Coding and Excel | AI’s Two Super-Verticals
Coding surprised everyone on the upside by becoming one of the strongest AI application verticals to date.
It combines three rare attributes: a massive TAM, a natural wedge into adjacent use cases, and a product-led GTM that largely eliminates the need for traditional sales and marketing. Few verticals share that profile.
Excel is one of them. The TAM is even larger - much of the software industry can be viewed as layered “Excel wrappers” - and adoption can be largely self-serve. This likely explains why both OpenAI and Anthropic have been aggressively expanding into the spreadsheet and productivity workflow (source: public news).
Coding: A Snapshot
GTM
Coding is structurally different from most verticals like healthcare, real estate, finance, etc.
Developers quickly identify the best tools without heavy marketing.
They also have direct influence to expense or approve tools at work. Companies are insensitive as to the extra costs per developer as long as it’s helpful.
As a result, strong products spread bottom-up with minimal sales effort.
Most other verticals require explicit selling, marketing, and enterprise procurement.
TAM
The most commonly cited total addressable market for coding is ~$2T.
(Source: ChatGPT)
Coding Is More Than Coding
Coding is not just an end market - it is a wedge. Once you own the developer workflow, you gain leverage across every application built on top of it.
Coding: Status Check
4 companies at $1B+ ARR
At least 7 companies have crossed $100M ARR, often at unprecedented speed
Claude Code: crossed $1B in Nov vs. $500M ARR in Aug
(Source: Gemini)
Why Excel Fits the Same Pattern
Why Excel
Excel looks surprisingly similar to coding as a vertical:
Enormous TAM
A gateway to many adjacent use cases
The application software industry (~$500B) is arguably one giant Excel abstraction layer - think CRM, Airtable, Smartsheet, etc.
Self-serve adoption with limited GTM
TAM: Spreadsheet Users at Scale
Some rough anchors:
Google Workspace
Google states Workspace is “trusted by more than 3 billion users” and has “over 10 million paying customers” (2024) / “over 11 million paying customers” (2025).
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-from-google-workspace-and-the-harris-poll-shows-rising-leaders-are-embracing-ai-to-drive-impact-at-work-302314697.html?utm_source=chatgpt.comWPS Office (Kingsoft)
Reports 632M monthly active devices globally (Dec 2024).
https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0416/2025041600794.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.comMicrosoft Office
Microsoft has historically cited ~1.2B Office users. This figure is dated, but remains the last widely published Microsoft number.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/2015/04/29/microsoft-empowers-windows-ios-android-mac-and-linux-developers-to-reach-billions-of-new-customers/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Even accounting for overlap, a ~1.5–1.6B global monthly active spreadsheet user base is a reasonable point estimate.
Excel Is More Than Excel
Software is a ~$1T industry, with application software likely representing ~50% of that.
A meaningful share of application software is effectively “Excel wrappers”: Airtable, Smartsheet, Large portions of CRM, Finance, ops, analytics, and internal tooling
If an AI-native Excel becomes programmable, the opportunity expands well beyond Microsoft Office or Google Workspace as products. The surface area becomes application creation, not just spreadsheet usage.
GTM: Why Finance Is the Natural Wedge
The finance industry appears to be the logical starting point - and is where both Anthropic and OpenAI have been aggressively investing effort (per public news).
Why finance works:
High profit per capita
Strong willingness to pay for productivity and data tools
Analysts often have direct budget authority, similar to developers
Clear ROI makes the product largely self-selling
Some context on user density:
US financial services + insurance employment: >6.7M
Finance functions across all industries (FP&A, corporate finance, accounting, audit, treasury): ~150M globally
Using global monthly active spreadsheet users (~1.55B) as the denominator:
% working in finance (broad definition) = 150M / 1.55B = ~10%
That represents a very large, highly monetizable initial wedge.
Coding proved that a self-serve, workflow-native tool with massive surface area can scale faster than almost any other software category. Excel may be the next version of that playbook - at even larger scale.