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Brian Jones

Verified account Microsoft Copilot

@brijones

I lead Excel at Microsoft. Thinking about the role spreadsheets play when people and AI work together.
Austin, TX linkedin.com/in/brijones/ Joined May 2009
323 Following 3.2K Followers 1.5K Posts

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Brian Jones Verified account @brijones
Imagine working with the smartest person in the world, but you're only allowed to communicate through text. No sketches, no charts, no pointing at things.

You'd get there eventually. But a picture really is worth a thousand words.

A spreadsheet is probably worth ten thousand.
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Brian Jones Verified account @brijones
Q: "Is Excel under threat?"
A: "No, it's like my love language, dude."

Praveer does a great job articulating a point I've made here and with my team all the time. Most of how we talk to AI today is text chat, but some things are easier to show than describe. His color wheel example is a good one. You can pick the shade faster than you can explain it in a prompt. Spreadsheets are a great language for communicating with AI, just like they help in communicating with other people. A picture is worth a thousand words... a spreadsheet is probably worth ten thousand.

Great conversation @seema_amble @IvanoMakSF... Praveer's answer starts at 40:35
x.com/a16z/status/21…
a16z @a16z 5d
Figma CFO Praveer Melwani used to spend his days writing hundreds of lines of SQL just to get one set of numbers everyone trusted. Now his finance team builds its own AI tools to do that work.

He sees the CFO's job shifting from traffic cop to business enabler, as long as the people doing the building still own their thinking.

Praveer joins a16z's Seema Amble and Ivan Makarov, authors of "You Need a New CFO," to discuss the growth-stage finance team that built 40 to 50 agents in a month or two, what breaks when every rep vibe codes their own dashboard, and how finance went from sitting out hackathons to winning them.

0:00 From traffic cop to business enabler
8:48 Hire people who understand the model
12:20 Vibe coding a target to test moats
13:15 An AI Dylan Field reviews the memos
18:01 Let AI make the messy data calls
20:00 Unused agents still build the habit
20:46 The CIO's new job: scale what works
22:36 The rise of the finance engineer
26:24 Why the board trusts his numbers
30:25 AI tools as a recruiting perk
40:35 Why Excel is his "love language"
44:20 What to look for in your next CFO

YouTube: youtu.be/9iAQdKxyiQc

@figma @seema_amble @IvanoMakSF
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Brian Jones Verified account @brijones
The median Excel session on mobile is just over 20 seconds. Not surprising given the typical patterns of how we all use our mobile devices. Lots of quick consumption, actions, and small edits.

Many of the more valuable Excel tasks around analysis and editing are longer running, and that includes tasks people assign to Excel Copilot. The problem we saw was that people would give Copilot a longer-running task from their phone, but then need to put the phone away before it was done, or want to switch to a different app like email while they waited. The OS would essentially put the app to sleep in these cases, which means the Copilot task wouldn't continue to run, and when they came back, the task wasn't done.

We now have a feature in beta that is rolling out to everyone where we run the task in the cloud and notify you when it's done. So you can give Copilot a task, move on to other things, and Excel will let you know when it's done.

Here's an example that shows the experience of moving away from Excel and getting a notification when the task is done.
0:46