Collect financial data on 100 independent schools
Observed in the wild: the writer gave Operator a Google Sheet listing 100 school names, which came from an o3-mini-high query. Operator Leaned on its own browser to search ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer for each school, read the summary financials, and paste them into the sheet. Operator was very slow and was stopped after about 25 schools.
- Agent or tool
- Operator
- Topic
- Productivity
- Reported on
- Blog
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Small, repetitive tasks eat more of the week than anyone likes to admit. Cases like this show an agent taking a chore off someone's plate end to end, not just suggesting what to do. It is one of 196 sightings filed under Productivity on Agent Sightings (number 144 by interest), and one of 10 involving Operator.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Operator or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Help me collect financial data on 100 independent schools. Break it into steps, show your work, and wait for confirmation before anything irreversible, paid, or outbound.
Tip: Start small: run it once on a low-stakes example, read what the agent did, and only then let it run on real work.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Blog: https://fullstackeducator.substack.com/p/ai-agents-in-action. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.