Summary

Stancil traces the decades-long unfulfilled promise that analysts would eventually graduate from grunt work to 'strategic insights,' arguing that AI-driven Q&A won't deliver this escape either — because answering 95% of questions at 10-20x volume still leaves analysts with the same load. The real opportunity, he argues, is AI agent swarms doing exploratory analytics, and the surprising punchline is that the ideal infrastructure for this already exists: Excel-style portable, self-contained file-based computation.

Key Insight

AI won't free analysts from volume by answering questions faster — it will multiply questions — but it could unlock genuine exploratory insight work if analytics infrastructure embraces portable, file-based sandboxes rather than SaaS, making Excel an unlikely but apt model for the agentic analytics future.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 8

  If people are asking an analyst to answer five questions a day, and now people are asking 100 questions, and the AI bots can answer 95 percent of them, that leaves the analyst to answer…five questions a day.

• 9

  On the other hand, that's just…Excel?

• 6

  insight isn't the data; it is what's not in our heads

• 5

  Excel is a self-contained computational sandbox. It contains built-in methods for manipulating and displaying data. It is very easy to snapshot (you save the file)… And if AI is good at working with anything, it's good at working with files.

• 4

  To the extent the analysts have done 'strategic exploratory work,' that's usually how it's happened—across dozens of slowly advancing files, one finding stacked on top of the other, until, after days or weeks or months of poking, something useful falls out.

Tone

satirical, reflective