I can pretty reliably guess that approximately 100% of all companies in the world use excel tables for financial data and for processes. Ok, this was a joke. It's actually 99.99% of all companies. One would think that financial data, inventory and stuff like that should be damn precise. No?
How precise do they really need to be? If there's 3 of a widget on the shelf in the factory, and the factory uses 1000 per day, is it crucial to know that there's 3 of them, and not 0 or 50? Either way, the factory ain't running today or tomorrow or until more of those things come in. Similarly, what's $3 missing from an internal spreadsheet when the company costs $5,000 an hour to operate (or $10 million a year). Obviously errors accumulate so the books need to be reconciled, but apl that stuff only need to be sufficiently directionally accurate with enough precision. If precision is free, then sure, but if a good enough job is cheaper? We all make that call every day.
If you have 2000 hectares of land you need to buy the exact amount of seeds to sow them. If you buy less you are losing money, if you buy more it is useless and you are losing money. If you have trucks or other machinery in the company you need to report exact amount of fuel needed/used, or either they won't run or you lose money on machinery missing fuel. If you need to tax a company, it is pretty important if there are 100 tons of steel used or 1000 tons. Or if the company has 5 factories to be taxed or 15. Etc.
You are anthropomorphizing LLM programs, you assume that if a number in a spreadsheed is big, then program can somehow understand it that it is a big number and if it will make an error it will be a small order error like a human would make. Human process: "hmm, here is a calculation where we divide our imports by number of subsidiaries, let me estimate this in my head, ok, looks like 7320." (actual correct answer was 7340, bu human made a small, typical mistake in the math) LLM program process: it literally uses heat maps and randomization to arrive at each particular character in a row. So it may be 7340, or it may be 8745632, or 1320, or whatever. There is a comment here at a top, from another user, where he queried LLM to make a change of value in the document and it did it correctly. But at the same time it replaced bank account number with a different bank account number. Because to LLM it is the same - sixteen digit in the field, or another sixteen digits in a field, it is the same for LLM. Because it is not AI and doesn't "understand" what it does.
If you have 2000 hecatares land, there is no way you're buying the exact right amount of seeds. You overbuy seeds by as little as you can, but seeds get loaded via tractor bucket, which is fairly messy. You're going to lose a decent amount of seeds. Thus, a lb or kilo of seeds or < 1% in the scheme of things isn't even going to be noticed, much less cause the demise of your farm
For fuel, similarly, you're going to lose militers to evaporation on a hot day, so similarly, being off my ml isn't material.
If you tax a company, fine, sure, the company is going to want it to be right, but 1 or two tons in a 10,000 ton order is again, < 1%. There is some threshold below which precision is extra unnecessary work, though if you have problems with thieves and corruption, you're going to want additional precision that isn't necessary elsewhere.
As to where in my comment I'm anthropomorphizing LLMs, you're going to have to point out where I did that, as the word LLM doesn't appear anywhere in my comment, so it feels like you're projecting claims my comment does not make, as it is LLM neutral and merely point of that 100% exact precision doesn't come without a cost.
A small error in a spreadsheet (or other program but spreadsheets can hide errors) can cause huge errors in the output.