What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #95

Author

Jason Staats
August 10, 2023

💡 An AI Agent In Your Browser

Agents are the most exciting short-term application of AI. Bigger than ChatGPT, more important than writing emails like a pirate, agents actually do the work.

And this tool is the best general-use agent we’ve seen yet:

Previously we’ve discussed Pixie’s agent that fetches things for you from Xero, and why agents are likely the solution to the awful state of US tax software.

But in my opinion the best general use agent today is Hyperwrite’s Personal Assistant.

  1. Click the Chrome extension to pull up a chat dialog on the right

  2. Ask it to do something on the current page of your browser

  3. It opens a background Chrome tab and does its best to complete the task as requested, clicking around & typing as necessary

The more specific instructions you give it the better, but it’s impressively good at reading between the lines as well.

Like ChatGPT this is a general tool - most exciting will be domain-specific applications of this tech. An agent optimized for QBO, for Xero, etc.

Tasks I’ve used it for in the past few weeks:

  • Completing a standard, repeatable set of tasks in QBO

  • Looping through all my QBO company files to check something, for example to check for broken bank feeds

  • On a department of revenue site, looping through all the accounts I have access to & exporting payment information

  • Clicking the OK button a kajillion times on the Xero reconciliation page

It isn’t pure magic. It breaks, it’s kinda slow, and high-volume tasks get expensive since it’s using GPT-4 to instruct it. But it’s absolutely been worthwhile for me in a number of situations, and gets me EXTREMELY excited for domain-specific agents I can assign recurring work to.

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😍From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members. We’ll be permanently raising the price for new members in a couple weeks.

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