The Intern

Two years ago, I hired a college student. Summer intern. Smart kid, willing to learn, zero Excel or business experience. To set the stage properly, he had never opened an Excel sheet in his life.

I gave him a premium ChatGPT membership and a stack of tasks.

The tasks were not simple. They were the kind of Excel work I’d spent two decades learning to do well:

• Layered analysis

• Conditional logic

• Macro writing

• Pivot tables on top of pivot tables

• Reporting structures that pull from multiple data sources

• Complex, clean, accurate output

The work required thinking in spreadsheets, not simply using them.

I spent twenty years building models, writing nested formulas, designing dashboards that could survive handoff to a client who’d never touch the underlying architecture. I learned this craft the way most operators my age did: slowly, painfully, one broken VLOOKUP at a time.

The intern learned it all in two days.

He did not master the theory or concepts. He learned to execute the output. He sat with ChatGPT and described what he needed, directed its writing of Python scripts, which were then placed in the Google Script Editor, followed by downloading the Google Sheets’ output as Excel files.

He didn’t so much understand all the code.

He didn’t need to.

He understood the problem, described it clearly, and the machine built the solution.

By day three the quality of his output matched mine. By the end of the first week, some of it was better.

Cleaner formatting.

More elegant logic.

Fewer redundancies in the cell architecture than I would have built by hand.

Then the competence compounded.

Once he could build advanced spreadsheets, he could do data cleansing.

Once he could cleanse data, he could build reporting pipelines.

Within two weeks he was performing work that I would have previously needed to hire a specialist to do, or spend my own billable hours completing.

A college kid with no experience and a forty-dollar monthly subscription had replicated the functional output of a twenty-year practitioner.

I more than noticed.

I didn’t file it away.

It’s true that he couldn’t describe what needed building or articulate the more complex bits of the business logic and strategic intuition required for the larger project, but he could perform, with Chat, the most laborious parts of the work in profoundly less time.

That was the week I knew I was becoming obsolete.

When did this happen for you?

- j -