Today I'd like to briefly share one of my hands-on projects: using PilotDeck to turn a spreadsheet with a few thousand rows into an online intelligent charting system.
Our office has a so-called "on-site nonconformance report" that lives in an Excel spreadsheet on a shared drive. After several years the number of entries has grown so much that it lags just to open it, and it crashes often. Even so, it's just a spreadsheet, and getting it in place years ago took a lot of effort aligning N different teams. A few years before that, on-site issues were still recorded on paper cards in the workshop... good luck collecting and analyzing those. Now that we're in the age of agents, and PilotDeck happened to be running a competition, I took the chance to practice on this clunky spreadsheet and see what I could pull off with an agent's help! The LLM behind it is DeepSeek V4; I topped up 50 CNY. The whole project cost less than 10 CNY, cheaper than a cup of bubble tea... Step one: put the spreadsheet online, so multiple people can finally log data at the same time. Custom queries and the like go without saying; they came easily. Binding an email system, subscribing to update notifications and so on are all doable too, not much different from an ordinary web system, so I won't go into detail here.
(Some privacy-related data in the screenshots has been masked or cropped out; the same applies below.) Stopping at step one seemed too easy; it was done within an hour. So why not add agent capabilities to the system? What do I mean? Use PilotDeck directly as the agent foundation to provide an AI assistant service for the system. When I want to know about a specific piece of data, I just ask the AI assistant. Work that used to mean laboriously building pivot tables, filtering and writing formulas can now be done with one sentence.
Generally, getting this far would be about enough. Day to day, people mostly use work data to look up information and make a few tables to get the job done. To test PilotDeck's limits, I deliberately built a custom dashboard as well. Beyond regular data queries, it lets you customize data dashboards through the AI assistant.
A regular system dashboard page shows a fixed set of metrics. If you want charts for other fields, you'd have to open a separate Excel file to do it, right? Here I just had the PilotDeck-based AI assistant do it along the way.
Open the AI assistant chat panel on the right, and through conversation you can pull out data fields that have already been converted into a database and generate charts from them.
Because this involves information about my employer, I can't go into much more detail. To sum it up in one sentence: with an agent's help, many automated workflows I wouldn't have dared imagine a year ago really can run, and they can be developed at almost zero cost. The digital, intelligent factory that manufacturing has been talking about for so long can absolutely be built up iteratively, bit by bit, like this. Hand over the information-flow work that's just copying, pasting, stitching and forwarding to agents! If you're interested in PilotDeck too, check out their official repository.