Yesterday, a friend of mine who works in finance complained to me: "I stayed up late for 3 hours making Excel spreadsheets, but my colleague finished it with AI in 10 minutes and did it better than me..."
You might not have noticed yet, but AI is no longer just that "little assistant" that chats with you.
It now diagnoses diseases, writes code, sells products, and can even organize a 5,000-row Excel spreadsheet clearly in 10 minutes. It works faster than you, better than you, and cheaper than you.
"AI won't replace humans, but it will replace humans who don't know how to use AI."
This statement is becoming reality. From finance to programming, from customer service to translation, AI agents have quietly surpassed human performance in multiple fields. But the scariest part isn't that AI is stronger than you—it's that when AI becomes "standard equipment," you're still stuck in the "manual transmission" era.
Writing Code Faster Than Programmers, and Can Fix Its Own Bugs?
"Will programmers be replaced by AI?" This question is outdated. What's more heartbreaking is: "Your current way of writing code might already be obsolete."
In the past, programmers feared two things most: not being able to write code, and writing code full of bugs.
Now, AI handles both of these problems directly.
GitHub recently added an "Agent mode" to its Copilot, which not only helps you write code but can also fix bugs on its own. What you write wrong, it helps you correct; what you can't write, it helps you complete.
ByteDance also launched an AI development tool called Trae, which is free, supports Chinese, and can help you build projects from scratch. You just need to say: "I want an app that tracks daily water intake," and it can help you set up the framework, code, and interface.
Even more impressive: GitHub Copilot can now run code by itself, find errors and fix them automatically, then run it again until it works.
Not to mention the now more popular AI programming platforms like Cursor and Claude Code, which have made most developers unable to resist.
Bosses don't care whether you wrote the code yourself—they only care whether it can go online faster. When colleagues use AI to finish in one day what takes you a week, "hard work" suddenly becomes worthless.
Jensen Huang was right: "The future programming language is English." It's just that the clearer you can speak, the better AI can write.
Excel Spreadsheets Done in 10 Minutes, Finance People Are Speechless
In the past, finance people dreaded Excel the most.
5,000 rows of data, manual entry, proofreading, creating pivot tables—working overtime until midnight was common. Now, an AI agent called Shortcut can complete Excel modeling tasks in 10 minutes that used to take 1 hour.
It not only understands what you say:
- "Help me merge these 20 sheets and calculate each customer's average spending"
- "Find abnormal sales data and automatically highlight them in red"
- "Create a visualization chart that the boss can understand at a glance"
More frighteningly, it can also check for errors itself, automatically fix formulas, and even do data visualization and pixel art creation.
At the Excel World Championship organized by Microsoft, the questions were so difficult that even investment bank analysts struggled. Shortcut participated for the first time and completed the entire test in 10 minutes with over 80% accuracy.
The VLOOKUP and pivot tables you painstakingly learned for 3 years, it can handle in 3 seconds. Finance people fell silent after seeing this: Is there still room for humans?
In Foreign Trade, AI Conversion Rate Is 5 Times That of Humans
There's a saying in foreign trade: whoever can handle the night shift can close big deals.
But the problem is, humans eventually need to sleep—AI doesn't.
A foreign trade AI sales agent called Agentforce can now achieve a 50% conversion rate, while human salespeople average only 10%～15%. It can also work 24/7 online, chatting with thousands of customers simultaneously, without losing temper, taking leave, or slacking off.
Even more impressive, it can automatically adjust its approach based on which products customers have browsed and which emails they've opened. Customers think they're "actively placing orders," but actually AI is "gently guiding" them behind the scenes.
It has already closed over 8,000 deals, with an average deal value of seven-figure dollars.
Foreign trade salespeople are devastated: I worked night shifts for three years, only to be beaten by a string of code?
Game Translation, Script Writing, Customer Service—AI Does It All
You think AI only does "serious work"? Wrong. It can handle game translation, script creation, and customer service chat too.
An AI translation tool called AiNiee specializes in translating game text. You just need to throw the exported game text into it, and it can translate it into Chinese with one click, even capturing tone words and jokes like a human writer.
There's also intelligent customer service in the consumer industry, which now responds several times faster than human customer service, with higher accuracy. It can answer whatever customers ask without needing to "transfer to human agents."
Even games are now becoming "personalized." AI generates storylines and missions specifically for you based on your gaming style. If you play well, it gives you harder challenges; if you're struggling, it goes easy on you.
In short: in the future, you might not even be able to beat AI at games.
AI Isn't Here to Steal Jobs, It's Here to Handle the Dirty Work
After all this, you might ask: If AI is so powerful, am I going to lose my job?
Not necessarily.
What AI is doing now are those repetitive, boring, error-prone tasks. For example:
- Financial reconciliation (the month-end number matching you hate most)
- Medical preliminary screening (repetitive basic examinations)
- Code bug fixing (finding bugs until your eyes hurt)
- Customer service Q&A (answering the same questions every day)
- Excel spreadsheet organization (doing it until you question life)
These tasks are tiring, slow, and error-prone for humans. AI does them fast, accurately, and efficiently without complaining.
And you can use the time saved to do more valuable things:
- Face-to-face relationship building with clients (the human touch AI can't provide)
- Creative planning (requiring inspiration and imagination)
- Strategic decision-making (requiring experience and judgment)
- Having dinner with family (the warmth AI can never replace)
Just like telescopes let people see farther and cars let people run faster, AI just lets you do more, better, and easier.
In Conclusion: You're Not Being Replaced by AI, But by "People Who Know How to Use AI"
Now, AI isn't a future thing—it's already around you.
Your colleagues might already be using AI to write weekly reports; the clinic downstairs might already be using AI for diagnosis; the reseller in your friend circle might already be using AI for sales.
The scariest thing isn't how powerful AI is, but when everyone else is using AI to improve efficiency, you're still struggling with primitive methods.
You don't necessarily need to understand how AI works, but you definitely need to know what it can do, where to use it, and how to use it.
Because next, it's not AI that will eliminate you, but those "people who know how to use AI" who will outcompete you.
So don't fear AI—try using it once first.
Even if it's just letting it help you organize a spreadsheet, write a piece of code, or reply to an email.
You'll discover: It's not that you've become stronger, but that you now have a "super assistant that never sleeps".
If you think this article resonates with you, feel free to share it with that friend who's still staying up late making spreadsheets—they might not know they've already been "outsmarted" by AI.
About Maybe
Maybe is an AI-powered platform that lets you turn any problem into a personalized AI assistant, without the need for any coding or workflow configuration. Create intelligent helpers in minutes through simple conversation. If you can describe your problem, you can build your solution.
Website: https://maybe.ai/
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