I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

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• Hacker News
• Being a copilot for Excel is an extremely challenging task. I've read many papers on this subject and feel that current technology is still far from achieving 90% or higher accuracy. If you frequently use ChatGPT to analyze Excel, I believe you also often encounter situations where it fails or makes mistakes, and this feature of ChatGPT (Code Interpreter) has been out for over two years now. Of course, ChatGPT is quite naive when handling Excel; it doesn't even bother to analyze how many tables are actually in a sheet, always foolishly treating each sheet as a single table.
  by andreww_young
• It's verifier law.

  Coding agents are useful and good and real products because when they screw up, things stop working almost always before they can do damage. Coding agents are flawed in ways that existing tools are good at catching, never mind the more obvious build and runtime errors.

  Letting AI write your emails and create your P&L and cash flow projections doesn't have to run the gauntlet of tools that were created to stop flawed humans from creating bad code.

  by Zigurd
• Another problem is that the AI may try to fudge the numbers to mask its mistakes so they look like they all add up while the rot is hidden away. Just like it tries to manipulate the unit tests so they pass without fixing the _actual_ bug. I've seen it happen.
  by insane_dreamer
• Nah, I've seen them screw in all sorts of ways that would fail in some conditions and not others. You're way too optimistic about this.
  by phyzome
• Using ai does not absolve you from the responsibility of doing it correctly. If you use ai, then you better have the skills to have done the job yourself, and so have the ability to check the AI did things correctly.

  You can save time still, but perhaps not as much as you think, because you need to check the ai's work thoroughly.

  by alienbaby
• It looks like the OP is thinking that AI causing errors in spreadsheets is going to make the whole economy collapse.

  When tools break, people stop using them before they sink the ship down. If AI is that terrible at spreadsheet, people will just revert to Brenda.

  And it's not like spreadsheets have no errors right now.

  by d--b
• Many fears of “AI mucking it up” could be mitigated with an ability to connect a workbook to a git repository. Not for data, but for VBA, cell formulas, and cell metadata. When you can encapsulate the changes a contributor (in this case co-pilot) makes into a commit, you can more easily understand what changes it/they made.
  by jwsteigerwalt
• Even if "teaching the rest of the workforce how to use Git" wasn't a massive obstacle, many (most?) corporate workflows involve editing files that weren't designed to be human-readable. There are a couple of approaches out there for comparing diffs to excel spreadsheets specifically, but it's not exactly pleasant.
  by smoothbran
• Brenda has been getting slower over the years -as we all have-, but soon the boss will learn that it was a small price to pay for knowing well how to keep such house of cards from collapsing.
  by AmbroseBierce
• And then the boss will make the decision to outsource her job, to a company that promises the use of AI to make finance better, and faster, and while Brenda is in the unemployment line, someone else thousands of miles away is celebrating a new job
  by Simulacra
• That mirrors my experience as well. LLMs get instantly confused in real world scenarios in Excel and confidently hallucinate millions in errors

  If you look at the demos for these it’s always something that is clean and abundantly available in training data. Like an income statement. Or a textbook example DCF. Or my personal fav „here is some data show me insights“. Real world excel use looks nothing like that.

  I’m getting some utility out of them for some corporate tasks but zilch in excel space.

  by Havoc
• As somebody with non-existent experience with Excel, I could totally see myself getting a lot of value out of LLMs, if nothing else then simply for telling me what's possible, what functions and patterns exist at all etc.
  by lxgr
• Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different.

  “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management.

  “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking everyone for the same information, twice. And they’re so focused on their little spreadsheet worlds that neither sees enough of the bigger picture to say, ‘Wait… couldn’t we just automate this so we don’t need to do this song and dance every month? Then we wouldn’t need two people in different parts of the company compiling the same data manually.’

  “But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. She’s a spreadsheet person, not a process fixer. She just makes the spreadsheets.”

  We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them.

  by Esophagus4
• > But that’s not what Brenda was hired for.

  Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?

  by RegW
• "We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them."

  True... I have an on-staff data engineer for the purpose. But not all companies (especially in the SMB space) have that luxury.

  by SirFatty
• But then you need someone to maintain/look after that automation, and they'll be more expensive than two Brendas

  And now if one of the Brendas wants to change their process slightly, add some more info, they can't just do it anymore. They have to have a three way discussion with the other Brenda, the automation guy and maybe a few managers. It will take months. So then its likely better for Brenda to just go back to using her spreadsheet again, and then you've got an automated process that no longer meets peoples needs and will be a faff to update.

  by codeulike
• Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue.

  If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company.

  To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.

  by martin-t
• > We need fewer Brendas...

  We need more Brendas (those who excel goddesses come and kiss on the forehead) and need less people who are disrespectful of Brendas. The example in this post is someone giving more respect to AI than Brenda.

  by nashashmi
• And then you end up with a team of five people each tree times as expensive as Brenda, and what used to be an email now takes a sprint and has to go through ticket system.
  by oytis
• I work in corporate finance and these issues are certainly present. However, they are almost always known and determined low priority to have a better process built. Finance processes are nearly always a non priority as a pure cost center/overhead there’s not many companies that want to invest in improving the situation, they’ll limp along with minimal investment even once big and profitable.

  That said, every finance function is different and it may be unknown to them that you’re being asked for some data multiple times. If you’re enduring this process, I’m of the opinion you’re equally at fault. Suggest a solution that will be easier on you. As it’s possible they don’t even know it’s happening. In the case provided, email to all relevant finance people “Here’s a link to a shared workbook. I’ll drop the numbers here monthly, please save the link and get the data directly from that file. Thanks!” Problem solved. Until you don’t follow through which is what causes most finance people to be constantly asking for data/things. So be kind and also set yourself a monthly recurring reminder on your calendar and actually follow through.

  by conductr
• With respect, you probably only see that bit of Finance, but doesn't mean that is all Brenda does.

  At least half of the work in my senior Finance team involves meeting people in operations to find out what they are planning to do and to analyse the effects, and present them to decision makers to help them understand the consequences of decisions. For an AI to help, someone would have to trigger those conversations in the first place and ask the right questions.

  The rest of the work involves tidying up all the exceptions that the automation failed on.

  Meanwhile copilot in Excel can't even edit the sheet you are working on. If you say to it, 'give me a template for an expense claim' it will give you a sheet to download... probably with #REF written in where the answers should be.

  by jimnotgym
• This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086...

  (I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)

  by simonw
• You... could have given the job to Brenda instead, unless the irony was the point?
  by sionisrecur
• This may be the first quote from TikTok reposted on a blog, that ends up this high up in HN.
  by 6thbit
• I can see that MacWhisper uses parakeet v2 as the model (although it allows choosing another model).

  Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model?

  by self_awareness
• It's a little over two paragraphs. Seems like it would have been simpler just to... type it out?
  by donatj
• This reminds me of a friend whose company ran a daily perl script that committed every financial transaction of the day to a database. Without the script, the company could literally make no money irrespectively of sales because this database was one piece in a complex system for payment processor interoperability.

  The script ran in a machine located at the corner of a cubicle and only one employee had the admin password. Nobody but a handful of people knew of the machine's existence, certainly not anyone in middle management and above. The script could only be updated by an admin.

  Copilot may be good, but sure as hell doesn't know that admin password.

  by glimshe
• And that’s why consultants exist, because employees do insane shit like that
  by MagicMoonlight
• This sort of gimmick is not going to help anyone keeping their job.
  by ozim
• An old colleague and friend used to print out a 30 page perl script he wrote to do almost exactly this in this scenario. A stapled copy could always be found on his dining room table.
  by chaps