Financial Modeler's Corner
00:42:15 · Paul Barnhurst, Peter Fuller, Ian Schnoor
[00:42:15] S2: to me. [00:42:16] S1: No. But you're right. So you're you're exactly right. All of these organizations woke up and they all put together task forces. And, you know, I was initially very skeptical. Was like, don't sell to the task force. You know? Sell to the managing director. You know? But actually these task forces were real and they really bought stuff and their people are really motivated. So it's it's been... It's actually been amazing to watch that, watch this kind of category change in the last in the last year or so. So, yeah, I think now the challenge they have is there's a lot of vendors out there and they need to figure out which one is which one is best. And obviously, I think that's Tracelight, but so there's a lot of trials going on. There's a lot of pilots and then there's a lot of change management on their side as well. Right? And then you get the, you know, the the real worry that a lot of them have is is they will just buy the wrong thing. That's the thing that they're that they're most worried about. Right? Because then, you know, eight months from now, they'll have to do a whole change management program again, and that's not really what they wanna be doing. So your... Our job is, you know, we'll have our foot in the door, but our job is to prove to them that we are the long term partner. [00:43:35] S3: Nice. Fun... Must be a fun time to be alive and running a business. I I love it. We can we can live vicariously through you.
00:43:35 · Ian Schnoor, Giles Male
[00:43:35] S3: Nice. Fun... Must be a fun time to be alive and running a business. I I love it. We can we can live vicariously through you. [00:43:48] S4: Well, it's interesting when you compare... Again, I'm not gonna say too many nasty things about Microsoft because they'll... They will kick me out of the MVP program eventually. But Microsoft are so lucky in the sense that they are the stickiest company, and and I agree with you, like, year... Especially a year ago or even more. Copilot was awful. I mean, I I... I'm now in a position where I can train it because it's good enough in lots of areas. It's certainly not perfect. But my god, I don't... I'm not sure any other company other than Microsoft would have gotten away with how bad it was and how overhyped it was by them for so long, which is crazy. So if you're going in and from day one, like you say, you're focused on, like, give the customer a good experience. It's doing what we said it would. That's... Yeah. That's awesome.
00:44:37 · Peter Fuller
[00:44:37] S1: But I I think so. Yeah. I I continue to be confused about how how bad Copilot is given how strong the models are that are powering Copilot. Right? But I think Microsoft does have that innovator's dilemma problem now. And let's just take Excel. I I always compare Excel with coding. And one big difference, I think, between those domains is coding was really nicely set up actually even before ChatGPT. Coding was really nicely set up for AI to come along. Right? You had IDs. You had a really nice collaboration environment. You have diffs. You have git. You have version control. All of these things are really important if you're gonna start working meaningfully with someone or something else. In this case, that something else is AI. Excel is just it's just missing all of it. And and that's that's a huge problem. So, you know, now if you go into the Tracelight web app and you say, here's an Excel. I want you to make the following 25 changes to this Excel. What you'll get back is you'll get a diff. You'll get, okay, here's, you know, here's a overlay kind of thing of what the file was like before. Here's what the file is like now. And as you build up these diffs, you can then build up versions of what you're working on. You can roll back and you do all of these things. And, yeah, I I know I know there is some versioning, etcetera, and and diffing, but it's completely insufficient in my view in Excel. So, yes, it's Copilot being slightly disappointing, but it's also the product right around, you know, I think that some big changes have to be made to make it really nicely set up to work with very powerful agents. I think they have a bit of a problem there.
00:46:31 · Paul Barnhurst, Ian Schnoor, Peter Fuller
[00:46:31] S2: It'll be interesting to watch. I think there's some good points there. And I've said to get what they really need, you almost need that kinda online whole new environment because it's 40 years old to truly have that modern innovative platform. But given their constraints they've had, they've done an amazing job in my opinion overall on Excel. Obviously, AI side, there are some challenges. [00:46:52] S3: When you're a $5,000,000,000,000 company and you have seven or 8,000,000,000 customers, We should all have such problems one day, but, you know, it's a whole different set of criteria and internal machinations, and it just obviously is different. And you have to be careful about people all over the world using things. I didn't even realize until recently how many people are not even working on Excel 365 yet. I mean, they're still using older versions of Excel that don't even have... So there are lots and lots of things that factor in when you are, you know, the large player that the whole world relies on. But that said, I mean... But that's why there's opportunity for Tracelight and others to take advantage of speed and nimbleness, and, you're obviously doing a fantastic job with that. So, anyway, I'll thank you for spending time with us on an evening, obviously, as busy as you are. [00:47:42] S2: I think we'll go ahead and kinda wrap up here. But before we do, any last thoughts? Anything you wanna share? Any thoughts about the future, modeling? Anything you wanna say to our audience here? [00:47:53] S1: Thoughts about the future.
00:47:53 · Peter Fuller, Paul Barnhurst
[00:47:53] S1: Thoughts about the future. [00:47:55] S2: Or wherever you wanna go. It's up to you. Just kinda last thoughts.
00:47:57 · Peter Fuller
[00:47:57] S1: One thing that I think about and talk about most days, you can be quite scared, right, looking at how this stuff is evolving. And it is quite a scary experience, I guess, if your career to this point has, you know, your unique, you know, value. Right? You've been the best at writing the formulas and building these complex models. I can imagine that it's very scary than watching LLNs, you know, the curve is just like this. Right? And even if they're not past you today, they probably will be past you quite soon. Right? And I totally get that, but I think people, your viewers, our users should all just be tremendously excited about what the future holds. Right? Their jobs will be different, but the amount of value that you'll be able to add in the world is now... It's just, like, increasing exponentially. And I think by this time next year, if your job had been building big Excel financial models and then handing that over to a customer, I think your job will be building those models, and then that becomes code and then that becomes a persistent part of how your customer is operating and, like, just the amount of value adding to them is so much greater. So I am very, very optimistic. Right? Even about the users that most of the rest of, like, Twitter, if you read it, everyone's like, oh, these, you know, these people are so cooked or whatever because the other lens are doing their work. I just completely disagree. That's how I feel about our users, and I hope that's how how your viewers feel to you. I love it.