The thing is, I had a sales dataset recently, about 600 rows across 4 regions and 6 months, and my manager asked me to put together a solid analysis. Normally that kind of task isn’t hard because of the math. It’s hard because of all the setup around it. You have to build summary tables, calculate growth rates, and turn all of that into something readable. This time I tried doing the first pass in AI. I gave it a simple prompt to analyze regional sales performance and look for trends. What was useful wasn’t that it replaced analysis. It didn’t. What it did do was generate the initial structure much faster than I would have manually. What I liked most was that the numbers were tied back to the spreadsheet instead of just sounding plausible. That made it much easier to revise. I also tried adding last year’s review doc for comparison context, which helped me get to a rough yoy view faster than doing all the cross referencing myself. AI feels most helpful here not as an analyst replacement, but as a shortcut through the repetitive setup layer of reporting work.