4 Ways AI will Unlock the Largest Pools of Business IP and Human Capital–Excel Files

Intellectual capital is everywhere in companies. It’s our human talent, our brand, the processes and procedures we create, and the relationships we have with customers and partners. We know intellectual capital lives within our people and systems, but many companies may not fully harness it, especially when hidden in silos. 

Where is intellectual capital hiding in companies? 

While it can be anywhere, Excel is a common place to find intellectual capital hidden in silos.  Excel files are incredibly rich assets that contain logic, data, documentation, and interactive visual elements. Excel files can contain millions of formulas and data points, which represent years of intellectual property and deep subject matter expertise. 

When you consider that most large companies use tens of thousands of Excel files every year, a more powerful picture emerges.  The files–and perhaps more significantly–the business users that create and manage them, represent the single largest living "code base" that most businesses have. But also for most companies, it is effectively unmanaged. 

While we may think of code living with developers, the number of people creating models in Excel can be five to ten times larger than the IT department. This ocean of intellectual capital gets divided and stuck in countless small, disconnected puddles.  

How Coherent extracts intellectual capital from Excel  

For the past five years, Coherent has provided an automated platform that lets companies convert the IP and logic in their Excel files into scalable APIs that can integrate with other systems. Business experts can continue to create, update, and maintain the logic in Excel while the Coherent platform provides a single place to backup, manage, and integrate the intellectual property. 

We have developed a strong understanding of the internal structures of Excel files, how different parts relate to each other and other files, and how to extract and utilize the value of each file.  We help companies create a system, where changes to files are automatically tracked and documented, effectively creating a private GitHub for Excel.  

Why the time is right to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

But that is just the beginning.  This year, Coherent is rolling out AI capabilities that will enable us to help our clients extract even more intellectual capital from their ocean of “hidden code.”  With the rapid advances in AI, now is the time to leverage it.  

Through the conversion of tens of thousands of complex Excel files, Coherent has built deep expertise in breaking down Excel files continuously and at unlimited scale. When Coherent’s platform first launched, we would work with a few dozen high-value files for a customer, but now we can work with their entire Excel spreadsheet base.

While Excel files have many rich structural elements, users enjoy a lot of flexibility in how they lay out their files and define logic.  This makes it difficult to mechanically find connections between files. A user cannot just throw Excel files into a modified text search engine and expect to get useful results back out.  Recent advances in AI make it possible to extract, store and discover relationships in a way that just wasn't possible two years ago. 

 How AI will enhance spreadsheet control and integration   

 We see AI changing how organizations use spreadsheets in four major ways:

• ‍Improving spreadsheet basics
  AI, like ChatGPT, can help users write formulas based on all the formulas contained in spreadsheets that have already been indexed. Generative AIs can also easily create file documentation, summaries, and change logs as users update files and make improvements.  
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• ‍Finding relevant data
  AI will be able to find relevant datasets and tables that have already been published. Security controls and tagging can separate the high-quality source data from the less valuable data. AI can also summarize the output of a regression test comparing an Excel file with updated rules to the results of an older version from a previous time period. 
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• ‍Creating connective tissue
  AI can locate connectors across data sources and enterprise systems, eliminating the need to cut and paste into excel files and, therefore, reduce human error. Users can still access the live Excel “source code” from their desktops so there’s complete visibility into the system code. 
  
  AI also has the ability to identify and refactor logic across thousands of existing files in your organization. For example, it could find APIs with logic created by a company expert and reuse those APIs in other relevant files. 
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• ‍Becoming the "second brain" for the enterprise
  When these different aspects of AI are brought together, AI can begin to create insights across a corporate repository of Excel files. As a basic example, a spreadsheet author might see a message like, "The first two sheets are structurally a match to 147 other files we have sampled.  Notable audit events of these files: Jan 12, 2023 - File XXX was reviewed and approved by the audit department for formula corrections. "  

Coherent has been helping companies unlock the value of intellectual capital in their spreadsheets for years. AI has tremendous potential to accelerate those efforts and we are excited to be on the bleeding edge of that. 

Are you ready to take the first steps in unlocking your Excel-based intellectual capital? 

Do you know what intellectual capital might be hidden in silos in your company’s spreadsheets? Chances are you have no idea how many isolated puddles exist on dispersed computers, but it could add up to an ocean, or at least a great lake. 

If you are ready to bring those puddles together in a scalable, controlled way, Coherent Spark can help. To learn more, visit us at coherent.global or explore our free sandbox to turn your own spreadsheet models into enterprise-wide code in seconds.