Intellectual capital defines modern business success. It's the expertise of your people, the sophistication of your processes, and the depth of your customer relationships. Every organization has vast reserves of this capital, but much of it remains locked away, hidden in unexpected places.
Where is this intellectual capital hiding? Look no further than Excel.
Pricing logic. Risk models. Forecasts. Assumptions. Decisions. All housed in spreadsheets.
These files represent more than just calculations. They're incredibly rich assets containing complex business logic, historical data, detailed documentation, and interactive visual elements. They embody years of industry expertise and market understanding.
Yet this valuable knowledge and IP often remains hidden in plain sight. And there's a cost to not understanding and managing what's inside these files.
Consider these common scenarios:
- An insurance product team spends months rebuilding a pricing model, unaware that a similar model already exists in another region
- Bank analysts manually copy data between risk assessment spreadsheets and downstream systems, creating potential for errors
- Trading desk spreadsheets contain valuable market insights, but the knowledge remains trapped in desktop files
- Actuaries and IT teams struggle to collaborate effectively, slowing down product launches and system updates
What if AI could help you finally see, understand, and operationalize these isolated pockets of Excel-based knowledge into enterprise-wide assets?
Here are four concrete ways AI is transforming Excel from a personal productivity tool into strategic infrastructure.
How AI Transforms Excel Management in Financial Services
1. Enterprise Knowledge Discovery
Across insurance, banking, and asset management, we see many organizations relying on complex spreadsheets often inherited rather than designed. Built years ago by people who've moved on. And still driving decisions today.
AI can analyze Excel files at scale—reading formulas, macros, dependencies, and structure—to explain how models actually work. Not just what’s in them, but how logic flows across sheets and files.
That unlocks several things at once:
- Legacy models become understandable, not fragile
- Duplicate logic across teams and regions becomes visible
- High-risk files and undocumented assumptions are surfaced early
Instead of treating Excel as tribal knowledge, organizations can finally treat it as shared intellectual capital.
2. Seamless System Integration
Excel’s flexibility is also its biggest limitation: it doesn’t naturally integrate well with modern systems. As a result, teams rely on manual handoffs—exports, copy-paste workflows, and brittle downstream processes.
AI changes that by identifying integration points directly from the spreadsheet logic itself.
Instead of forcing teams to rewrite models in code, AI can map inputs, outputs, and dependencies—making Excel logic usable by other systems while keeping Excel as the source of truth.
The result:
- Fewer manual processes
- Less operational risk
- Faster movement from model to execution
3. Formula and Documentation Intelligence
In most organizations, Excel quality depends on who built the file. Some models are pristine. Others are barely decipherable.
AI helps close that gap.
By learning from an organization’s full spreadsheet estate, AI can:
- Suggest validated formulas based on proven internal patterns
- Flag inconsistencies across similar models
- Automatically generate documentation and change summaries as files evolve
That means less rework, better standardization, and far fewer “how does this actually work?” moments—especially when models change hands.
4. A Practical "Second-Brain" for Spreadsheet Users
AI doesn’t just help organizations manage spreadsheets—it helps people use them.
Instead of opening a complex file and reverse-engineering it manually, users can get:
- Clear summaries of what a spreadsheet does
- Guidance on where to make updates safely
- Comparisons between versions to understand what changed and why
When updates happen, AI can also summarize test results and highlight differences between old and new logic—reducing the risk of unintended consequences.
Together, these capabilities become day-to-day leverage, transforming Excel from isolated files into a unified source of enterprise value. This kind of proactive intelligence—automatically discovering patterns, surfacing insights, and connecting related work—requires more than just technology. It demands a deep understanding of both financial services workflows and Excel's internal structures.
Where Coherent Fits
Understanding your Excel estate at scale traditionally requires months of manual analysis.
Coherent Insights compresses that work into weeks.
By applying purpose-built AI to Excel files—without removing them from your environment—Coherent helps financial services teams quickly understand what they have, where the risk lives, and how logic is reused across the business.
With Coherent Insights, teams get
- Interactive dashboards that visualize relationships between spreadsheets
- Automated identification of high-risk files containing VBA or sensitive PII data
- Clear recommendations for optimization and standardization
- Deep pattern analysis based on content, structure, and usage
For years, Coherent has helped organizations unlock the value hidden in their Excel files.
Now, with the power of AI, we're accelerating this transformation—helping financial services firms manage their Excel estates like the strategic system it already is.
Transform Your Excel Estate
If your organization depends on Excel (and it almost certainly does), the question isn’t whether AI belongs in your spreadsheet ecosystem.
It’s how long you can afford not to use it.
Coherent helps organizations discover and unite their valuable Excel-based knowledge, transforming disconnected expertise into an enterprise-wide strategic advantage.
