Meet Shortcut: The AI Excel Agent That Automates Business Tasks in Minutes

Microsoft Excel has long been a fixture of office life, making it both essential and tedious, powerful but often painfully manual. For decades, professionals in finance, marketing, and countless other fields have spent their days calculating projections, answering data questions, and performing other tasks deep in the cells of Microsoft Excel.

We cannot just get rid of Microsoft Excel; it is an essential tool. However, to make it more productive, we can use artificial intelligence (AI). There is a new AI tool called Shortcut, claiming to be the first AI superhuman Excel agent that helps do things faster and smarter than most humans.

Shortcut: The First AI Superhuman Excel Agent

Shortcut is an AI Excel agent built specifically for spreadsheet-related work that automates business tasks similar to a skilled analyst but in minutes. You tell it what you need, and it performs the task for you. Instead of you building the charts or models, the AI does it for you.

According to its creators, Shortcut can complete most knowledge work tasks on Excel faster than a person could. The Superhuman Excel agent is already scoring over 80% on real-world Excel Championship problems in around ten minutes, problems that usually take a trained human an hour or more.

What Shortcut Can Do: Key feature

Shortcut tries to replace the need to do most Excel-related tasks manually.

• Instant results: Upload your files, ask a question, and Shortcut returns fully built Excel models or insights in seconds.

• Direct Excel integration: You can edit spreadsheets directly inside Shortcut, or import/export files as if you're working in Excel itself.

• Feature parity: It supports almost everything Excel does, so you're not stuck switching back and forth between tools.

• Smart automation: Shortcut handles tasks like model building, scenario planning, and analysis that would take most users hours to complete.

• Speed and accuracy: On Excel test problems built for global competitions, it performs better and faster than most humans.

The tool is designed to be a capable assistant for anyone who works with data. Its main function is to take instructions in plain language and turn them into completed work. 

It's Not Perfect—Yet

Shortcut is still in its early stages of development; hence, there are several reported pain points:

• It sometimes gets sloppy with formatting, especially on presentation-heavy files.

• It doesn't always handle long, back-and-forth conversations well.

• Very large files, especially long PDFs or complex workbooks, can consume a lot of memory and cause hiccups and performance issues.

However, even with those issues, Shortcut can reduce the time and effort it takes to do meaningful work in Excel.

Final Thoughts

The introduction of a Shortcut, the superhuman Excel agent, into common office software is a massive moment. It's a serious tool, although it is not perfect yet, it can be a clever replacement for manual Microsoft Excel work with an AI agent. We haven't tried it ourselves, so we can't provide a definite answer on whether it's worth it or not, but based on the current knowledge of this AI agent, it certainly has the capability of being an impressive tool.

If you want to try it, visit tryshortcut.ai to join the waitlist to get the invite code.