Twin’s first AI agent is an invoice-retrieval agent for Qonto customers

When Twin emerged from stealth mode in January 2024, AI agents were more of a buzzword than a tangible solution. Fast forward to today, and the Paris-based startup is launching an automation agent in collaboration with Qonto, the fintech powerhouse serving over 500,000 business clients across Europe.

Sure, there are plenty of options out there for automating those pesky repetitive tasks. You've got your API-based, no-code, or low-code automation tools like Zapier, and then there's RPA software like UiPath that many companies swear by.

But Twin, with its tight-knit team of just nine folks, reckons there's a smarter way to do automation, and yep, you guessed it, AI's at the heart of it. Take their first product, Invoice Operator, designed specifically for Qonto. It's a prime example of why AI's the way to go. Qonto processes millions of invoices monthly, and their customers spend hours just collecting and uploading them.

Over the last three months, Twin's been hard at work on an automatic invoice-retrieval tool that cuts down on this hassle. When you fire up Invoice Operator, it first grabs a list of transactions missing invoices. Then, it shows you which services it needs to access to download those invoices, all while you watch the agent's moves in a browser window.

If you need to log into a service to grab those invoices, the browser will pause and ask you to enter your login details. Once that's done, hit a button, and the agent gets back to work. After that, Invoice Operator automatically hunts down your transaction history, downloads the invoices, and sticks the PDFs right into your Qonto account.

"At Qonto's scale, you're looking at covering a vast array of services. We're talking thousands, tens of thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands of different services that everyone's using," explained Twin's co-founder and CEO, Hugo Mercier, during a product demo.

"Trying to do this with RPA? Forget it. You'd need a custom script for each website, and every time the site updates, you're back to square one, tweaking the script," he added.

As for API-based tools like Zapier, Mercier pointed out it took them a decade to support 8,000 apps. Meanwhile, Twin's Invoice Operator already supports thousands of apps just a few months after kicking off the project.

Behind the scenes, Twin's using a Chromium-based web browser on a server, powered by OpenAI's CUA model. They were one of the lucky 15 companies to test CUA in its beta phase. CUA's also what drives OpenAI's Operator, their consumer product that lets you type in a prompt and watch an agent do the work for you. Twin's betting that having an agent browse the web for you will be not just more efficient but simpler, too.

"We've put a lot of effort into making the experience as straightforward as possible. We're aiming at everyday users, even those who aren't tech-savvy. They don't need to fiddle with prompts or settings. Just log in, launch the tool, and it does the legwork to find your invoices," Mercier explained.

Looking beyond invoice retrieval, Twin sees a world of opportunities for B2B agent applications. Think automating order management for e-commerce, sorting a marketplace's catalog, or pulling up info for call center staff.

Twin's vision is a future where AI agents are quicker, cheaper, and more precise across a wide range of tasks. Now, the big question is whether they can take the core platform behind Invoice Operator and turn it into something developers can integrate into their own apps. Time will tell, but for now, Twin's certainly stirring up some excitement in the world of automation.