VisiCalc

The first spreadsheet software arrived in the late 1970s in the form of VisiCalc.

Before VisiCalc, accounting and financial analysis was a slow, manual process. Bookkeepers and analysts worked through paper ledgers and calculators. One single error or assumption could take hours to update. Financial forecasts were scarce because they were expensive to produce.

Spreadsheets dramatically improved the efficiency of the entire process.

Suddenly, you could change one cell and watch the entire model update instantly. Productivity exploded. The work got faster, cheaper, and easier.

If technological breakthroughs destroy jobs, this should have been the end of accountants and financial analysts.

Instead, the opposite happened.

The number of accountants, analysts, and finance professionals increased dramatically over the next several decades.

Why? Improved efficiency unleashed pent up demand. Business owners or anyone analyzing numbers asked their accountants and analysts to do more.

Now it was affordable to run dozens of scenarios. Finance departments expanded. Forecasts became more frequent, more complex, and more central to decision-making.

Efficiency didn’t reduce demand.

It unleashed it.

This phenomenon is not isolated to spreadsheets.

The Counterintuitive Truth of Efficiency

In the 19th century, British economist William Stanley Jevons observed something strange.

As coal fired engines became more efficient, everyone assumed Britain would consume less coal. Instead, the opposite occurred.

Cheaper, more efficient energy lowered costs, unlocked new applications, and expanded demand for coal faster than efficiency could reduce consumption.

Jevons Paradox, as it is now known, explains that increased efficiency in using a resource often leads to more demand, not less.

And it shows up everywhere:

• We drove more as cars became more fuel efficient.

• We took more photos as digital cameras replaced film.

• We consumed more media as high speed internet overtook dial up.

Does Jevons Paradox apply to possibly the greatest technological breakthrough in our lifetime: AI?

The answer is yes, but we need to understand how AI-driven efficiency will reshape demand for work and the people who do it.

Why AI Is Making Everyone Nervous

As a technological breakthrough, the breadth and depth of AI’s potential impacts far exceed the scale of prior large scale revolutions such as the printing press or the internet.

AI can write, create images and video, code software and analyze complicated legal documents at mind blowing speeds.

Naturally, the first reaction is fear.

“If AI can do this in seconds, why would anyone need me or my business?”

But that’s the wrong question. The right question is:

Does efficiency from AI reduce demand in my work, product or service or expand it?

Spreadsheets didn’t eliminate analysts because they made analysis more valuable, not less.

AI will do the same but only for certain kinds of work.

The AI Exposure Framework

To evaluate whether AI is a threat or a force multiplier, ask yourself three questions:

1. Is My Work Divergent or Convergent?

Convergent work moves toward a single correct answer.

Divergent work expands the space of possible answers.

This distinction matters because efficiency affects them very differently.

Spreadsheets are a classic example of divergent work. When spreadsheets made analysis faster, companies didn’t converge on one model and stop. They ran more scenarios. Explored more possibilities. Modeled more futures. Efficiency widened the funnel.

Payroll software, on the other hand, is convergent. No matter how efficient it becomes, a company still needs one payroll run per period. Faster processing doesn’t create more payrolls, it just reduces cost of running payroll each period.

AI amplifies this divide.

• If your work produces options, scenarios, insights, or directions, efficiency tends to increase demand.

• If your work produces one correct output, efficiency tends to compress value.

Ask yourself:

When my work gets faster, do people want more of it, or just cheaper versions of the same thing?

2. Does My Value Come From Judgment or Execution?

AI is exceptional at execution.

It is far weaker at judgment.

Execution is about producing output once the path is known.

Judgment is about deciding which path matters.

Spreadsheets automated calculation. They did not automate deciding which assumptions to test, which risks to highlight, or which conclusions to trust. Analysts who provided judgment became more valuable. Those who only crunched numbers did not.

The same pattern is playing out now in areas such as software development and content creation.

• Writing code is execution.

• Deciding what to build and why is judgment.

• Generating content is execution.

• Determining tone, audience, narrative, and intent is judgment.

As execution costs fall, judgment becomes the bottleneck.

This is why AI doesn’t replace decision-makers but increases the need for good ones.

If your value is tied to:

• Context

• Tradeoffs

• Accountability

• Interpretation

• Taste

AI becomes leverage.

If your value is tied to:

• Speed

• Volume

• Formatting

• Repetition

AI becomes competition.

3. Does AI Efficiency Pull Work Upstream or Push It Downstream?

Productivity gains from technological efficiency is a combination of work elimination and relocation.

The key question is whether AI shifts value upstream toward higher level functions or downstream toward commoditized output.

Spreadsheets were a clear example of value moving upstream.

By making calculations fast and cheap, spreadsheets didn’t reduce the importance of finance. They increased it. The value moved away from arithmetic and toward judgment: framing assumptions, interpreting results, and deciding what to do next.

Contrast that with the “Amazon Effect”.

In traditional retail, the value was upstream in curation, a shopkeeper’s ability to "pick" the right inventory for their specific store.

Recommendation engines and global marketplaces have commoditized the "picking" and "finding" of products.

When any customer can find any product, the value moves downstream to fulfillment efficiency.

Competitive advantage is found in "Last Mile" logistics: warehouse robotics, route optimization for delivery drivers, and the sheer speed of the conveyor belt.

When AI relocates value in your domain, are you positioned to move with it?

The Next Step

AI is changing the nature of work. Some jobs and their tasks will disappear. Others will be reshaped. A few will become dramatically more valuable.

Predicting winners and losers is difficult but understanding your exposure is essential.

Efficiency doesn’t remove value evenly.

It reallocates it.

Those who acknowledge the disruption and adjust their positioning won’t avoid change but they will be far better prepared to benefit from it.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.