In the 19th century, William Jevons discovered something peculiar, he noticed that as steam engines became more efficient, coal consumption didn’t drop, people began to use more coal. This counterintuitive insight became known as Jevon's Paradox, and for economists and historians, it’s been a neat little academic footnote ever since.

In the context of AI Agents, Jevon’s Paradox means that as tasks become drastically more efficient to perform through automation, organizations don’t do less, they begin to use more agents to perform even more tasks, unlocking entirely new levels of productivity and demand.

Box’s Aaron Levie, put it well: “If you make the liquidity of a taxi service 100x more efficient, the market doesn’t contract—it grows 100x.” In other words, when a task becomes cheaper, faster, and easier to do, we don’t stop doing it—we find a hundred new ways to do more of it. And this represents the current environment of AI Agents applied to professional services.

iClerk AI Agents transform professional services tasks into software agents, automating the entire data lifecycle from collection and calculation to validation and reporting. Agents automate 90% of routine tasks such as unstructured data collection, compliance checks, financial workflows, client reporting and graph generation, all at about one tenth of the cost of human labor. AI Agents don’t eliminate the need for CPA’s, analysts, controllers, or accountants, they unlocking new value in their roles by performing less tactical tasks.

AI isn’t compressing markets. It’s unleashing new ones. Accuracy and efficiency improve and it becomes affordable to reason and to iterate through tasks to ensure precision. Research becomes deeper because it canbe continuous, reporting is automated and real-time, analysis becomes interactive, not static. A team that used to barely manage the basics can now handle high-value outputs once reserved for firms three times their size.

Levie again: “We keep thinking AI-driven efficiency will shrink a market. But really, it makes the work accessible to more people, who then find entirely new ways to use it.”

All professional services firms, from financial sector venture capital, private equity, fund administration, and accounting workflows, to education, legal, or healthcare systems, will go through this transformation. This isn’t automation, it’s a re-archiecture of how business gets done.

This is the new Jevon's Paradox. Automate the repetitive parts of your job, and instead of having less work, you suddenly have the capacity to do much more of the work that actually matters.

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