Your company runs on spreadsheets. Let's be honest, it always has. You can point to the ERP, the CRM, the BI dashboards and all the approved systems of record. But the actual work happens in spreadsheets: the thinking, the scenario planning, the version someone created for their own understanding.
AI has just created a new spreadsheet problem. Employees and customers are spinning up AI-generated tools and agents to get their work done. People don't adopt the superior tool, or the official one. They adopt the malleable one.
This realization is keeping both enterprise leaders and SaaS providers up at night. The spreadsheet was supposed to be a relic. Instead, it quietly remained ingrained, helping to get real work done before pushing the results to the declared "source of truth" solution after the fact.
Why is that? The spreadsheet never won on capability. ERPs, CRMs, SaaS tools are definitely superior. The spreadsheet won because it easily adapts to the user, to the approach to the task at hand, to a way of thinking that no product roadmap can anticipate. It's malleable. And malleability wins way more often than we like to admit.
continue reading “AI Is the New Spreadsheet: The Malleable Expert Wins” →