What Spreadsheets Taught me About the Future of Agentic AI

I am in the middle of my company's annual planning process for our forthcoming fiscal year. It is a widely accepted corporate ritual involving myriad meetings and conferences—sales kickoffs, planning off-sites, strategy sessions, and so on—essentially a lot of pow-wows, presentations, and, of course, analysis of arrays of operational data using spreadsheets. A standing corporate joke in the Technology Services industry I work in is that the ultimate programming language to master is spreadsheet formulas! For a large part of my career, it was Microsoft Excel, and now it happens to be Google Sheets.