Most Indian households I know still keep their accounts in a physical ledger, the red cloth-bound bahi khata you buy before Diwali, and a few have moved it into an Excel sheet that one of the kids set up.
My mother is in the first group. Years ago I made her a sheet with the totals set to add themselves up, which she used for a month and then went back to the handwritten ledger.
I've been thinking about her this week because of a question a student asked me, which was whether she still needed to learn Excel or would prompting AI suffice? Honestly, I get this question once every few days.
Back in my batch, the placement test was a broken spreadsheet on a locked machine and 90 minutes to fix it, and whoever cleared it went to the banks and the well-paying firms while everyone else tried again next year.
So what she was really asking was whether that test still exists.
My opinion: it doesn't, or not for long.
Claude for Excel came to the 20 USD Pro plan in January, ChatGPT for Excel opened to everyone in May, and in Google Sheets you can type =AI() into a cell.
The VLOOKUP I memorised from a printout the night before can now be done with just a sentence in English or Hindi.
Everyone I talk to about this has the same worry, that the fresher won't learn Excel and with it, the thinking underneath. I have that worry too, and I've already written about it.
This edition is about the other side of the desk, because I think something worse is happening there.
The Excel test was a filter, a company had 90 minutes and a machine, and at the end of it knew who could do the work, and so who it could trust with it.
It was also the fairest round most of us ever sat because if you came from a college nobody had heard of, it really didn’t matter. Either the sheet worked or it didn't.
That test is now worthless, because the best analyst in the room and the person who understands nothing hand in the same clean sheet in the same 20 minutes.
So the question every company is facing this placement season is what to filter on instead, and we already have the answers.
In June, Infosys paused its hiring tests for more than 20,000 trainee applicants after finding applicants had got other people to sit the online exam, and said new dates would come once it had a new plan with tighter verification.
A Bengaluru hiring platform went through 19,368 interviews on its own system between July last year and January. It flagged 38.5% of candidates for cheating, 48% in technical roles, and candidates with five years' experience or less at roughly double the rate of senior ones.
61% of the people it flagged still cleared the pass mark. (Fabric sells the detection, so I’d trust the direction more than the number itself.)
Google, Cisco and McKinsey have all brought back in-person interview rounds after years of hiring on video.
Microsoft's own guidance for its in-cell AI said not to use it for "any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility", financial reporting, or legal documents.
So the company still needs the person who knows what the right number looks like, but it just can't find her from the output anymore, and it's looking for her in the places the output used to make irrelevant.
The same will probably happen here.
But who will get the jobs remains a mystery. My guess is that a lot of the new accountants came from people the firm had already watched work.
This time the fresher walks in with a sheet that could have come from anyone. I worry that employers will fall back on the college name when they can't judge the work.
Which brings me back to my mother.
I used to think she was being difficult but now I think the ledger did one thing the Excel sheet couldn't, which is that anyone in the house could open it and see her working, and that is why we trusted her with the accounts.
So tell me one thing: if you hire people, or if you ever got a job because you were good with Excel, what test AI can't sit for you?
Reply and tell me.
I read every one.
Nandini
PS: I tried Copilot in Excel last week. It built in a minute what would have taken me 20, it was right, and if I'd sent that sheet to anyone they would have had no way of telling whether I understood a line of it or not. I'm still not sure what I'd send instead.