When the Spreadsheet Learned to Talk

Hello!

It’s Thursday, 10^th July 2025. Welcome back to Bold Efforts. Each week we map where work and life are headed. Today we complete the first year of Bold Efforts. Thanking you for being with me on this journey. 12 months ago this letter went out to a handful of friends. Since then the list has stretched across continents. Today, Bold Efforts returns to its central promise: track the forces reshaping how people create value.

Over the last year those forces have accelerated. Three currents now converge with unusual strength: machine intelligence, borderless collaboration, and capital that rewards speed over certainty. Their meeting point is the modern desk, wherever that desk may be.

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Key Idea: Knowledge Work is changing

These days, my Google Sheets and Excel files don’t really need me to give them instructions. When I open an existing document, the data table has a subtle border, and any insights or analysis are at my fingertips. The spreadsheet is talking to me. It wasn’t always this way.

Work once began at a door with a lock and ended when that door closed. Connection costs fell, laptops left the building, and the boundary blurred. Then generative models arrived and the tools themselves started thinking. Codes review code, documents edit documents, spreadsheets suggest strategies. The essential transaction of knowledge work has shifted from producing answers to framing the right questions.

AI supplies instant drafts, curated data, and probabilistic insights. Remote infrastructure supplies talent unconstrained by geography. Markets reward teams that combine both. Together they create what economists call decreasing latency: the interval between idea and impact shrinks. In that compression cycle, competitive advantage no longer rests on exclusive information but on superior interpretation.

Judgment replaces recall. What counts is context i.e. political nuance, ethical risk, human preference that statistical models cannot fully grasp. Teams that cultivate wide‑angle vision spot emerging patterns before dashboards update. A compliance analyst in Hanoi hears local chatter about capital controls and flags exposure before the currency swings. A designer in Abu Dhabi notices a meme that foreshadows a global fashion pivot and nudges a campaign while it is still cheap to change.

Global reach introduces its own hazards: cultural misreads, fragmented schedules, and algorithmic surveillance that erodes trust. Successful companies respond with radical transparency. Decisions are logged in public channels, rationales archived, playbooks living documents. Ambiguity collapses into searchable artifacts. This architecture turns time‑zone distance into follow‑the‑sun continuity rather than managerial chaos.

Careers face a sharper calculus. The half‑life of a technical skill now tracks with software release cycles. Specialists thrive until yesterday’s cutting‑edge becomes tomorrow’s default; generalists glow until breadth produces shallow returns.

Hiring panels increasingly scan for this trait because it cannot yet be automated. Practical signals like the following are emerging rapidly in top talent rooms:

• Models draft and humans curate. Teams that iterate in short loops (model suggests, human revises, model tests) ship features in days that once took quarters.

• Quality overtakes location. Recruitment funnels widen, but the real filter is resilience under asynchronous pressure.

• Attention is a scarce commodity. Continuous partial awareness degrades insight faster than any algorithm can restore it. Deep work rules, like firewall policies, protect strategic thinking.

• Context is king. Reading widely, crossing domains, and maintaining real‑world contact supply the non‑digital texture machines still miss. In fact, context engineering is overtaking vibe coding as the primary AI-assisted human activity for creative tasks.

None of this guarantees stability. It does expand the field for anyone ready to work at network speed. Knowledge work now behaves like a living system, rewritten each night by code commits and each dawn by people who refuse to coast. The advantage belongs to those who ask better questions than the models can, surface context so teams move together, and treat attention like working capital.

We discussed the impact of AI on knowledge work a few months ago and since then the forces on knowledge work have only increased.

As time progresses, the tools keep learning. Talent that learns out loud, shares reasoning, and iterates quickly will set the pace. The spreadsheet is already talking. Make sure it is talking to you, not about you.

Thank you for reading!

Best,
Kartik

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Who am I?
I’m Kartik, founder of Polynomial Studio, a holding company and product studio building AI-driven businesses for the future of work. The way we work and live is being rewritten. AI, remote work, and shifting economic forces are reshaping careers, businesses, and entire industries. The big question is where it’s all heading.

For the past eight years, I’ve been at the forefront of these shifts, working across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy. I’ve helped businesses navigate change and stay ahead of what’s next, always focused on understanding the forces shaping our future and how we can use them to build something better. Click here to know more about me.

Why Bold Efforts?
I started Bold Efforts because I believe work should fit into life, not the other way around. Too many people are stuck in outdated systems that don’t serve them. This newsletter is about challenging the status quo and making the effort to design work around life. It brings together bold ideas and actionable insights to help you build a healthier, more balanced relationship with work, leading to greater purpose and fulfillment. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives on how to work and live better, you’re in the right place.

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