AI can now turn our figures into polished documents, charts and interactive reports. Impressive. But I keep wondering why we are asking it to make the report in the first place.
I was watching Paul J. Lipsky demonstrate seven uses for ChatGPT Space. One was sharing interactive reports. It set me thinking about how much business administration revolves around gathering figures, arranging them, formatting them and presenting them so somebody else can work out what they mean.
A spreadsheet becomes a chart. The chart goes into a presentation. The presentation becomes a PDF. Somebody reads it, asks a question, and the whole thing starts again.
What happens when the intelligence preparing all this can also understand the situation, assess the options and deal with the routine work?
Imagine asking whether you can afford something. A sufficiently capable personal agent, with access to your financial records and an understanding of your commitments, could assess that directly. It could take account of the money you have, the bills coming, the risks you tolerate and the things you actually want to do. Why would you first ask it to generate a balance sheet for you to decipher?
If I want to see the result, give me a clear visual. If I want to question it, explain the reasoning and let me inspect the figures. But most of the time I want the matter dealt with. Tell me when something needs my judgement.
This becomes more interesting if the agent is my continuing digital counterpart: a system that understands my circumstances, remembers my priorities and acts within the authority I have given it. In that sense, the agent is an extension of me. It does not need to prepare a report just to hand the thinking back.
We will still need reliable records, audits and ways to challenge a decision. People may still enjoy exploring the numbers. The change I am imagining is that reading a spreadsheet stops being compulsory work.
Today’s ChatGPT demonstrations show early capabilities. Superintelligence would take this proposition much further. And some of the change may arrive well before anything deserves that name.
So perhaps the future of office work is the disappearance of much of the need to produce and consume reports. We have spent decades making information easier for humans to process. What happens when humans no longer have to process most of it?
Will I ever need to read a spreadsheet again? I suspect the more interesting question is how much of my life I get back when I don’t.