The ABR Intelligence Report: The Reports of Excel’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Exploring innovations and analyzing trends in Artificial, Business, and Real-time intelligence.
The Spreadsheet is Dead, Long Live the Spreadsheet
Excel has been around for 40 years, and for at least the last two decades, industry pundits have been predicting its imminent demise. Each new wave of business intelligence tooling, including dashboards, self-service analytics platforms, and more, has been heralded as the long-overdue replacement for rows, columns, and formulas. And yet, despite repeated declarations of obsolescence, Excel stubbornly refuses to die. If anything, it continues to thrive.
This narrative has become particularly pronounced in the age of agentic AI. As autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents promise to ingest vast datasets, reason across domains, and surface insights without human intervention, many observers assume that the humble spreadsheet will finally be rendered unnecessary. Why manually explore data, they ask, when an AI agent can do it for you?
The answer, as it turns out, is that agentic AI is not displacing Excel; its use is being amplified by it.
Why Excel Persists and How Agentic AI Will Prolong Its Use
Excel is the language for business logic. That is why it has remained entrenched in the corporate world.
Finance teams use it to model scenarios. Operations teams use it to reconcile and validate data. Analysts use it as a sandbox to explore hypotheses before formalizing them elsewhere. Executives use it to sanity-check numbers before making decisions. Excel persists because it sits at the intersection of data, reasoning, and human judgment. Agentic AI can reinforce all of these things.
Agentic AI is exceptionally good at performing multi-step analytical tasks: cleaning data, identifying patterns, generating summaries, and even proposing conclusions. Increasingly, AI agents operate within Excel or alongside it, automating the tedious parts while preserving human oversight.
Additionally, AI agents embedded in spreadsheet environments can translate natural language intent into actions, generating formulas, restructuring data, building charts, or explaining results. Essentially, users describe what they want, and the agent handles how it is achieved.
As organizations adopt increasingly automated analytics pipelines, Excel is quietly evolving into a control plane rather than a computation engine. Heavy processing may occur elsewhere, but Excel remains the place where results are reviewed, adjusted, annotated, and shared.
ABR Intelligence News Analysis
PwC Survey: CEOs See No Revenue Growth From AI Investments
PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, based on responses from 4,454 chief executives across 95 countries and territories, had some sobering findings regarding AI’s benefits. Despite huge spending on AI, the survey found that “most CEOs say their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI. Although close to a third (30%) report increased revenue from AI in the last 12 months, and a quarter (26%) are seeing lower costs, more than half (56%) say they’ve realized neither revenue nor cost benefits.”
From its work with organizations, PwC has some clues to change this situation. It found that isolated, tactical AI projects often do not deliver measurable value. Those organizations that carry out enterprise-scale deployment consistent with their company’s business strategy get tangible results. However, to do that requires strong AI foundations, including a technology environment that enables AI integration, a clearly defined roadmap for AI initiatives, formalized Responsible AI and risk processes, and an organizational culture that enables AI adoption.
IBM Embraces Sovereign AI
IBM announced IBM Sovereign Core, an AI-ready, sovereign-enabled software platform for enterprises, governments, and service providers. The solution is purpose-built software for building, deploying, and managing cloud-native and AI workloads under an organization’s own authority, within chosen jurisdictions, built on Red Hat’s open-source foundation.
One distinction of the solution is that Sovereign Core makes sovereignty an inherent property of the software itself. That is in contrast to many other recently announced solutions that are based on approaches that layer sovereignty controls onto existing architectures,