Are you still climbing the stairs one step at a time?
When disruption hits, the question isn’t who’s fallen behind, but how many processes you keep alive just because they’ve always been there.
The impact of Artificial Intelligence on business is no longer in doubt, and everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, is already thinking (or acting) on how to apply it to their processes, including how they run the company. And even so, it never ceases to surprise me how it has become a source of everyday decisions.
A business owner told me a few days ago how his accountant (60 years old) still did the books by hand (you read that right, by hand), and how the CFO he'd hired (30 years old) only uses Claude to do his job. The owner's complaint was that the accountant didn't use Excel and, while he'd been right for the more than 40 years she'd been with the company, the arrival of a CFO who doesn't use it as a base either leaves us facing an opportunity.
What if Excel is what's redundant?
I know, many of these AI tools still rely on that program to run, but unlike my client, I saw this situation as an opportunity, not a problem. For the first time in all these years, there's no conflict over which tool to use, and we can jump straight to the next one. It's like those who went from the CD to Spotify without passing through Napster (my fellow Gen Xers know what I mean); those who pay by phone in Africa without ever having had a bank account, skipping in one leap the whole branch-banking system we still drag around here; or many of us, who've gone from the paper map to the phone's GPS without ever stopping at the car's sat-nav.
Technological and generational leaps aren't always linear, and we need to understand this when facing a disruption like the one we're living through, so as not to hold back the development of processes tied to a technology that, at the company I visited, only the Managing Director now uses intensively. "Maybe what's needed, I told him, isn't teaching the accountant Excel. It's all of us dropping it altogether." Because the real question isn't who's fallen behind. It's what you're holding on to that no longer needed holding.
How many stairs do you keep climbing one step at a time when there's already a lift?
© Oriol López Villena 2026