Note: this site and the author does NOT have any financial relationship with the service provider being reviewed.
THREE POINT OVERVIEW:
I asked Shortcut AI to assist with building out a financial model for Vail Resorts Inc.
Shortcut did a pretty good job populating the capital structure table, but missed a few details.
Accuracy issues in pulling historical financials were a persistent problem. These issues persisted after Shortcut released their updated version called “v0.5” this week.
INTRODUCTION:
Over the past week I tested out Shortcut AI (link), an AI agent for Excel. Overall I think it’s an ambitious tool that is off to a good start – as both of my write ups this week will show, while certain capabilities were impressive, some more work is needed to improve reliability. I am sure Shortcut will make these improvements - I plan on trying it again soon and posting updated reviews to keep readers up to date on progress.
This is the first of two write ups I will publish on Shortcut AI this week. Instead of focusing these reviews on trying a one shot three-statement DCF model that spreadsheet AI providers seem to like to put in their demos (I tried this and the result was a very high-level cookie cutter DCF model with some of the same reliability issues that we will touch on shortly), I focused this assessment on modeling work that a buyside analyst would actually need to do when trying to get up to speed on a new name. If you have any experience in the industry, you know that a super high level three statement DCF model (even without accuracy issues) is of limited use and I can’t recall a single time when I’ve been asked to build one of those on the job.