2024 was the year AI came of age. Buoyed by a non-stop release cycle from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta, innovation thrived and abundant digital intelligence became available on demand. Human-computer-interaction shifted from the step-by-step tedium of task specific workflows into a more creative, expansive, collaboration exercise with the machine: ask for what you want, provide guidance and instruction on how you want it done, then sit back and let the machine do the work before stepping back in of the editing and review cycle. 

Creative Instruction —> [AI does the work] —> Editorial Review.

In short, 2024 was a revolution in software, and this was no less true at Sourcetable.

Sourcetable’s Year in Review
2024 was a massive year for Sourcetable. We launched a feature-complete spreadsheet platform from stealth with the same watermark features as Excel and Sheets (formulas, visualizations, formatting, pivots, real-time collaboration, XLSX compatibility). Our infrastructure also included important pieces lacking from Excel and Sheets including storage, compute, programmability (SQL & Python), 100+ data connectors, and multi-gigabit CSV upload. This laid the foundation for Sourcetable to thrive as an AI-centric application platform.

We released an AI chatbot (CMD + \) that could analyze files, let you “talk” to your workbook data, get formula assistance and multi-step how-to walkthroughs. We extended the chatbot with a text-to-graph visualizations suite that leverages Python and Plotly to unlock a world of advanced analysis and visualizations unavailable to regular spreadsheet users. We expanded the chatbot again to allow users to talk directly to their databases and applications using natural language (advanced users can still write SQL if they prefer); this involved fine tuning data and — in a world first for spreadsheet users — complex multi-step reasoning for data retrieval and database analysis. These layered AI chatbot releases all made analysis and operations workflows easier for knowledge workers.

Once we were done making Sourcetable smart, we then prioritized making things fast. 

The first initiative was to go right down to the metal and partner with Groq to run AI models using their language-processing oriented inference chips. This led to massive latency reduction and users now enjoy near-instant response time for most common workflows tasks (“what’s the formula for X”). We then took these capabilities into overdrive, releasing a special keyboard-driven AI feature called the Command Bar (CMD+K) that allows users to clean data, write text, translate documents, and do research at a speed and scale unmatched by any other spreadsheet in the world. Now, if users want to pair with AI to edit or fill in thousands of cells in seconds, they can do that with Sourcetable.

Tying a bow on all things fast, we released prompt suggestions to keep users in flow and help ask follow-up questions to analysis and visualizations-based workflows. We also released voice-to-text V1 which allows you to talk directly to your computer. Truthfully, it still feels a little weird to talk to your computer while sitting in a room alone by yourself, but users who made it over that awkward hump found massive improvements in their ability to prompt the AI to do their work for them. The reason for this is because the quality of AI output is directly related by the quality of human input (the questions we ask and the tasks we delegate), and most of us just don’t enjoy typing long paragraphs to a high degree of specificity. We are, however, quite happy to chat at length while describing the work that should be undertaken. 

Finally, Sourcetable closed out the year by pushing another world first with a self-driving spreadsheet (currently released in alpha). We haven’t announced this feature broadly, but if you know how to access it you can sit back and watch the computer do your spreadsheet work for you. To say we are excited about this feature is a massive understatement. It really is quite magical.

Summary
2024 was a huge year. The light cone of human potential expanded massively within the space of twelve short months. Knowledge-based friction is at an all-time low, and creative agency is on the rise. What a time to be alive!

Happy New Years from the Sourcetable team!

— Eoin