AI Just Showed Up in the Spreadsheet
This week a department asked me to help them learn AI in Excel. Not a pilot program. Not a request from leadership. A group of people who use spreadsheets every day looked at what’s happening...
This week a department asked me to help them learn AI in Excel.
Not a pilot program. Not a request from leadership. A group of people who use spreadsheets every day looked at what’s happening and said: we want to learn this.
What they didn’t know is how much the tools had already changed underneath them.
That’s the signal most companies miss.
⸻
The old playbook doesn’t apply anymore A special project. A new tool with its own onboarding deck and its own budget line.
That made sense two years ago when the tools were separate. You had to go somewhere else to use AI. Open a different app. Learn a different interface. Speak a different language.
That’s not where we are anymore.
This week Google shipped Gemini directly into Sheets. Not as a sidebar. Not as an add-on. Inside the cells. You describe what you want in plain language and the spreadsheet builds itself. Microsoft did the same with Copilot in Excel. The AI doesn’t live somewhere else now. It lives where the work already happens.
That team didn’t know any of this. They just knew they were curious. My job was to meet that curiosity with context.
Most companies aren’t ready for that combination.
⸻
Access isn’t the problem anymore. Fluency is. You picked a vendor. You rolled out access. You trained people on a new platform.
When AI is inside the tools people already use, adoption becomes a fluency problem. The question isn’t whether people have access. It’s whether they know what to ask for. Whether they trust the output. Whether they understand what the system is actually doing when it fills in a column or writes a formula.
That’s a different kind of readiness. And it requires a different kind of support.
⸻
Three questions that expose the gap
Do your people know AI is already inside the tools they use every day? Or are they still thinking of AI as something that happens somewhere else?
When someone asks how to use AI in their workflow, does the organization treat that as signal or noise?
Is there a place for people to learn this that doesn’t require them to stop doing their job?
If the answer to any of these is no, you have a structural gap. Not a technology gap.
⸻
The correct order of operations: It’s an operating model change. The way people build reports and analyze data and make decisions is different now. Treat it that way.
Then, meet people where the curiosity already is. Don’t wait for a company-wide rollout. When a department asks to learn, that’s your entry point. Build from pull, not push.
Only then do you build fluency programs around the actual tools people use. Not abstract AI training. Not prompt engineering workshops. Hands-on practice inside the spreadsheets and documents and CRM systems where work already lives.
The mistake most companies make is building AI fluency programs disconnected from the work. The right move is building fluency programs that start inside the tools people already use and expand from there.
⸻
What real adoption looks like
It’s someone in a department raising their hand and saying: I want to understand what this can do in the tool I already use.
It’s a salesperson asking how AI fits into her actual sales process. Not because she was told to. Because she’s curious.
It’s an organization that treats those moments as the most valuable signal it has.
The fastest adoption doesn’t come from mandates. It comes from proximity. When AI shows up inside the spreadsheet, inside the inbox, inside the CRM, adoption stops being a project and starts being a habit.
The companies that recognize this build fluency programs around workflow. They channel the curiosity into structure. They make the learning accessible before the mandate arrives.
That’s the difference between adoption that sticks and adoption that stalls.
⸻
AI capability isn’t scarce. Curiosity is.
When your people start asking how to use AI inside the tools they already know, that’s not a training request.
That’s the competitive advantage showing up on its own.
The only question is whether you’re ready to meet it.