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You would be surprised at the volume of money made by businesses supported by Excel.
Yes. I suspect there are thousands of Excel files that "process" >$1bn/yr out there.
Two kinds of AI users are emerging
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Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#12The "upside" description:
On the other you have a non-technical executive who's got his head round Claude Code and can run e.g. Python locally.
I helped one recently almost one-shot converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code.
Once the model is in Python, you effectively have a data science team in your pocket with Claude Code. You can easily run Monte Carlo simulations, pull external data sources as inputs, build web dashboards and have Claude Code work with you to really integrate weaknesses in your model (or business). It's a pretty magical experience watching someone realise they have so much power at their fingertips, without having to grind away for hours/days in Excel.
I've a reasonably intense math background corrupted by application to geophysics and implementing real world numerical applications.
To be fair, this statement alone:
* 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model
makes my skin crawl and invokes a flight reflex.
Still, I'll concede that a Claude Code conversion to Python of a 30 sheet Excel financial model is unlikely to be significantly worse than the original.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#13The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly. I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp
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Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#14> Microsoft itself is rolling out Claude Code to internal teams
Seems like Nadella is having his Baller moment
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#15The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the a…
The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing. I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it did…
It behooves me that Gemini et al dont have these standard video editing tools. Do the engineers seriously think prompting by text is the way people want videos to be generated? Nope. People want to customise. E.g. Check out capcut in the context of social media.
Ive been trying to create a quick and dirty marketing promo via an LLM to visualise how a product will fit into the world of people - it is incredibly painful to 'hope and pray' that by refining the prompt via text you can make slight adjustments come through.
The models are good enough if you are half-decent at prompting and have some patience. But given the amount invested, I would argue they are pretty disappointing. Ive had to chunk the marketing promo into almost a frame-by-frame play to make it somewhat work.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#16The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly. I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp
Meanwhile the people I know who work at Microsoft say there's a constant whip-cracking to connect everything they're doing to "AI" and prove that's what they're doing.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#17> Microsoft itself is rolling out Claude Code to internal teams Seems like Nadella is having his Baller moment
Nothing but ego frankly. Apple had no problem settling for a small market share back in the day... look where they are now. It didnt come from make-believe and fantasy scenarios of the future based on an unpredictable technology.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#18> I helped one recently almost one-shot[3] converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code.
I'm sure Claude Code will happily one-shot that conversion. It's also virtually guaranteed to have messed up vital parts of the original logic in the process.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#19Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect
They have an excel sheet next to it - they can test it against that. Plus they can ask questions if something seems off and have it explain the code.
I'm not sure being able to verify that it's vaguely correct really solves the issue. Consider how many edge cases inhabit a "30 sheet, mind-numbingly complicated" Excel document. Verifying equivalence sounds nontrivial, to put it mildly.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#20Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect
All we need is one major crash caused by AI to scare the capital owners. Then maybe us white collar workers can breath a bit for at least another few more years(maybe a decade+).