Most small companies don’t need AI to be more efficient. They need Excel.

I’ve already had two cases where a friend asked me to show them how AI can help them run their company better. In each case it turned out that they needed Excel. Specifically an excel export from one system, some bulk editing, and an excel import into another system.

(I understand the satire in this article but this is a serious post)

They used to say this exactly about databases. Small companies usually only need a spreadsheet.

> They need Excel.

They should also learn how to use it. Too many times I see people manually sorting rows by cutting and inserting them, when filters are just two clicks away! Filter it, copy the table, save it. Done. 3 hour job done in less than 10 seconds.

Or using pivot tables (i.e. for filtering reports with thousands of lines to find string which occurred the most and sort them by the occurrence).

Or automatically deduplicating rows (remove duplicates - choose columns, click and done.)

And the most outrageous cases of being Excel illiterate are people using calculator on the table and writing results back into Excel. These folks are already too far gone. Nobody can help them.