When Twin got here out of stealth in January 2024, AI brokers had been extra of a theoretical idea than a actuality. Right this moment, the Paris-based firm is releasing an automation agent in partnership with Qonto, the fintech startup that gives enterprise financial institution accounts to greater than 500,000 prospects throughout Europe.
If you wish to automate repetitive duties, there are already a number of methods to sort out these issues. Some firms use API-based, no-code or low-code automation merchandise like Zapier. Others depend on RPA software program, akin to UiPath.
With its staff of 9 individuals, Twin thinks there’s a way more environment friendly technique to deal with automation. As you’ll have guessed, it concerned synthetic intelligence and laptop use fashions.
Bill Operator, Twin’s first product designed for Qonto, is an efficient instance of why it is sensible to make use of synthetic intelligence. Qonto handles thousands and thousands of invoices per 30 days. And prospects spend a number of hours per 30 days gathering invoices and importing them to Qonto.
Over the previous three months, Twin has created an automated invoice-retrieval instrument that may velocity up this course of. When customers launch Bill Operator, Twin first fetches the listing of transactions with lacking invoices. It then exhibits the listing of companies that it must entry to obtain invoices subsequent to a browser window exhibiting the agent’s actions.
If you could log in to a service to obtain invoices, the browser pauses and asks you to enter your credentials manually. When you do that, you may click on on a button to let the agent proceed its work.
After that, Twin’s Bill Operator routinely finds your listing of previous transactions, downloads invoices, and attaches the PDFs to the transactions in your Qonto account.
“If you try this on the scale of Qonto, you mainly have to cowl a really, very lengthy tail of companies. 1000’s, tens of hundreds and shortly a whole bunch of hundreds of various companies that everybody is utilizing,” Twin co-founder and CEO Hugo Mercier mentioned throughout a demo of the product.
“And that may be utterly not possible with RPA since you would want to create a single customized script per web site after which each time the web site adjustments, you would need to modify the script,” he added.
As for API-based automation merchandise like Zapier, Mercier mentioned that it took Zapier 10 years to assist 8,000 functions on its platform. Twin already helps hundreds of functions for its Bill Operator simply a few months after beginning work on the product.
Behind the scenes, Twin runs a Chromium-based internet browser on a server. The startup makes use of OpenAI’s CUA (computer-using agent) mannequin. Actually, Twin was one of many 15 firms that bought to strive CUA in beta.
CUA can also be the mannequin that powers OpenAI’s Operator, its prosumer product that allows you to enter a immediate to let an agent carry out an motion for you. Along with higher efficiency, Twin believes it ought to be simpler to make use of brokers that browse the online for you.
“We labored lots on making the expertise very simple. We’re actually focusing on the top person, perhaps people who find themselves not tech-friendly. They don’t should immediate or configure something. You simply log into your accounts, launch it, and it navigates to search out the invoices,” Mercier mentioned.
After bill retrieval, Twin thinks there are various industries that would profit from B2B agentic functions. For instance, brokers may routinely handle orders for an e-commerce firm, classify the catalog of a market, or retrieve data for name heart brokers.
Twin is pitching a future during which AI brokers develop into cheaper, sooner, and extra correct throughout all kinds of duties. Now let’s see if the startup can flip the core agent platform that powers Bill Operator right into a product that builders can begin utilizing in their very own functions.