This is really two articles in one. First a (great) history of the spreadsheet.

Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.