Note: this site and the author does NOT have any financial relationship with the service provider being reviewed.
THREE POINT OVERVIEW:
In this week’s second review, I asked Shortcut to build out a granular revenue and cost forecast for Vail Resort Inc’s main operating segment.
Shortcut needs a lot of guidance on determining key revenue drivers, building out the structure of a granular revenue forecast, and modeling costs appropriately.
Even for a simple business like Vail, there are nuances in the business model that were not picked up by Shortcut for modeling purposes. This exercise was helpful in framing where analyst judgement will continue to be important if/when accuracy issues (some of which we identified in this week’s first review) are eliminated.
INTRODUCTION:
Over the past week I tested out Shortcut AI (link), an AI agent for Excel. This is the second review on Shortcut that I’m posting this week.
A quick recap - in my first write up on Shortcut (here), I assessed the tool’s ability to pull the current capital structure and historical financials for Vial Resorts Inc from its latest 10-K. As the first write-up showed, Shortcut was surprisingly good at pulling capital structure information but consistently made basic errors in pulling historical financials. On the bright side, I think that these issues should be fixable (they are not untraceable hallucinations). I will be testing Shortcut again soon and will update readers to the extent that there are improvements in these areas.
In this week’s second review, I wanted to test Shortcut’s ability to build a granular revenue and cost forecast if given a model that already includes historical financials. I gave Shortcut the historical segment financials for Vail’s “Mountain segment” which consists primarily of the Company’s ski resort/area operations. I also uploaded the Company’s most recent investor presentation which included additional KPIs not included in the 10-K and a press release that detailed management’s guidance for the next fiscal year. The goal was to test Shortcut’s ability to model the segment in the same detailed way that a buyside analyst would be expected to think about the business and build projections.
REVIEW OF RESULTS:
First, we uploaded an excel sheet with the below segment financials (Figure 1) and wrote a prompt asking Shortcut to use these financials along with any relevant information in the uploaded FY 2025 10-K and latest Investor Presentation to come up with a granular revenue and cost build for the segment. I know that this is a lot to expect from a very nascent tool - but when its promos are going viral with taglines suggesting imminent mass replacement of analysts, I think it’s fair to at least test it by assigning real work a buyside analyst might actually do.