Sorry AI, old-school spreadsheets are still king

livemint.com:

Spreadsheets remain a go-to application in today’s workplace, but depending on how they’re used, they can hamstring efforts to incorporate artificial intelligence into operations, chief information officers say. As enterprises remain under pressure to leverage generative AI, CIOs say it’s more important than ever to keep their enterprise data properly managed—and the continuing popularity of tools such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets isn’t making the task of managing corporate data any easier, they say.

“Organizations are awash in spreadsheets," said Frank Sicilia, CIO at enterprise software company Egnyte. “I don’t care what it is that you do for a particular organization, somebody’s got a spreadsheet somewhere." Spreadsheets shot up in popularity with the debut of Microsoft Excel in the 1980s, and despite attempts from upstarts, Excel and its ilk remain dominant.

Office workers today use tools such as Excel to visualize, analyze, organize, share and present slices of corporate data—either exported from databases or whipped up on the spot. All these spreadsheets—created, shared, tweaked and retweaked—can result in multiple, conflicting versions of the same data sets living on different employees’ devices, said Bill Cassidy, CIO at life insurer New York Life.

Data, which can include a company’s transaction records, analytics and other types of proprietary information, is considered to be the backbone of any AI model. That’s because that data is used to teach the AI how to spot patterns and make predictions.