ChatGPT is becoming the new Excel

Remember those days? The Wild West of spreadsheets. Everyone, from the intern to the CEO, had their own personal Excel masterpiece. Budgets, trackers, project plans – all meticulously crafted, often with a hidden formula that only made sense to the creator (and sometimes not even to them a week later).

The Glorious Chaos of Personal Tools

Excel, in its prime, was the ultimate "bottom-up" tool. Need to track your tasks? Excel. Generate a massive SQL insert script? Excel. Create the executive dashboard? Excel. The beauty was its accessibility. Anyone could jump in, hack something together, and instantly feel like a data wizard.

Sales teams loved using 17 different Excel sheets to track leads. Each rep had their own, with their own unique color-coding system and a "secret" column for "gut feeling." It was brilliant for them individually, a nightmare for the sales manager trying to get a unified forecast. "Just consolidate them!" The response was always a blank stare, followed by "But mine works for me!"

Enter ChatGPT: The New Kid on the Block (with a Familiar Vibe)

Fast forward to today, and we're seeing a similar phenomenon with ChatGPT. Everyone's tinkering. Need a quick email follow up? ChatGPT. Brainstorming blog post ideas? ChatGPT. Analyzing reports? ChatGPT

It's empowering, right? Suddenly, you have a personal AI assistant, ready to churn out text, code, or even terrible poetry on demand. It's the ultimate "bottom-up" AI tool.

The Inevitable Scaling Headache

But here's where the comparison gets a bit more… Excel-like. Just as those individual spreadsheets started to buckle under the weight of team collaboration and enterprise demands, so too will our personal ChatGPT hacks.

Imagine this: A marketing team, each member using their own ChatGPT prompts and methods to generate campaign copy. Some are getting amazing results, others… not so much. The brand voice is fragmented, the messaging inconsistent. The marketing director throws their hands up and says, "Can't we just have one approved AI for this?"

Or consider a support team. One person uses ChatGPT for quick answers, another for empathetic replies, a third for comedic relief. While individually helpful, the lack of a standardized, scalable approach means inconsistent customer experiences and a mountain of unmaintainable, idiosyncratic AI "workflows." Add the demands of corporate policy or worse yet compliance constraints and it all falls apart pretty quickly.

The Future: From Personal Hacks to Enterprise Solutions

Just as we learned to embrace proper databases, CRM systems, and collaborative tools over countless individual spreadsheets, we'll need to do the same with AI. The individual experimentation with ChatGPT is invaluable – it's how we discover what works and what doesn't. But for real business impact, we need to move beyond isolated, unscalable hacks.

I’ve been working in the enterprise AI space for 12 years - starting way back when we were calling it “predictive analytics!” My companies have developed platforms to become great at picking up those diamonds in the rough and creating enterprise agents. That means setting up data governance, software maintenance process, responsibility and safety controls and putting experts seamlessly in the loop to close the AI quality gap. 

We’re seeing a lot of companies who are starting to wonder why they aren’t getting the productivity juice from their AI squeeze, and a few who are ahead of the Enterprise AI Curve seeing 400%+ ROI in just a few months.

If you’re in the rarified air, congratulations! You’ll likely dominate within the next 2-3 years. If you need some help getting there, reach out to me.

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