If a machine can sum a column in a microsecond, why would we need the man who took an hour?
The best Microsoft Excel commercial ever created was aired in 1990
In 1990, I was a little too young to appreciate this Microsoft Excel commercial:
Excel: the disruptor of the “human calculator.”
I was a little too young, but somehow I can imagine the intellectual class of the 80s predicting the end of the accounting profession, seeing a 1:1 replacement with human beings.
If a machine can sum a column in a microsecond, why would we need the man who took an hour?
Today, 36 years after this commercial, we have more accountants, more analysts, and more “Excel Ninjas” than the 1990 mind could grasp. Excel eliminated the drudgery of the task, which in turn lowered the marginal cost of calculation, which (by the laws of Lindy and economic expansion) exploded the demand for complexity.
Today, 36 years after this commercial, we are hearing the same hysterical refrain regarding Generative AI: “This time is different” (but whenever someone tells you this time is different, they are usually trying to sell you either a doomsday bunker or a subprime mortgage).
From arithmetic to architecture
When the spreadsheet arrived, the “arithmetic” skill became a commodity, and the value shifted to Information Architecture. Nobody cared about who could add the fastest, but you surely had an edge if you could build the best model.
We are seeing the same inversion now:
1990: The cost of calculation went to zero.
2026: The cost of “first-draft” content and coding is going to zero (rapidly).
Does this mean the Consultant, the Lawyer, or the Engineer is obsolete? Well, only the ones who define themselves by the “arithmetic” of their trade.
If your value is merely generating a standard contract or writing a boilerplate script, you are a manual ledger in a 1990 world.
A spreadsheet can give you a P&L, but it cannot give a leadership team the vulnerability required to admit their strategy is failing. An AI can draft a “Mission Statement,” but it cannot sit in a room and forge the “Five Disfunctions”-proof bond that makes a team actually execute.
The “spreadsheet-era” demonstrated that as tools become more powerful, the bottleneck becomes human interpretation, understanding, empathy, EQ, etc etc
And so, are we indeed witnessing the end of work, or are we witnessing the end of boring work?
The “smart guys” of 1990 thought they were all losing their jobs when, in reality, they were being promoted to a higher level of abstraction.
The same is happening today.
Your job is not to fight the AI, but to become the person who knows what to ask it, how to vet its “hallucinations”, and how to apply the result to solve a human problem.
History is a great teacher for those who don’t think they are smarter than it:
The spreadsheet created the Analyst, it didn’t kill the Analyst!
AI won’t kill the Partner either. It will finally demand that the Partner actually partners, focusing on discernment, ethics, sense-making, leadership rather than the “arithmetic” of the slide deck.
In the 1970s and 80s, “Legal Research” meant sitting in a basement for 40 hours, manually cross-referencing leather-bound books to find a single precedent. When LexisNexis and Westlaw digitized the law, the “researcher” role was effectively automated, and the legal profession exploded.
For a century, a doctor’s primary value was their “internal database”, ie, remembering symptoms and matching them to diseases. Today, AI-powered imaging and diagnostic tools can out-read a radiologist and out-diagnose a generalist in specific pattern-matching tasks. This is the best thing to happen to medicine (!): it frees the physician from being a sub-optimal “search engine” and allows them to return to the Healer role.
A pattern emerges: technology always attacks the routine-analytical and the routine-manual, leaving behind a “human residual” (actually, the most valuable part of the job).
Will this time be actually different?
Let me know in the comments…
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Great post Maurizio - AI is a normal technology. Soon enough we will see the new work and value that it generates when we automate portion of the old.
This commercial is a fascinating snapshot of the anxiety around automation in the early 90s. The rhetorical question posed - "why would we need the man who took an hour?" - captures the raw fear of technological displacement. Yet 35 years later, we've learned that speed isn't the full equation. The human who took an hour might have been doing critical thinking, verifying assumptions, or catching errors that a microsecond calculation would miss. The real value shift has been humans moving from calculators to decision-makers.