It used to be a technical skill. Now it’s a communication skill.

What a 15-minute Excel automation taught me about where the real value is shifting.

A Task That Used to Take Four Hours

Recently, I was asked to automate a daily process in Excel. Every day, someone on the team exported data, organized it across multiple tabs, formatted each tab to print correctly in portrait mode, and printed it. The whole thing took about an hour every single day.

Because it was a repeated task, automation made sense. Traditionally, that means knowing Excel well, understanding macros, recording actions, cleaning up code, testing, troubleshooting, and tweaking until everything works exactly the way you want it to.

That’s been my approach for years. I’d start with Excel’s macro recorder to get the foundation, then go into the code and adjust it. That process usually takes me about four hours to get right.

This time, I did something different. Instead of opening Excel first, I opened ChatGPT.

Fifteen Minutes Later

I described exactly what I wanted to happen. How the data should be organized, how each tab needed to be formatted, and how the final output needed to print. I explained why the automation mattered and who it was for.

ChatGPT wrote the macro. I copied and pasted it into Excel and it worked. Fifteen minutes later, I had a fully working automation. A couple of small adjustments to column widths took a few more minutes, and that was it.

I felt excited. Proud. Accomplished. But also a little strange about it.

Normally, that feeling comes after hours of trial and error. After troubleshooting. After finally figuring out why something wasn’t working and watching it click into place. This time, there was no long struggle.

The pride came from how clearly I explained the problem and how effectively I used AI to solve it rather than fighting with the solution.

What Actually Made It Work

What made this work wasn’t knowing VBA syntax or remembering where macros live in Excel. What mattered was being able to clearly explain the problem.

• What I was trying to do
• Why it needed to be done
• Who it was for
• What done should look like

I didn’t even need to know that a macro was the right solution. AI could have helped me figure that out too. And if I hadn’t known where to paste the code or how to run it, ChatGPT could have walked me through that step by step.

My experience didn’t disappear in this process. It guided the AI. That’s an important distinction.

AI Doesn’t Replace Your Expertise. It Translates It.

This matters especially for non-technical professionals and corporate teams who feel uneasy about AI. The value you bring isn’t in memorizing tools or knowing every technical detail. It’s in understanding the work, recognizing inefficiencies, and being able to clearly articulate what needs to change.

It used to be a technical skill to build something like this. Now, it’s a communication skill.

The people who will thrive in this shift aren’t the ones who know the most software. They’re the ones who can think clearly, explain context, and communicate outcomes.

Where to Start

If AI feels intimidating, the question to ask isn’t “what tool should I learn?” It’s “where am I still doing things the hard way?”

Start noticing the tasks that drain time and energy. Practice explaining what makes them frustrating, what you wish would happen instead, and who it impacts. That ability to clearly describe a problem and its context is quickly becoming one of the most valuable skills you can build.

And the good news? You’re probably already closer than you think.