Every venture capitalist from Palo Alto to Shoreditch is currently throwing billions at Large Language Models in the hope of birthing a digital god. We are told that AI is the new electricity, the new fire, the new steam engine.

But after 15 years of being a Software Developer across the corporate landscape of the UK, if you want to know what actually keeps the lights on in the global economy - what ensures the cargo ships arrive in Singapore and the payroll clears for a mid-sized plumbing firm in Chester, don’t look at a neural network. Look at a .XLSM file. The Excel Macro is the ultimate unsexy tech hero. It is the digital equivalent of the Roman arch: old, slightly clunky, but so structurally sound that we’ve built an entire civilisation on top of it.

In the world of behavioral science, we often talk about the "IKEA effect" - the idea that we value things more when we’ve had a hand in building them. This is the secret sauce of the spreadsheet. A software engineer looks at a complex Excel workbook held together by VBA and sees a legacy nightmare. But the Chief Financial Officer looks at it and sees agency.

Unlike the incomprehensible Black Box of a SaaS application, an Excel macro is a transparent labour of love. It was Low Code before marketing departments invented the term. It allows a person who understands business, rather than tech, to automate their own reality.

I’ve done work for Investment Banks that spent millions trying to digitally transform trading desks by replacing these spreadsheets with sleek, multi-million pound software systems - effectively trying to trade the messy, human-centric flexibility of Excel for the rigid efficiency of a centralised database. And guess what happened? The analysts and traders invariably spent the following six months figuring out how to export the data back into Excel so they can actually get some work done. They didn't value Excel because it’s the best technology; They valued it because it is the most forgiving. It allows for the "fudge factor." It accounts for the fact that the real world is not a clean set of training data, but a series of exceptions, last-minute changes, and human errors.

AI is a utility - a pressurised pipe of intelligence, as I’ve argued before. But Excel is the bucket. It’s the tool we pick up when we need to move something from A to B ourselves. While the world waits for AI to automate the future, the present is being held together by a 67-year-old accountant named Bernard and a Macro he wrote in 2004 that calculates the global supply of zinc.

Innovation is flashy, but resilience is boring. And in a world of hype, the most radical thing you can be is a spreadsheet that actually works.