Has AI become the new Excel?

The idea sounds absurd until you consider how workplace tools actually become standard without any conscious intent or strategy. Productivity tools like Excel, Word and PowerPoint were not adopted because everyone became experts or because they were the perfect, most well considered solutions. They became mandatory because they were accessible, convenient and eventually expected. Over time they became so deeply engrained in everyday office life that organisations simply assumed people knew how to use them.

Excel has been around since 1985. Forty years later people still put “Advanced Excel” on their CV while struggling to find the formula bar, yet entire multibillion dollar organisations run on spreadsheets so fragile that if Excel vanished tomorrow, operations would grind to a standstill before lunch. We have normalised the idea that a tool can be essential even if most people barely understand it.

This history matters because we are now watching the same pattern repeat with AI, only at a speed and scale that Excel never came close to. AI is being rolled out across organisations faster than any tool in history. Not because everyone understands it, but because every organisation has declared it essential. Businesses are buying AI the way they once bought email, cloud storage or software. Rapidly, universally and often without any plan for what competency looks like or how to ensure they get the most from the investment.

Job ads now casually list “AI proficiency” even though nobody can agree on what that means. If decades of Excel usage still leave experienced professionals manually wrestling spreadsheets like it is 1998, what outcome should we expect when AI has had only eighteen months in the mainstream?

This is the part we do not like to admit… AI is becoming a workplace expectation long before it becomes a workplace skill and most leaders are ignoring the warning signs because the superficial results look impressive. Even inexperienced users are seeing noticeable productivity gains, which can create a false sense of confidence that everything is fine. When the surface level outputs look good, it becomes easy for leaders to dismiss the deeper gaps and think it does not matter.

Meanwhile the capability gap grows wider every week. People who barely understand formulas are being asked to use AI to summarise complex reports, shape decisions, automate workflows and manipulate data they do not fully understand. They rely on outputs they cannot verify and trust reasoning they cannot inspect.

I have seen the same pattern for years with productivity tools. The breakthrough solutions never come from the person who technically knows the software. They come from the person with a real business problem that has time and is willing to experiment.

Those people will build incredible things with AI because necessity forces them to learn. Others, with equally critical problems, will be left behind because they were never trained to translate their real-world challenges into AI powered solutions.

This is the risk we are drifting toward without intention. AI could easily become the new Excel. Not in capability, but in corporate behaviour. A tool people claim to know, rely on every day and quietly use poorly. A tool so deeply embedded into workflow that leaders assume everyone is competent while day-to-day work becomes increasingly dependent on shaky fundamentals.

The difference is that not understanding Excel could only lead to a broken spreadsheet or wasted productivity. AI can break decisions, distort reality, introduce invisible errors and reinforce biases without announcing that anything is wrong. If organisations continue down this path without meaningful literacy, governance and enablement, the next major workplace crisis will not be a cyber breach or a system outage. It will be the slow, silent accumulation of flawed decisions produced by tools employees do not truly understand.

The risk is not that AI might become the new Excel. The risk is that it already has and we are just haven’t noticed.