Why Am I Still Paying for an Excel Course?

Estudiantes tomando apuntes durante una clase en línea

I’m in the middle of a Microsoft Excel course on Udemy right now, picking it up where I left off. And somewhere between one lesson and the next, a thought stopped me cold: why am I doing this?

For years, the logic of a paid course was simple. You found a well-curated table of contents, worked through the lessons, did the exercises, and applied the knowledge at your job or in whatever you were building. Whether you took it for fun or to skill up, the course was the shortcut to expertise. But now there’s AI. Free plans, subscriptions well under twenty dollars a month, and a tool that has already absorbed most of the technical knowledge a course would teach me. I can describe what I need, and it hands me the formula. I can ask it to teach me the formula, and it does that too. So what exactly am I paying for?

There’s something almost fairy-tale about it. Remember Timmy Turner and his fairy godparents? You say what you want, and it appears. That part is pure make-believe. But there’s also a different kind of idea that comes to mind, and it belongs in a completely separate category: the power of the spoken word in scripture. Proverbs says the power of life and death is in the tongue, and in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciples to speak to the mountain and believe, and it will be done. For me, that isn’t a story, it’s reality. I’m only saying that the feeling of declaring what you want and watching it come into being within minutes reminds me of that principle.

The market seems to be feeling this shift. Chegg’s academic services revenue fell 61% in a single year, as students moved to AI. Udemy’s own instructors have felt it too, with subscription payouts dropping from 25% to 15% between 2023 and early 2026, and Coursera absorbed Udemy in May of this year. Meanwhile, AI has cut course production time by roughly half, which means more content is flooding a market where learners need it less.

My honest prediction is that paid courses shrink dramatically over time. I’d guess something like 85% of them fade away, though that number is my own gut feeling, not a statistic. Anything that’s purely informational, the formula, the shortcut, the how-to, is exactly what AI does best.

But I don’t think they disappear entirely, and here’s why. People still feel more comfortable paying a human being to explain something to them. And the data backs up what I suspect about accountability: according to Ruzuku’s research, typical self-paced MOOCs see completion rates of only 3 to 6%, while cohort-based programs with real people and deadlines report 85 to 96%. That’s the gap a course can still fill. A good course gives you structure, a person who cares whether you finish, and, maybe most importantly, the understanding to judge whether what the AI just handed you is actually right.

And that brings me to the flip side of the coin, the part we don’t talk about enough. What happens when you go offline?

Picture it: you’re on site, in a meeting, or somewhere the connection fails, and you need to get hands-on work done. No chat window, no assistant, only what’s in your head. If you’ve outsourced all of your technical knowledge, there’s nothing there to fall back on. The line between what AI can do for us and what we can do ourselves is getting thinner every year, and I suspect it may eventually disappear for most of the world. But I’m a finite being. I’m thirty years old, and I won’t be around to see how far that goes. What I can control is whether, in my own lifetime, I’m someone who understands the tools or someone who only knows how to ask for them.

So I’ll finish my Excel course. Not because I need it to survive, but because it’s the difference between asking for a formula and knowing why it works. When the connection drops, only one of those people can keep working.

Why Am I Still Paying for an Excel Course?

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