Automation Agents: The Future of Repetitive Tasks
Introducing Twin: The AI-Powered Automation Agent
When Twin came out of stealth in January 2024, AI agents were more of a theoretical concept than a reality. Today, the Paris-based company is releasing an automation agent in partnership with Qonto, the fintech startup that offers business bank accounts to more than 500,000 customers across Europe.
Automation: The Current State of Affairs
If you want to automate repetitive tasks, there are already several ways to tackle these problems. Some companies use API-based, no-code or low-code automation products like Zapier. Others rely on RPA software, such as UiPath.
The Rise of AI-Powered Automation
With its team of nine people, Twin thinks there’s a much more efficient way to handle automation. As you may have guessed, it involves artificial intelligence and computer use models.
Invoice Operator: A Case in Point
Invoice Operator, Twin’s first product designed for Qonto, is a good example of why it makes sense to use artificial intelligence. Qonto handles millions of invoices per month. And customers spend several hours per month gathering invoices and uploading them to Qonto.
How It Works
Over the past three months, Twin has created an automatic invoice-retrieval tool that can speed up this process. When users launch Invoice Operator, Twin first fetches the list of transactions with missing invoices. It then shows the list of services that it needs to access to download invoices next to a browser window showing the agent’s actions.
The Power of AI
If you need to log in to a service to download invoices, the browser pauses and asks you to enter your credentials manually. Once you do this, you can click on a button to let the agent continue its work. After that, Twin’s Invoice Operator automatically finds your list of past transactions, downloads invoices, and attaches the PDFs to the transactions in your Qonto account.
The Limitations of RPA and API-Based Automation
"When you do that at the scale of Qonto, you basically need to cover a very, very long tail of services. Thousands, tens of thousands and soon hundreds of thousands of different services that everyone is using," Twin co-founder and CEO Hugo Mercier said during a demo of the product.
"And that would be completely impossible with RPA because you would need to create a single custom script per website and then every time the website changes, you would have to modify the script," he added.
The Rise of AI-Powered Automation
As for API-based automation products like Zapier, Mercier said that it took Zapier 10 years to support 8,000 applications on its platform. Twin already supports thousands of applications for its Invoice Operator just a couple of months after starting work on the product.
The Technology Behind Twin
Behind the scenes, Twin runs a Chromium-based web browser on a server. The startup uses OpenAI’s CUA (computer-using agent) model. In fact, Twin was one of the 15 companies that got to try CUA in beta.
The Future of Automation Agents
CUA is also the model that powers OpenAI’s Operator, its prosumer product that lets you enter a prompt to let an agent perform an action for you. In addition to better performance, Twin believes it should be easier to use agents that browse the web for you.
"We worked a lot on making the experience extremely simple. We are really targeting the end user, maybe people who are not tech-friendly. They don’t have to prompt or configure anything. You just log into your accounts, launch it, and it navigates to find the invoices," Mercier said.
Conclusion
Twin is pitching a future in which AI agents become cheaper, faster, and more accurate across a wide variety of tasks. Now let’s see if the startup can turn the core agent platform that powers Invoice Operator into a product that developers can start using in their own applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does Invoice Operator work?
A: Invoice Operator uses an AI-powered agent to automatically retrieve and attach invoices to transactions in your Qonto account.
Q: Is RPA suitable for automating repetitive tasks?
A: RPA can be used, but it would require creating a single custom script per website and modifying the script every time the website changes.
Q: How does Twin’s AI-powered automation agent differ from other automation products?
A: Twin’s agent is more efficient and can support thousands of applications, whereas other products like Zapier took years to support 8,000 applications.
