AI Weekly Malaysia

Microsoft is retiring Excel's COPILOT() function on September 14, 2026, killing a feature that launched in preview only a year earlier and was never made generally available. The function let users invoke AI from a worksheet cell, but Microsoft now says the Copilot side pane covers the same capabilities. Google Sheets still offers a comparable AI function.

Why: If anyone in your team embedded COPILOT() in production spreadsheets, those formulas break on September 14 and need replacing with side-pane workflows or a migration to Google Sheets' equivalent AI function. This is also a cautionary tale for relying on preview-tier AI features in business-critical documents.

Microsoft added per-process NPU and GPU neural engine utilization metrics to Windows Task Manager's Processes and Performance tabs, on supported newer devices. The feature lets developers see AI workload activity alongside existing CPU, memory, storage, and networking data.

Why: If you're developing or running on-device AI workloads on Windows laptops, you can now use Task Manager to identify which processes are hitting the NPU and diagnose battery drain or performance issues without third-party tooling. For everyone else, this is a minor OS update with no action required.

Meta's ad moderation approved and ran advertisements for an app that generates non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) of female politicians, according to Ars Technica. The actual article body was not captured—only cookie consent boilerplate was retrieved—so specific details such as the app name, which politicians were targeted, how long the ads ran, and Meta's response are unavailable from the provided text.

Why: For builders running Meta ads or building on Meta's platform, this is a concrete signal that automated ad review still fails to catch egregiously harmful content—relevant if you rely on Meta's moderation as a trust layer for your own products or ad campaigns. The Malaysian audience should note this affects anyone advertising or being advertised on Meta in the region, but without the full article, no specific action can be recommended.

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT Ads to 31 European countries next week, six months after launching ads in the U.S. Ads appear only for Free and Go plan users; Plus, Pro, and Enterprise remain ad-free. Self-service via Ads Manager won't arrive until later this summer—currently only through OpenAI's ads team and partners.

Why: No Asia-Pacific rollout is mentioned, so Malaysian founders can't act on this yet. Worth noting that ChatGPT is becoming an ad surface alongside search, which could eventually shift where discovery budgets go—but there's nothing to do today.