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Shortcut – the first superhuman excel agent – is live. While not perfect, Shortcut beats first year analysts from McKinsey/Goldman head-to-head 89.1% (220:27) when blindly judged by their managers. We even gave humans 10x more time. Try Shortcut now (before your boss does).

3,728,172 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

56 Comments

pika capital's profile picture
pika capital1 year ago

Yea well I bet the excel agents can’t chug 12 IPAs at the company happy hour and show up insanely hungover the next morning

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

You get it

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

Shortcut is what Copilot/Gemini should have been. It’s not a one step copilot. Think of it like your own personal analyst. Grab a coffee while Shortcut gets you +90% there. Shortcut turns beginners into experts and it gives Excel experts superpowers.

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

It's not enough for Shortcut to be better and 10x faster. It needs to be super easy to review. The review changes feature shows you the before and after for every task. Click into hard coded cells for exact source citations or references.

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

Users on the MAX plan get early / included access to “Analyst” – a hire-able agent that can run 10x in parallel, making it 100 times faster than a human analyst. This feature is in early preview and has much improvement left ahead of gen release. email [email protected]

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

There are areas where it’s much weaker than humans: 1) Formatting gets lazy 2) Existing sheets are much trickier than new ones 3) Huge files can crash 4) XLSM (macros) not supported yet Still, users at hundreds of companies like Ares, PWC, SOFI, etc. are using Shortcut daily

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

Here is a detailed walkthrough of real tasks. You can loosely break Excel work down into 3 buckets. 1) Building Models from scratch 2) Filling out files 3) Editing and overwriting existing files These are progressively harder. Even first year analysts are better at 3 (for now)

gromit (☕️,🧀)'s profile picture
gromit (☕️,🧀)1 year ago

@hosseeb Just used it to create a 3yr financial projection for a hedge fund inc sensitivity analysis in ~5 minutes. I did the same task manually(ish) earlier - it’s 100% accurate, 50x faster & added in additional detail I didn’t have the time to add myself.

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

@hosseeb Glad you’re liking it!

gromit (☕️,🧀)'s profile picture
gromit (☕️,🧀)1 year ago

@hosseeb Epic product 👏

litquidity's profile picture
litquidity1 year ago

In: excel agents Out: trust fund Wharton grads with superiority complexes who try to leave early to crush beers and hinge dates

Emad's profile picture
Emad1 year ago

Congrats, nobody really enjoys crunching those spreadsheets or powerpoints, there is more to life

Alex Cohen's profile picture
Alex Cohen1 year ago

Extremely impressive software! Blows my mind using it

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

ha! glad you're still loving it. big improvements coming

Codie Sanchez's profile picture
Codie Sanchez1 year ago

Can confirm the demo was incredible @nicochristie

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

excited to bring this to the broader contrarian team

obsidian capital's profile picture
obsidian capital1 year ago

I like the idea and want you guys to keep iterating but your headline is super clickbaity and inaccurate. This isn’t replacing any 1st year analyst yet alone an intern. With the $200/mo plan it incorrectly pulled a number of historicals in what should be an easy assignment

robin's profile picture
robin1 year ago

As a former McK analyst, we weren't great at modeling in the first place 🤣

NextMD's profile picture
NextMD1 year ago

Serious question... Is the information kept confidential?

Karim C's profile picture
Karim C1 year ago

89.1% win rate against mckinsey/goldman analysts is the kind of metric that changes everything been saying this for months - the first wave of AI employees isn't replacing programmers, it's replacing the army of analysts doing repetitive excel work mario does similar analysis for deal evaluation but focusing on excel specifically is brilliant. most enterprise workflows still live in spreadsheets, and most analysts spend 70% of their time on data manipulation vs actual insight the 10x time advantage is the real killer. even if quality was equal, speed wins in consulting where billable hours drive everything this is what production AI deployment looks like - not chatbots, not demos, but measurable performance against human benchmarks in specific workflows

Exec Sum's profile picture
Exec Sum1 year ago

This is about to unlock so much global GDP

The Deal Director's profile picture
The Deal Director1 year ago

Congrats, probably the most exciting “normal” AI business product in the last few months.

Nutlick Capital's profile picture
Nutlick Capital1 year ago

Scenes when a whole bunch of 1st year analysts get fired for sending work emails to their personal accounts to build these models double quick time

A.'s profile picture
A.1 year ago

That’s a good thing for the industry. We need juniors to spend less time doing meaningless tasks, which does not mean they should not understand how models work (or how they are built). But having them spending hours on formatting or even setting up basic model structures is not efficient. This naturally means less job for juniors, but the few that will be hired will be the brightest rather than mixed with “smart monkeys with a keyboard”. They will be staffed on much more meaningful and enjoyable tasks - hopefully leading to less hours in the office. I’ll give it a go on my side, very curious about the product but the video is promising. Kudos to the team for tackling that problem and hope you’ll find appetite from banks.

