“Everyone Will Soon Access Digital Intelligence That Outclasses Humans,” says Sourcetable CEO

Historically humans have organized society through structured tabular data. The PC era brought us Excel for financial modeling and project management. The browser era introduced Google Sheets as the collaborative alternative. And now, as we moved into the age of AI, we are on the verge of another platform shift, one that will democratize data analysis like never before.

Leading this shift is Sourcetable, an artificial intelligence spreadsheet designed to make users “incredibly productive” with an experience that feels like “working with an analyst.”

From Frustration to Innovation

After spending a decade in startups across business and engineering roles, Sourcetable’s founder Eoin McMillan reached a pivotal conclusion: Excel and Google Sheets simply aren’t architected correctly for our modern information environment.

In an exclusive interview with AIM Research’s Kashyap Bairagi, Eoin said, “What we needed was a spreadsheet that had not only the common interface that everybody understood calculations and formulas but also compute and data storage underneath, which would allow you to build more powerful applications for analysis inside the workbook,” the founder explains.

This insight led to the creation of Sourcetable, which describes itself as “the intelligent spreadsheet.” While it looks and feels just like Excel or Google Sheets on the surface, with all the same familiar formulas and functions, underneath everything reduces to code either SQL-based or Python-based.

Making Data Accessible to Everyone

Sourcetable’s mission is refreshingly straightforward, that is to make data accessible to everybody. The company sees AI and technology as tools to give people what they want in terms of data whether that’s completing a specific task, creating a report, collaborating with others, or performing analysis.

Traditional spreadsheet users often find themselves limited by their skills, dealing with improperly formatted data, or spending excessive time on analysis. Sourcetable claims to reduce tasks that might take hours or even days down to minutes.

The Vertical Integration Advantage

What sets Sourcetable apart from giants like Google and Microsoft is its vertically integrated architecture with both storage and compute. While Excel now offers Python integration, Sourcetable provides users with access to a full suite of tools and cloud computing capabilities for more advanced operations.

The founder explains: “Under the hood, Sourcetable is a very, very powerful application… Underneath, everything reduces down to code… and that means our AI is able to validate that the work that it is doing for you is factual and accurate.”

This architecture allows users to access hundreds of data science tools, including NumPy, SciPy, and other libraries that Excel and Google Sheets cannot provide due to their legacy infrastructure constraints.

“Pivot Like Nobody’s Watching”

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of Sourcetable is how it eliminates the intimidation factor of spreadsheets. The founder encourages users to “pivot like nobody’s watching” and ask all the “embarrassing questions” they wouldn’t want to ask a coworker.

“The game has changed. Spreadsheets are no longer hard to use. If you can ask your question, you can get an answer,” he emphasized.

From recent graduates entering the workforce to experienced professionals, users can simply import their files (typically CSVs) and start asking questions. The system takes care of the analysis work automatically.

Beyond the Basics

Sourcetable is not just a spreadsheet but a full application platform with integrations to hundreds of data applications. Users can access PostgreSQL, MySQL, Shopify, Salesforce, Stripe, and numerous other data sources directly within Sourcetable.

The company also offers specialized agents, including a market analysis agent for creating market summaries and research reports. Unlike Excel with its 50 years of legacy code or Google Sheets with 20 years of legacy code, Sourcetable was built “AI native from the ground up,” enabling faster interoperability with the ecosystem.

As an application company rather than a model company, Sourcetable remains model-agnostic, leveraging innovations from OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Deepseek, and others. This gives users access to best-in-class AI for specific tools or workflows, rather than being locked into a single ecosystem like Excel (OpenAI) or Google Sheets (Anthropic).

Future Of Spreadsheets Is Spreadsheets

Despite the revolutionary changes AI brings to data analysis, Eoin maintains that “the future of spreadsheets is spreadsheets.” The familiar tabular format provides constraints that make it easy for humans to understand and collaborate.

However, the capabilities are expanding exponentially. David Sacks, described as the “AI czar of the United States,” predicts a million-fold increase in AI capabilities over the next four years. This suggests that manual, repetitive tasks will increasingly be automated, leaving humans free to focus on creativity and curiosity.

For professionals looking to thrive in this rapidly evolving landscape, Eoin offers clear advice, “stay curious.” This simple directive may be the key to remaining relevant as AI capabilities expand exponentially.

Curiosity Is The Key

“What we see is that younger people have the biggest advantage in AI, and that is because they have less embarrassment around asking silly questions to AI,” the founder explains. “They actually learn the fastest, and it’s the pace of learning that gives you the best advantage.”

The more time spent interacting with AI tools, the faster one learns and the more capable they become. This creates a virtuous cycle of understanding what’s possible and staying ahead of the curve.

For those who strongly identify with their spreadsheet mastery, the founder offers a sobering prediction. Sourcetable and similar AI tools will soon outperform human experts in traditional Excel competitions. The keyboard shortcut wizardry that once distinguished power users will no longer provide a competitive edge.

Instead, the new advantage lies in higher-order thinking: How well can you think about thinking? How adeptly can you create tools that create other tools? The founder envisions a world where users build agents that not only perform tasks but also anticipate needs and generate new ideas, similar to training workers who can independently identify and solve problems.

“I don’t think anybody fully understands what it means to ride that exponential,” he acknowledges. “But it is helpful to think any manual task that you were doing today that may be boring or repetitious, all of that is going away, and what remains is our capacity to be creative as humans and curious as humans, and to be able to organize the world.”

Sourcetable represents the next step in this progression, maintaining the familiar tabular interface that has served us for decades while leveraging AI to eliminate limitations and democratize data analysis. The future belongs to those who can think creatively about thinking itself, harnessing AI tools to build solutions that generate new solutions. In this new landscape, curiosity becomes the ultimate competitive advantage.