okay…
this one… is triggered by a post… from a lady called Meenal Asesh…
senior AI researcher… talking about…
three Excel tasks that should embarrass you… if you’re still doing them manually in 2026…
now…
on the surface…
that sounds like another social media headline…
but… actually…
there’s something deeper going on here…
because… according to Hiran de Silva…
this isn’t about AI and manual Excel skills…
it’s about… Excel and architecture…
Meenal talks about cleaning messy data…
writing lookups…
building summary tables…
and she says…
using AI to do that…
that’s not cheating…
that’s 2026…
and…
yes…
she’s right…
but…
only… partially right…
because…
what she’s really describing…
is using AI…
to help you operate Excel…
better…
faster…
cleaner…
but still… automating the traditional manual steps
inside… the same way of thinking…
now here’s where Hiran’s work…
takes a very… different turn…
because instead of asking…
how do we do these tasks faster…
the question becomes…
why are we doing them at all…
In other words, if we organised the process better
can we eliminate the work altogether?
and this is where…
the embarrassment… really starts…
Hiran recently built…
a full reconciliation system…
using AI…
not just assisting Excel in its manual journey …
but redesigning… understanding the problem…
from first principles…
SO, from weeks of manual work for a team of people,
transformed into this monster set of Excel tasks!
one hundred reconciliations…
not one-to-one…
but many-to-many…
up to five lists… against five lists…
with up to five thousand rows… each…
and it runs…
unattended… with Excel in the backgrund
in under a minute…
no manual steps…
no ticking…
no checking…
no V-LOOKUPs…
no Power Query pipelines…
none of it…
just…
run…
and the results…
are ready…
for the domain experts located anywhere in the world, to review, investigate, take action …
that’s the difference…
between…
using AI…
and…
thinking differently…
because according to Hiran…
Excel was already capable…
of eliminating this work…
years ago…
decades ago…
But only people with these specific Excel skills even knew this methodology exists.
AI didn’t create the capability…
it removed the barrier…
to expressing it…
and implementing it.
now…
this is where… Steven Donaldson steps in…
with a very… important warning…
what happens…
when AI goes away…
or becomes too expensive…
or people forget… how things work…
does this…
make us…
dumber…
and again…
he’s right…
because… for Hiran,
as this system was being built…
something became clear…
uncomfortable…
there was a shift…
towards preferring…
AI’s way…
cleaner code…
better structure…
more complete thinking…
covering edge cases
that might have been skipped…
and the thought appeared…
quietly…
but clearly…
do we even need…
to know this hand-coding anymore?
that…
is the real risk…
but then…
Meenal responds…
and this is the part…
that matters…
the skill…
is not…
remembering formulas…
the skill…
is knowing…
what to ask…
spotting… when something is wrong…
and structuring the problem
in the first place…
and that
changes everything…
because…
AI doesn’t replace thinking…
it exposes…
whether thinking…
was ever there…
Quoting and paraphrasing Meenal,
lazy people…
become lazier…
yes…
but thoughtful people…
become…
dangerously effective…
because now…
the bottleneck…
is gone…
no waiting…
no gatekeepers…
no long development cycles…
no excuses…
just…
idea…
to execution with the least effort, and shortest time …
and that…
is where Hiran’s work…
really sits…
not in…
Excel tips…
not in…
AI tricks…
but in…
reframing the problem…
so completely…
that the work…
disappears…
so yes…
if you’re still cleaning data manually…
writing lookups…
building summaries…
maybe…
that is embarrassing…
but not because…
AI can do it for you…
because…
If Excel is applied in the right way,
the the way only thinking people can do,
AI can help implement it
to eliminate the manual Excel work…
that shouldn’t exist…
in the first place…
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