Felipe Montealegre's profile picture
Felipe Montealegre1 year ago

I will use shortcut so much once it gets better. This is fifth try with pretty thoughtful prompting. You definitely have the demand side figured out. I desperately want this product and am willing to pay. I just need this puppy to get better fast.

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

this specific issue is fixed with agent auto adjusting row height -- but please confirm

Felipe Montealegre's profile picture
Felipe Montealegre1 year ago

Yes, looks great! FYI — my main use case is copying data tables from pandas and asking Shortcut to make a nice excel output. I find myself spending a lot of time giving it formatting comments. Any way to add standard IB format templates?

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

Yes! Have you added your custom rules in the ai rules section? If that’s not enough let me know

Felipe Montealegre's profile picture
Felipe Montealegre1 year ago

Going to put some work in this weekend and come back to you with results 🫡

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

thank u!

Felipe Montealegre's profile picture
Felipe Montealegre1 year ago

This worked great. Thank you. I think templates would be helpful — took me a little while to program a format style that I liked but would have been nice to start from an off the shelf IB format template.

Mitch's profile picture
Mitch1 year ago

Why are all these product launch videos always shot on Stanford campus??

'Lakunle Adebayo's profile picture
'Lakunle Adebayo1 year ago

this is incredible. well done

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

thank you

Zac Denham's profile picture
Zac Denham1 year ago

Analysts all over the world shaking in their boots

Bart P. Fuchs IV's profile picture
Bart P. Fuchs IV1 year ago

Thanks, Nico. I’ll take 20 analysts. Best, Bart

Anicet's profile picture
Anicet1 year ago

@washed_devv u should PR spam them until they hire you

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

@washed_devv say i wont

alex's profile picture
alex1 year ago

@AniC_dev ive already pr spammed too many ppl and so far i was too based for them i think that approach is not working

Anicet's profile picture
Anicet1 year ago

@nicochristie nah they were not based enough for u

OSINT with a splash of good takes and a few bad 1s's profile picture
OSINT with a splash of good takes and a few bad 1s1 year ago

I see most of the material on Shortcut focused on financial use cases. Are you also working on mechanical engineering and other engineering disciplines? Especially interested in pre/post processing integration with CAD for FMEA & stress/strain calculations

nico's profile picture
nico1 year ago

There’s really nothing it can’t do decently well. Unless your file has macros or is. Over 20k rows you should be 90% fine

OSINT with a splash of good takes and a few bad 1s's profile picture
OSINT with a splash of good takes and a few bad 1s1 year ago

Calculation sheets have complex macros that review experiments that have data chunks measured in 10s of thousands of rows. Would be great for you to do a post highlighting these capabilities. I can add more context/requirements into this thread if it helps

btt's profile picture
btt1 year ago

Nico this is great. How do you protect the handling of confidential information that your models handle? Is there a private server option?

Daniel's profile picture
Daniel1 year ago

that last sentence try it before your boss does wow

Rivério's profile picture
Rivério1 year ago

i must be in the 10.9%

Troy Kirwin's profile picture
Troy Kirwin1 year ago

I’ve had friends clamoring to use this. So happy to see it launch widely

Feared Gear's profile picture
Feared Gear4 months ago

@nicochristie This AI addon should be mandatory for all Production Managers working within Manufacturing like myself. Shaves time off so you have time where its needed most and will give you a professional result.

Ofir ☕️'s profile picture
Ofir ☕️1 year ago

i'd be curious to see how it performs on complex financial models with interconnected assumptions. Excel mastery is more than formulas.

Gershom Charig's profile picture
Gershom Charig1 year ago

Congrats on the launch! Really cool for IBD/PE modeling. Exciting to see innovation in the space. For those in accounting, Rowan AI runs inside Excel, is trained specifically on accounting logic, and focuses on accuracy and traceability →

emily's profile picture
emily1 year ago

Today is a shortcut day!!!!!!

Nader Khalil🍊's profile picture
Nader Khalil🍊1 year ago

I've always wondered how vibe spreadsheeting hasn't been a thing yet. Trying it now!

Kyle Scott Laskowski's profile picture
Kyle Scott Laskowski1 year ago

I was planning to build a model for an event I'm planning and not particularly good at Excel. Your product just did it for me in about 12 minutes, and it's 4x anything I would have come up with.

Will Piot's profile picture
Will Piot1 year ago

This is wild and awesome. I’m curious to see how it performs in real-world use cases. I just graduated from @SMUCox with a BBA in Finance, and some of the hardest parts (aside from exams) were the Excel-heavy projects

Frankie Li's profile picture
Frankie Li1 year ago

try it.... before your boss does

Riley Hagen's profile picture
Riley Hagen1 year ago

GG’s. Job security is cooked

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