Testing CoPilot Agent

🤖 Testing CoPilot Agent: Electronic Arts LBO 🤖

Following up on this week's release of Microsoft's new CoPilot Agent, we put it to the test yesterday and have posted the output below. Given the news about the $55 billion Electronic Arts LBO announced this week, we thought "what better way to test it than to see how it does building an LBO model?". So we asked it to pull together an LBO model analyzing the deal, pulling historical financials, and creating it's own projection model. Attached is a PDF of model it put together. (We did give one follow-up request asking for credit stats, scenarios, and a value creation chart to be added to see how it would do)

First reaction: it's quite impressive at how it pulled it together in under 30 minutes. It researched LBO models, the EA deal, and then went to work pulling the financials and creating the layout from scratch. It understood all of my requests and consistently prompted me with extra ideas of what could be built on top of what I asked for.

Now, before anyone says "AI will take over everything", it is important to note that there are critical flaws in the model (e.g. negative cash). It's also missing key components we would normally include in LBO model (e.g. revolver, deferred financing fees, etc.). So modelers, there's no need to worry just yet - there will continue to be a need for people to know how to build these models so they can analyze & check them, step in and make changes as needed. However, for a first take of a new product, it was still impressive at its ability to pull together a lot of information quickly.

⏭️ Next step: see how it handles working with an already built template!