AI agents making up a finance team; Meet the Auto Queens

‘Stuck’ is one way to describe the situation of hundreds of Indian H-1B visa holders who are back home in India for the holiday season. 

Alphabet’s Google and Apple have advised some employees on US work visas to avoid international travel due to delays of up to 12 months for visa stamping appointments at embassies.

Immigration law firms representing the companies said the delays stem from new social media screening requirements, warning that staff risk being stranded outside the US if appointments are postponed.

Now, the advisory applies to holders of H-1B, H-4, F, J and M visas, according to Google’s internal memo, which said some US embassies and consulates face appointment delays of up to a year!

ICYMI: Now, you can make adjustments to ChatGPT’s enthusiasm levels!

These options now appear in the ‘personalisation’ menu, and allow users to further customise ChatGPT’s tone, on top of the existing ability to set a ‘base style and tone’, including the professional, candid, and quirky tones that OpenAI added in November.

ChatGPT’s tone has been an ongoing issue this year, with OpenAI rolling back one update for being “too sycophant-y,” then later adjusting GPT-5 to be “warmer and friendlier” after some users complained that the new model was colder and less friendly.

Lastly, meet the plants that thrive in salt. As rising seas salinise the soils of the Venice lagoon, scientists and chefs are turning to long-forgotten wild herbs: halophytes. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• AI agents making up a finance team
• Meet the Auto Queens

Here’s your trivia for today: Where can you find the world’s longest-operating ‘Santa School’?

Startup

AI agents making up a finance team

Finance and accounting have long been among the hardest enterprise functions to automate in a meaningful way. While software has digitised workflows, much of the actual judgement—deciding whether an invoice is valid, whether a cost should be accrued, or whether a vendor is billing correctly—has remained firmly human. 

Hyperbots, a New York and Bengaluru-headquartered startup, is attempting to close that gap by building AI agents designed to reason the way finance professionals do.

Key takeaways:

• Founded in 2023 by Rajeev Pathak, Niyati Chhaya, and Ram Jayaraman, Hyperbots offers agentic AI-native co-pilots that automate core finance workflows such as procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, expense management, analytics, and other processes.
• Hyperbots’ platform has been pre-trained on over 30 million finance documents, achieving 99.8% accuracy in production environments. 
• Over the next 12–18 months, Hyperbots plans to expand beyond procure-to-pay workflows into order-to-cash copilots, and launch HyperLM, a specialised language model and intelligent workspace built specifically for CFO use cases.

Women Empowerment

Meet the Auto Queens

Stories of women ‘breaking barriers’ have become a celebratory genre designed for inspiration. At a time when such hero-making narratives dominate public storytelling, Auto Queens, a documentary directed by H Sraiyanti, goes beyond virality and spectacle. 

The documentary follows the Veera Pengal Munnetra Sangam (VPMS), India’s first registered union of women autorickshaw drivers in Chennai. Rather than positioning its subjects as exceptional figures battling adversity, it chooses to show us the unvarnished, often imperfect textures of their everyday lives.

News & updates

• Retire: Convenience store chain 7-Eleven Inc said that CEO Joe DePinto will retire after 20 years in the role. The company has appointed current President Stan Reynolds and Doug Rosencrans, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, as interim co-CEOs.
• IPO: AI chip maker Cerebras Systems is preparing to file for a US IPO as soon as next week, targeting a second-quarter 2026 listing. The company, which develops high-performance processors for AI workloads, withdrew its prior IPO filing in October, days after announcing it had raised over $1 billion in a funding round that valued it at $8 billion.

What you should watch out for

• Stock markets will be closed on December 25 on account of Christmas.
• Investors hoping for traditional holiday cheer for the US stock market are encountering turbulence that could keep markets on edge into year-end.
• Focus during the holiday-shortened trading week will likely remain on the AI trade that has helped lift stocks this year. The S&P 500 is up more than 15% so far in 2025, on track for its third consecutive year of gains of at least 10%.

Where can you find the world’s longest-operating ‘Santa School’?

Answer: Midland, Michigan. The three-day course at the school, founded in 1937, teaches various skills, including proper beard grooming, carolling, toy making, and American Sign Language.

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