AI won’t just disrupt jobs, but it can also end up disrupting some popular software tools.
That’s the striking prediction from Andrew Chen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), who has made the case that AI-powered code generation will render spreadsheets — one of the most ubiquitous tools in the history of business computing — effectively obsolete. Keith Rabois agreed with his assessment, quote-posting “agree” to his post on X.
“AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code,” Chen wrote. “You get all the advantages of software — libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness.”
The argument is rooted in a reframing of what spreadsheets fundamentally are. “Think about what spreadsheets actually are: they’re business logic that’s trapped in a grid,” Chen writes. “Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution — these are all fundamentally programs that we’ve been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row.”
The Barrier That No Longer Exists
For decades, the spreadsheet survived not because it was the best tool for the job, but because it was the most accessible one. Chen is blunt about this: “The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn’t learn Python in a month.”
AI code generation, he argues, has collapsed that barrier entirely. “Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application — with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from ‘spreadsheet’ to ‘software’ just collapsed to near zero.”
This is consistent with a broader shift already underway in how software gets written. Node.js creator Ryan Dahl has declared that “the era of humans writing code is over,” while Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that over 30% of code at Google is now written by AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has projected that 90% of coding could be done by AI within the near term. Tools like Cursor, Lovable, and other AI coding agents are already enabling non-developers to build full-stack applications through natural language prompts alone.
A Billion Users, About to Migrate
The scale of the disruption Chen is describing is staggering. “There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide,” he notes. “Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software.”
The implications are concrete. “Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products,” Chen writes. “The ‘shadow IT’ spreadsheet that runs half the company’s operations finally gets proper infrastructure.”
This “shadow IT” phenomenon is well-documented across organizations of all sizes — finance teams running critical models on shared drives, operations teams tracking inventory in color-coded tabs, marketing teams doing attribution in formulas no one fully understands. Chen’s thesis is that AI doesn’t just improve these workflows; it eliminates the need for the medium itself.
The Next Great Equalizer
Perhaps the most consequential part of Chen’s prediction is what it means for the democratization of software development. The spreadsheet, he argues, was itself a great equalizer — it allowed non-technical knowledge workers to build things that would otherwise have required a developer. But AI code generation is something far more powerful.
“The spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things,” Chen writes. “AI code gen is the next great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We’re about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.”
That democratizing potential maps onto a trend already visible in how AI is being used across professions. Anthropic’s own usage data shows that computer and mathematical queries account for 37% of all conversations on Claude — far outpacing the 3.4% of the US population in those fields. Business and financial operations workers are also among the leading adopters, suggesting that the finance analyst Chen describes is already beginning to make the transition.
What It Means for Software and Enterprise
The downstream consequences of Chen’s prediction extend beyond the spreadsheet itself. If a significant portion of the roughly one billion spreadsheet users migrate to code-based tools, it would represent one of the largest shifts in enterprise software in decades — comparable to the move from paper to digital, or from on-premise software to the cloud.
For Microsoft — whose Office suite includes Excel, arguably the world’s most widely used spreadsheet application — and Google, whose Sheets product is embedded in millions of organizations, Chen’s prediction poses an existential question about the future of their most entrenched products. Whether either company can evolve those tools fast enough to remain relevant in a world where natural language can generate real software is an open question. But what seems increasingly clear, though, is that the spreadsheet’s decades-long dominance as the default interface for business logic may be approaching its end.