Excel, the Hidden Operating System of Business Reasoning
Excel has long been the silent operating system of business reasoning. AI may be about to extend that logic into natural language.
How Excel quietly shaped the way we think, and how AI may extend its legacy.
Quick takeaways
- Excel has functioned for decades as a distributed ERP: every user building a local model of reality.
- Its power lies in flexibility, it lets people express business logic without programming.
- Enterprise systems formalise these models, but often lose their subtlety and adaptability.
- AI and conversational interfaces might restore that flexibility, learning from humans rather than forcing humans to adapt.
- The future of IT may not replace Excel’s logic, but translate it into new, more fluid forms.
The silent backbone of business
For most of the digital era, companies have lived on spreadsheets. Excel has been the quiet workhorse behind budgets, forecasts, reconciliations, audits and is the connective tissue of economic life. It isn’t just a table tool; it’s a universal modelling language.
Every tab in Excel contains traces of business reasoning: rules, workflows, and the instincts of whoever built them. People use formulas to make sense of uncertainty, test assumptions, or translate their knowledge into numbers. In that sense, Excel has been the de facto operating system of business reasoning, a distributed, ever-evolving network of micro-ERPs shaped by human context.
“In some sense, Excel will come with an analyst bundled in and with all the tools used.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
The paradox of structure
Once these spreadsheets succeed, they’re handed to IT. They are translated into databases, interfaces, and fixed processes. The result is reliable, auditable and rigid. The nuance that made the original model valuable often disappears in the act of formalisation.
Excel’s gift is its informality. It allows domain experts to model reality before the system ossifies it. That same informality, however, is what makes it fragile at scale. The tension between adaptability and control sits at the heart of almost every IT transformation.
When systems start to learn back
The rise of AI marks a reversal. Instead of humans learning the logic of systems, systems are beginning to learn from human logic. Large language models can take unstructured expression, notes, emails, verbal explanations, and infer structure, context, and intent.
This suggests a new kind of interface: one that captures reasoning in natural terms, converts it into structured rules, and interacts with formal systems below. It’s not about replacing Excel, but extending its lineage and giving the same expressive freedom to conversation that spreadsheets gave to formulas.
Where Excel let people compute with intuition, AI lets them reason with data in their own language. Both reduce friction between thinking and doing.
Closing thought
From cell to prompt, from formula to phrase. The underlying desire hasn’t changed: to make our reasoning legible to machines without needing to change its human texture.
The difference is that, for the first time, the machine seems willing to listen.
Rob Hoeijmakers
Dwarkesh Patel