Every few decades, a tool comes along that quietly changes who gets to compete.
Right now, everyone is talking about AI as if it’s some unprecedented force — a revolution that will reshape work, business, and society from the ground up.
It is powerful.
It is disruptive.
But it is NOT the first time technology has leveled the playing field.
Excel® did that decades ago.
And if you ran a small business in the 80s or 90s, you know exactly what I mean.
Before Excel, Scale Meant Analytical Power
There was a time when serious financial analysis required:
- An accounting department
- Specialized staff
- Time-consuming manual models
- Institutional resources
Forecasting cash flow, modeling margins, running “what-if” scenarios — those were not everyday tools. They were organizational capabilities. Larger firms had them. Smaller firms often did not.
Then the spreadsheet arrived. A miracle.
Excel put modeling power on a desktop. Suddenly, anyone who took the time to learn Excel could:
- Forecast revenue and expenses
- Test pricing strategies
- Model investment decisions
- Analyze performance trends
The advantage gap didn’t disappear. Large firms still had more capital, more distribution, and more brand power. But something fundamental changed:
Analytical capability stopped being exclusive to scale.
A small business owner with Excel could make decisions with the same financial visibility that once required a department.
Excel didn’t make everyone smarter.
It gave smart people leverage.
AI Is the Next Layer Up
AI is doing something similar — giving business owners even MORE control than Excel did.
Excel democratized quantitative analysis.
AI is democratizing cognitive and creative work, research. It draws from universal knowledge. And, boy, is it fast.
Look at what a small business can now do with AI tools:
- Draft marketing copy in minutes
- Generate product descriptions and packaging language
- Analyze customer data and feedback patterns
- Brainstorm product ideas and positioning
- Create visuals and mockups for campaigns
- Automate routine communication and support
None of this requires a large team anymore. Tasks that once demanded a marketing department, design agency or research consultant can now be handled — imperfectly but effectively — by a small team with the right tools and judgment.
Just like Excel didn’t replace accountants overnight, AI isn’t going to replace people across the board. But it will change the labor required per unit of output.
That’s where the real impact sits.
The Leveling Effect (With Limits)
There’s an important nuance here.
Excel didn’t eliminate scale advantages. Walmart still outbought smaller retailers. Big manufacturers still had better distribution. But small firms could operate more intelligently.
AI is following the same pattern.
AI helps smaller firms:
- Move faster
- Experiment more cheaply
- Produce more content and ideas
- Compete in branding and communication
- Programming
What it doesn’t do (at least not yet) is eliminate:
- Purchasing power advantages
- Supply chain scale
- Regulatory leverage
- Market dominance
So AI narrows the capability gaps, not the scale gaps.
That’s a big deal.
Why This Matters
A lot of AI discussion focuses on extremes:
- “AI will take all the jobs.”
- “AI will transform everything overnight.”
- “AI changes the entire economic structure.”
Those claims make good headlines. But for most businesses, the real story is more practical:
AI is a force multiplier for people who already know how to run things.
The same way Excel didn’t magically create good managers, AI doesn’t create good operators. It amplifies the ones who already understand:
- numbers
- customers
- margins
- positioning
AI, like Excel before it, rewards the person who knows what question to ask.
The Quiet Employment Impact
There’s another parallel worth noting.
Excel didn’t trigger mass layoffs of accountants overnight. Instead, it changed how many people were needed for certain tasks and how quickly work could be done.
Beyond accounting. For example, for one client, we exported from their SAP enterprise system and did in Excel what SAP couldn’t do without “severe programming.” For another client, we do comparative analysis of customer files to make sure there is an acceptable level of duplicate customers. And for still another, we used Excel to do RFM analysis that helped that client understand why his sales were lagging.
AI is having similar effects today. For example, it is giving small businesses the ability to generate realistic graphics. It can take loads of data and analyze it to produce insights that normally require heavy-duty software.
AI does this by users who know how to ask the right questions. Slowly but surely, it’s going to cut jobs through:
- Roles that never get filled and never need to be filled
- Shrinking teams that don’t need to grow as large as they once would have to grow
- Converging skill sets from diverse individuals to produce more with fewer support layers
This is employment impact by compression, not collapse.
The Real Competitive Edge
So no, AI isn’t the first leveler.
It’s the latest in a long line of tools that gave and give individuals and teams access to capabilities once reserved for large organizations.
Excel leveled analysis.
The internet leveled distribution.
Cloud software leveled infrastructure.
AI is leveling idea generation, communication, and knowledge work.
The pattern is familiar:
Technology doesn’t remove the need for judgment. It increases the return on it.
And just like with Excel, the advantage will not come from having the tool.
It will come from knowing how to use it to make better decisions than the person who doesn’t.
That’s where AI’s real power sits — not in replacing people wholesale, but in quietly expanding what a capable person can do.
Thanks for reading. What’s your take?