Do spreadsheets matter now that we have AI?
Yes, probably more than they used to, although what you need to be good at has shifted a bit.
I get why people ask. You can describe what you want to Claude or ChatGPT in plain English and have a working SUMIFS back in a few seconds, and depending on your licence there’s now an AI assistant sitting inside Excel itself. So if a machine can write the formula, why would anyone at uni spend their evenings learning to do it themselves?
The numbers still live in a spreadsheet
Walk into an FP&A team, an audit engagement or a deal team and the work still ends up in Excel (or Google Sheets). The budget is a workbook, the audit sample is a workbook, and so are the valuation, the board pack backup and the reconciliation that doesn’t quite reconcile (there’s always one).
AI hasn’t changed that. What it’s changed is who’s typing into the cells. The AI tools that are useful at work mostly spit out spreadsheets rather than replace them, so the spreadsheet is still the thing you send your manager and the thing they open to pull your work apart.
You can’t check what you can’t read
AI is very good at writing a formula that looks right. It’s a lot less reliable at writing one that’s right for your sheet, with all its quirks, like the total row it shouldn’t have included, the revenue column that’s GST-inclusive when the budget isn’t, or the reference that needed a $ so it didn’t wander off when you filled it down.
When the answer comes back, someone has to look at =SUMIFS(D2:D200,B2:B200,"NSW") and know whether D is the right column, whether row 200 goes far enough and whether “NSW” is spelt the same way in the data. That someone is you, and it’s your name on the file.
Whoever reviews your work will eventually ask where a number came from. If all you can say is “the AI gave it to me”, that’s going to be a short and fairly uncomfortable conversation. If you can click the cell, read the formula and trace it back to the inputs, you’re fine, and nobody much cares how the formula got there.
Being quick in the room still counts
A lot of Excel happens live. Your manager leans over and asks what happens to the margin if freight goes up 8% instead of 5%, or someone in a meeting wants it split by state. Changing an input and reading off the answer is quicker than writing a prompt and then checking whatever comes back, and being quick and sure in those moments is how people start trusting your numbers.
Plenty of firms also limit which AI tools can see client or company data, especially in audit and banking, so on day one you might not have the tool at all. And before day one there’s the application. Some grad programs and interviews include an Excel test, and nobody’s letting you prompt your way through that.
So what’s changed?
I don’t think there’s much value in memorising obscure functions any more. If it’s a formula you’ll use twice a year, asking an AI is perfectly sensible.
What still pays off is having the basics down cold. SUM, IF, SUMIFS, lookups, percentages and absolute references are the words of the language, and you can’t check a sentence if you don’t know the words.
It also pays to know roughly what the answer should be before you see it. If a project only pays back its initial outlay in year seven and the IRR comes out at 38%, something’s off, maybe the range picked up the cumulative cash flow row instead of the annual one, or the outlay landed in the wrong year. You want to be the one who notices that, not your manager, and definitely not the investment committee.
Then there’s laying a sheet out so someone else can follow it (inputs in one place, no numbers typed into the middle of formulas, totals that add across and down), and getting around it without touching the mouse, which is still the quickest way to tell who’s comfortable in Excel and who isn’t.
Calculators didn’t make it pointless to know roughly what 15% of 80 is. If anything they made it more important, because that’s how you notice when you’ve hit the wrong key, and AI is the same.
How I’d use AI while you’re learning
Use it, it’s a great tutor. Ask it why a formula works, get it to explain an error, or ask for a few different ways of doing the same thing. Just do the typing yourself while you’re learning, the same way you can’t learn to drive from the passenger seat.
That’s the idea behind Excel Excelsior. The lessons are short exercises on the kind of sheets you’ll get handed in your first job, and you type the formula in yourself and find out straight away whether it’s right. The first lesson is free and doesn’t need an account.