#18 The ChatGPT Agent That's Making Accountants Obsolete

Wilkommen to the AI Cookbook, I am Malcolm Werchota.

Okay, imagine this, you walk into the office tomorrow morning and your accounting team says something like, hey Malcolm, we don't need three and a half hours anymore for invoicing, we can do it in 57 minutes. Well, you would be really, really happy. But nobody needs to be there.

And you're like, okay, cool. How did you guys do that? How did you solve the problem? Well, yesterday, ChatGPT agents came out from OpenAI, hey man, they cost 200 euros a month, and they did all of the work even before we got to the office. Now this is not science fiction.

This happened last night in my company. And now I'm going to try to explain how to set up a ChatGPT agent that does in 57 minutes what we do maybe in hours. We double checked the results, not just only with last month's data, with other large language models also.

The accuracy, 100%. And this ChatGPT agent does not need any breaks, no smoke break, no coffee break, makes no mistakes. So buckle up.

Yesterday, late in the evening, ChatGPT AI agents were released. I don't know if you saw that, but there was a lot of commotion on X. Lots of people were talking about the ChatGPT agent which came out.

The announcement from OpenAI was, I think, 7 or 8 p.m. in the evening. And my colleague Poorani, she's based in India. And obviously, by her, it was already past midnight.

But in the morning, when I woke up at 7 this morning, she already came back with, Malcolm, you need to see this. Let's have a call. So I had a call with her. She had a screen. And she's like, look, man, we're always struggling with this problem. And we built multiple GPTs over the time that are able to help us with this.

We built something on Replit, which takes a lot of time, which doesn't work half of the time. But let's do your expense reports with ChatGPT agents.

Now, what does it do? We didn't take one invoice. We took 19 invoices from a week. We put them in a zip file and we uploaded it. And she uploaded all of them in one single zip file and said, hey, this is the format in which we normally do our accounting.

So she put a screenshot of the accounting Excel that we use, which is the output of the software, which is QuickBooks. The columns must be exactly like this. The customer number exactly like this. The dates exactly like that. And then the only thing she wrote is, take the invoices in the zip file, extract them for me and create an Excel table. And then she walked away.

And when she came back, you can see it. ChatGPT agent took 57 minutes for it. And there's a video and it shows you step by step on how it was done. So not just code that nobody can read, a video where every step, for example, when Python code is written, which is explained, how is it doing it?

So basically you can leave the office in the evening, start three or four tasks or go drinking coffee during the day or go on an important client call or collaborate with your team and let ChatGPT agent work for you. And for me, seeing this was a real wow effect. A real wow effect, why? Because normally when you prompt, you would have to prompt four or five different prompts.

Please extract the things from the zip file. Please do the Excel the same way that I want it. And normally after file number eight or nine or 10, you see that the AI starts losing focus. Please fill it out in an Excel. Please check at the end. And we checked it ourselves.

So we checked it, for example, with Claude and we checked it with Gemini 2.5 Pro and we checked it obviously with a file of last month. And it wasn't 95% correct. It was not 98% correct. It was 100% of the entries were perfect.

And now I'm thinking, holy shit, we're paying humans to do this. And OK, we did it with the ChatGPT Pro license, which costs 200 euros a month. But let's try to extrapolate what this means for business.

So this is, let's say, two hours work for a person or three hours work for a person, right? Per month, let's say, for example, because 15, 20 invoices, you can do relatively fast, right? But in Switzerland, the hourly rate is 100 euros an hour. In Austria, it's 70 euros an hour.

So if you find already two use cases or three use cases that saves you all in all, according to Swiss hourly rate, two hours or Austria, three hours, it's worth buying ChatGPT Pro. And it's not just saying, please capture this in an Excel. It's about taking an entire process from A to Z that is really annoying and difficult, explaining it to ChatGPT and pressing a button.

OK, Malcolm, I understand. That's very cool. But still 200 euro is a lot, guys. And now I'm going to say 200 euro because every time I do ChatGPT workshops or Copilot workshops in companies, companies are like crying for 20 euro a month. And I'm like, well, now we're going to try to explain to them why 200 euro a month is important. But again, summa summarum, 200 euro a month is 2.5k a year.

And this process that I told you, I know is a 10 to 15k process alone. So if I just hand over this process, I've saved 7.5 to 8k a year just from this. And then we talked to Poorani's husband. So he's an accountant. OK. And we work with banks.

