The CEOs of two of our clients effectively said the same thing last week: Excel spreadsheets are now the equivalent of working with pen and paper:
“The problem is none of our data sources really talk to each other. Or if they do, it has to be highly manual, with someone spending their whole day in Excel spreadsheets.”
“Excel, really because of the grid system that it exists on, only allows us to kind of see transactions from start to finish across a line... So everyone is double entering, to create this Excel file that doesn’t even work.”
Microsoft first released Excel in 1985, so it’s been the glue to organize and analyze company data for over four decades. This has been a blessing for businesses with disparate data systems. Some much so that a 2022 survey of 1,000 computer-based workers found that 38% of peoples’ time was spent in Excel.
For one of the CEOs quoted above, their data has always been spanned across five areas:
CRM: they have Salesforce to monitor leads, track outreach, and maintain relationships.
ERP: they pack finance, inventory, and supply chain information into one database.
Market data: they use Circana to get point-of-sale consumer data across the industry.
Internal files: 200+ employees save their work and files (including Excel) to Sharepoint.
Communications: the business communicates across Outlook and Slack.
Each group of data lives in its own ecosystem, and the business has grown accustomed to stitching it all together with Excel. These spreadsheets were once a perfect integrator but now create highly manual processes that waste too much time for little reward.
The good news is, we can now cut out the middle man (sorry Mr. Gates) and reallocate peoples’ time from manually assembling spreadsheets to drawing insights from the data. Excel experts are unlikely to get fired, they’ll just get to think more.
The solution is to use AI to integrate business systems into one central database (e.g., Microsoft 365 Claude connector, custom app with API connections.) Once systems start talking to each other, manual spreadsheet creation becomes redundant.
So here’s the game plan:
Sit down with the Head of IT / CTO and list the data sources in your business today. (Use the five bullet points listed above as reference.) For each source that connects data to another system automatically, give yourself +1. For each source that’s still requiring at least one employee to do some sort of Excel patchwork, give yourself -1.
Scored above zero? You’re ahead of the curve. Scored zero or below? Now’s the time to start thinking about how to make your company’s data more interconnected without manual work.
At a minimum, the companies that figure this out can reallocate employees’ time to higher-value tasks. At its best, having systems talk to each other in one “brain” generates greater insights. Based on your score, is this trend going to be a positive or negative for your business? It’s your call.
I live two lives. I’m an MBA student at Stanford. I’m also the co-founder of Mavnox, an AI implementation startup for mid-sized services businesses.
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-TW