You Need to Address the Spreadsheet in the Room

I came across a spreadsheet recently that got me thinking about AI readiness in a completely different way.

It wasn't a huge database or some complicated legacy system. It was simply a spreadsheet being used to manage an important operational process within a busy part of an organisation.

There was nothing particularly unusual about that. Spreadsheets are incredibly useful and every organisation has them.

The interesting part was what the spreadsheet represented.

It wasn't simply storing information. Over time, it had effectively become part of a business process. People entered information into it, interpreted what was there, knew what needed to happen next and used their own knowledge to bridge the gaps.

The spreadsheet worked because the people around it made it work.

And that's when something struck me.

The spreadsheet isn't really the problem

It's easy to look at something like this and say, "We need a better system."

But replacing the spreadsheet isn't actually the difficult part.

First you have to understand what is happening inside it.

Why is this information being captured? Who needs it? What does each piece of information mean? What happens when something changes? What decisions are being made from it? What happens next? What knowledge exists around the spreadsheet that isn't actually recorded anywhere in it?

The deeper I looked, the more the spreadsheet became a window into the process surrounding it.

And that process had to be understood before technology - AI or otherwise - could meaningfully improve it.

Every organisation has a version of this

It may not be a spreadsheet.

It could be a shared mailbox, an old database, a folder structure, a document someone manually updates, a process handed from one employee to another, or something that exists largely because everyone involved knows what they're supposed to do.

Individually, these things can look insignificant.

Collectively, they tell us an enormous amount about how an organisation actually operates.

And that's why I think they matter to AI readiness.

AI isn't only going to encounter our beautifully governed enterprise systems. It is going to encounter the reality of how information and work move through our organisations.

If we don't understand that reality, we're missing an important part of the readiness picture.

Address the spreadsheet in the room

This doesn't mean every spreadsheet needs to disappear before an organisation can use AI. Nor does every workaround need an enterprise transformation project.

It means we need to be curious about them.

Why does this exist? What problem is it solving? What does it tell us about the way we work? Is there now a better way?

Sometimes a humble spreadsheet can reveal more about an organisation's readiness than a technology inventory ever will.

Before we build the AI-enabled organisation of the future, perhaps we need to address the spreadsheet in the room.