Paul Barnhurst discusses how a financial-modeling platform plans to shift focus from Excel and PowerPoint add-ins to a web application as the main workspace. As large language models improve, users will need to manually navigate cells less often, making add-ins less critical for core work.
Is it always gonna be kind of that finance area in consulting or do you look to go to other areas or are you looking to add more apps or how are you thinking, as you call this a platform, that growth plays as you continue to scale and grow and want it to be more used?
I don't think it will be growth in terms of more add-ins. Maybe there'll be an Outlook add-in or something down the line, but I don't think that will be the main vector. The main growth will happen within our web app. And so this is actually the central place where more and more we expect users will be doing most of their work. And you'll still want the Excel add-in and the PowerPoint add-in. Last mile, and that's gonna decline in importance as the LLMs get better and better. I don't think you're gonna be wanting to spend so much time hunting through cells. You're gonna have a system that gets that done correctly and shows you that it's been done correctly, and then you are just gonna want to think at a higher level of abstraction.
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