Picture this: A 26-year-old Frenchman hunched over a computer screen, building an Excel monstrosity with 52 columns and 500 rows, trying to track vendor contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros. That was me in 2010, working for France's second-largest telecom company, and it was the moment I realized spreadsheets were humanity's most sophisticated form of self-torture.

Today, as Microsoft pours £800 million into making Excel "smarter" with AI, I have a different prediction: Within a decade, the spreadsheet as we know it will be dead. And good riddance.

The Excel Prison We Built Ourselves

My infamous 52-column spreadsheet wasn't just a data management tool—it was a monument to everything wrong with how businesses handle information. Each column represented a different contract attribute: renewal dates, payment terms, service levels, penalty clauses. Each row was a vendor. The intersections? Pure chaos.

It took me six months to build and populate that spreadsheet. Six months of my life I'll never get back. And here's the kicker: After all that work, the spreadsheet was obsolete the moment I finished it. Contracts changed, terms were renegotiated, new vendors came aboard. My carefully crafted Excel file became a lie frozen in time.

This isn't just my sob story. According to recent studies, 88% of spreadsheets contain significant errors. UK businesses alone lose billions annually to spreadsheet mistakes—from the infamous London Whale trading loss to countless smaller disasters that never make headlines.

The AI Revolution Is Already Here

While Microsoft talks about revolutionizing Excel with AI, the real revolution is happening elsewhere. AI isn't making spreadsheets better—it's making them irrelevant.

Consider what modern AI can do with data:

  • Natural language queries that instantly surface insights ("What's our exposure to vendors in the energy sector?")
  • Real-time analysis that updates continuously, not when someone remembers to refresh a pivot table
  • Pattern recognition that spots anomalies humans would never catch
  • Predictive modeling that actually predicts, rather than just extrapolating past trends

Tools like DataChat, Talonic, and specialized platforms are already delivering these capabilities. They don't look like spreadsheets because they're not constrained by rows and columns—a framework invented for paper ledgers, not digital intelligence.

Why Spreadsheets Can't Survive

The fundamental problem with spreadsheets is architectural. They were designed for a world where:

  • Data was relatively small and static
  • Analysis meant basic arithmetic and maybe a chart
  • One person owned and understood the entire dataset
  • Errors were acceptable because stakes were lower

None of this is true anymore. Modern businesses deal with massive, dynamic datasets that no human can fully comprehend. We need real-time contract analytics software across thousands of agreements, not static cells that lie about yesterday's reality.

The real nail in the coffin? AI doesn't think in rows and columns. When you ask an AI system about your business metrics, it doesn't build a spreadsheet—it queries databases, analyses patterns, and delivers insights. The spreadsheet interface is just unnecessary friction between question and answer.

The Contract Management Canary

Contract management perfectly illustrates this transformation. Remember my 52-column nightmare? Today at Concord, we help companies manage thousands of contracts without a single spreadsheet.

Instead of manually tracking renewal dates in cells, AI monitors them automatically. Rather than building pivot tables to understand vendor spend, machine learning continuously analyses patterns. When someone needs contract management software, they don't export to Excel—they ask questions in plain English and get instant answers.

This isn't just more efficient; it's fundamentally different. The AI doesn't just store data—it understands it. It knows that a contract approaching renewal with a poorly-performing vendor requires different attention than one with a strategic partner. No spreadsheet, no matter how "smart," can replicate this contextual intelligence.

The Next Five Years

Here's my prediction for the spreadsheet's demise:

Years 1-2: AI assistants in Excel become sophisticated enough that people stop using formulas. Why write VLOOKUP when you can ask "What's the total spend for London-based vendors?"

Years 3-4: Businesses realize they're using Excel as a clunky interface to AI, not as a spreadsheet. New tools emerge that skip the grid entirely, going straight from question to insight.

Year 5: The tipping point. Just as email killed the fax machine seemingly overnight, businesses abandon spreadsheets en masse for AI-native data tools. Excel becomes what it always should have been—a simple tool for basic lists and calculations, not the Swiss Army knife of business intelligence.

The Human Element

Some will argue that spreadsheets give users "control" and "transparency" that AI lacks. This is nostalgia talking. Did my 52-column monster give me control? No—it gave me the illusion of control while hiding errors in its labyrinthine cells.

True control comes from understanding your data's story, not from manipulating its storage format. When AI can instantly show you trends, anomalies, and predictions across millions of data points, that's real transparency. A spreadsheet showing you 0.01% of your data in a grid isn't transparent—it's myopic.

Embracing the Post-Spreadsheet World

For UK businesses clinging to Excel, the message is clear: The spreadsheet era is ending. Not because Microsoft says so, but because the fundamental assumptions that made spreadsheets useful no longer hold.

The businesses that thrive will be those that abandon the rows-and-columns mindset and embrace AI-native data management. They'll ask questions instead of building formulas. They'll trust machine learning over manual pivot tables. They'll realize that in a world of infinite data, the constraint isn't storage or processing—it's human comprehension.

My 52-column spreadsheet taught me an invaluable lesson: When a tool forces you to work harder instead of smarter, it's time for a new tool. For spreadsheets, that time has come.

The future of business intelligence isn't Excel with AI bolted on. It's AI that makes Excel obsolete. And somewhere in France, there's a filing cabinet full of vendor contracts that couldn't agree more.

Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Before founding Concord, Matt worked with Nicholas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign and later for a major telecom company, where his frustration with manual contract management inspired him to transform how businesses handle agreements.