professionals face: extracting insights from complex datasets without coding skills.
This focus positions Decide AI as a practical solution for real business challenges, particularly for teams in finance, operations, marketing, or education that rely heavily on spreadsheet data but lack dedicated technical support.
At Techparley, we see how tools like this can streamline data analysis workflows, allowing organisations to gain actionable insights faster, reduce human error, and free up technical teams to focus on higher-value tasks.
The platform’s ability to integrate with external data sources such as Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Metabase, and Google Ads means that users can analyse data across multiple systems in one central interface, enhancing operational efficiency.
As Decide AI scales, opportunities exist to form partnerships with educational institutions, small and medium enterprises, and professional services firms, helping deepen its footprint and establishing it as a go-to solution for spreadsheet-based analysis in Africa and beyond.
——————-
Bookmark Techparley.com for the most insightful technology news from the African continent.
Follow us on Twitter @Techparleynews, on Facebook at Techparley Africa, on LinkedIn at Techparley Africa, or on Instagram at Techparleynews.
