This founder had human beings do the work of AI.

Humans answered questions, uploaded files, organized financial data.

It helped to raise $20 million for an AI-based accounting software company.

Copy her approach.

Helen Hastings is the founder of Quanta, accounting software that works fast

because it uses a combination of humans and AI-backed software.

Helen, the interesting thing about you is that you basically had humans do AI in the beginning.

How did you do it?

Give me an example of something that a human being did then that today AI is doing because you

noticed it back then.

So we saw people just reading a lot of human written text is the biggest example of where AI has made a difference.

So imagine you have purchased something with a corporate card or maybe you need a reimbursement.

You have to put a memo on that into your company's expense system. So that's just human written

language. And this is something that bookkeepers were reading and then figuring out what it meant.

And LLMs are very good at that. People think that accounting is just numbers. Actually, so much of it is

just understanding what's going on in the business. And so much of that is actually human written.

So the example that you've given me before was you said, look, there would be a human being that would see a bill coming in from Amazon and analyze it and say, this is not an Amazon purchase.

It's an AWS purchase.

It's still the same company.

But clearly those are two different buckets of expenses.

And a human being would analyze it and then do it

in the beginning, right? And then eventually it was actual LLMs that were doing that kind of analysis.

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