AI will replace everything. Except the file nobody understands, nobody can touch, and the entire reporting cycle runs through.

The meme lands because everyone has a Mike. The spreadsheet, the process, the model that became load-bearing infrastructure and then became untouchable. Built by an operator who got tired of waiting for the official path and just made something that worked. Used by the whole team for years. Never formalized, never documented, never handed off.

In this episode, Stig and Bea trace where Mike came from — and what he actually represents. Not a technology problem. A leadership decision made by default instead of intention. Then they make the argument for what changed: the ceiling on what one operator can build has collapsed, and the organizations still running the old approval model are about to find out what that costs.

But there's a warning before the opportunity. If you're uploading spreadsheets to AI tools right now to get around the bottleneck — stop and ask where that data is going. Most free AI tools are not free.

The constraint was never the technology. It was always the structure. AI is the most powerful change agent most organizations have ever been handed. Most will use it to go faster inside the same broken structure.

E07 - Every organization has a Last Checkpoint. You already know who it is.