And I talked to him for like a minute or two. And I said, hey, man, what's difficult? What do you think this technology could help us with? Reconciliation. Oh, my God. Customer reconciliation. Like you have hundreds of PDFs on one side and an Excel on the other one or a PDF on one with 10,000 lines and an Excel on the other side with 10,000 lines. Supplier reconciliation, contract analysis, expense reports, bank statement matching and so on and so forth.

So we took a really long bank statement, threw it on the PDFs and said, hey, please do a reconciliation. What's good, what's bad, what's missing? OK, that doesn't happen in three minutes. It happens in 45. But you don't have to be there. And then you come back and the AI says, this didn't match, this transaction is missing. By the way, there's a currency difference.

And that's OK, because sometimes, you know, I pay with my card in one currency, but then the bank account debits in another currency. So what am I trying to say? So there's this MMA fight. I don't know if you guys know MMA. Actually, I don't know much about MMA, but I listen to Joe Rogan's podcasts all the time and Lex Fridman also. And Joe Rogan is always talking about MMA.

And there's this MMA fighter called Islam Makhachev, and I'm sure I said his name wrong. And he did an interview with another great fighter, a guy called Daniel Cormier. And then Daniel asked him about raising kids. And Islam said, look, if you want to do something good for your kids, teach them wrestling.

And Cormier laughed and he said, yeah, but how? And Islam said, no joke. Go and watch this interview. It's so funny. He's like, send them to Dagestan for two, three years and forget.

So why am I telling you this? Because wrestling takes years to learn. You need to understand the counting rules if you're an accountant. You need to understand if you're wrestling what you need to do. You need to practice. You need to make mistakes.

But what's genius about this ChatGPT agent and the way it's actually working now, you know, Operator came out like half a year ago and Operator was not working at all, is the philosophy is the same. Instead of sending my kids to Dagestan for two, three years and forgetting them so that they can learn wrestling, with ChatGPT agents, throw in your data and forget, go, go and do more important things.

And you don't have to sit next to it anymore and double check it. You don't have to micromanage it like you micromanage an employee. Go and drink a coffee. And it's not automation. This is elimination.

And Ethan Mollick just wrote a post also a couple of hours ago where he said, you know, he gave a ChatGPT agent an entire Kaggle data set. And he said, can you make a PowerPoint from this and also an Excel? And he said, the AI did a really good job.

And he had to tell it, look, can you please improve this? And can you please improve that? And at the end, he was really impressed. And he said, what a great example of co-intelligence. So don't spend time micromanaging your people, spend time expanding your brain, spend time augmenting yourself, spend time increasing the co-intelligence between you and your abilities and your ChatGPT agents, which now really work.

And like Copilot agents, we know don't work 99% of the time. So I don't care about this expense report example that I'm giving you. I care about doing the expense report without spending time and without being able to prompt like a semi-god.

And yesterday we talked about contract analysis. Now really go in and throw in your 15 supplier contracts and say, analyze terms, cancellation periods, prices, SLAs, et cetera. And now one more thing.

Every time we reach this point where technology jumps, my customers ask me, it's always the same question, always the same question. Yeah, but Malcolm, what are the use cases now? What should we do with this thing? And it's always the same answer. Always the annoying repetitive tasks.

Always the things when we do an interview, we say to people, what really pisses you off? What don't you like doing? What do you hate doing? And then your employees are going to happily use such technologies.

And obviously Datenschutz, remember data protection, always a topic with us. ChatGPT Enterprise is GDPR compliant. So today on Azure, you probably don't have yet OpenAI Azure ChatGPT agents, but you probably have it next week. And in the meantime, you have privacy.openai.com where you can opt out that your data is not used for training.

And even if the agent makes 5% errors, which it doesn't, it's still faster and better than a human. No, but Malcolm, my people are going to book all these things in 20 minutes. Your agent takes 45. Yeah, but my agent does not need supervision.

My agent works at midnight. My agent works when you guys leave the office. And in the morning it is, you can see exactly what my agent did. If there was a mistake, you press on play and six months later, you will see what it did.

That means the 200 Euro a month for ChatGPT Pro, so that you can use ChatGPT AI agents is a no brainer, absolute no brainer. The future is here. It costs 200 Euro a month. It's not waiting for you. Your competitors will definitely use this after hearing this.

I hope your CFO finds this really helpful and even better, please share it with the accounting department so that they can chill a bit and approach their job more relaxed and get more gratification from doing their job.

Most wonderful greetings from Austria, where we just reinvented our practice of using expenses and working through expenses with ChatGPT agents in 57 minutes for 200 Euro a month.

Malcolm out.