"Why do I need Excel?"
That's not me ranting, Satya Nadella asked this on a podcast in December 2024 about a 40-year-old tool that still sits at the center of how most companies work. I can't wrap my head around how wild it is to hear that from the CEO of Microsoft.
His reasoning is that most software has the same shape: a database, business logic wrapped around it, an interface for humans to interact with. Salesforce, Jira, QuickBooks, Excel all share the same foundation.
Nadella again: "The notion that business applications exist, that's probably where they'll all collapse, in the agent era."
Today, everyone is talking about AI agents. Agents will still need what business applications do. They just won't need the screens, the navigation, or the ~170 settings pages (looking at you, Google Admin Console). Agents have a goal, they talk directly to the data, and they get it done.
Nadella names the pattern most teams are stuck in: "The first instinct with any new technology is to add it to what you already have." A chat window in the corner. Meta AI shoved into the Instagram search bar. The app underneath, untouched.
That's the part I keep thinking about.
If agents become a user of your product, you are building for two audiences. Agents need every capability named, described, and reachable without the UI. Humans need a legibility layer. You drop in to check something, verify a figure, or build a mental model. That is not a UI refresh. It is a different product with its own design brief.
Microsoft's CEO is already redesigning for this agentic future. He said it over a year ago.
If you rebuilt tomorrow, knowing agents will be your primary users, how would you build differently?
