A software tester walks into a bar, then walks into the bar sideways, then walks in backwards, then dancing, skipping, and rolling. He orders one beer, then two, then 9,999 beers, then orders -1 beer. He declares success, the software is ready!  And then the first real customer walks in and asks, “Where’s the bathroom?”, and the bar explodes.

This joke is also a perfect metaphor for how agentic workflows operate. Just as you cannot test every possible application scenario upfront, you cannot expect AI Agents to handle every edge case on day one. AI isn’t an end-to-end solution, it is a middle-to- middle technology.

AI Agents provide the privacy, accuracy, and persistence necessary to perform business tasks. Agents act as the glue that binds all your disparate data and systems together, learning and adapting over time, just like an employee does. At iClerk, we see this play out across industries: finance teams use agents to automate accounts payable processing, engineering teams double their margins using agents to automate statutory reporting, and legal teams use them to rapidly perform due diligence analysis with a velocity and scale that cannot be achieved with human staff.

In every case, each tacit workflow is a dynamic, changing process. You run a single invoice, then 10, then 100 through it, and the agent will handle the common cases well and you’ll quickly see measurable results. Run one thousand email, image, PDF, and web-based invoices through, and you’ll uncover the edge cases that need tuning. Over volume and time, you asymptotically approach a robust, reliable agentic AI system.

The next time someone states their AI system can handle everything out of the box, tell them the joke of the software tester in the bar, and remember, iClerk Agents are not a joke, rather a story of privacy, accuracy, and continuous adaptation. But most importantly, we guarantee the only explosion will be in your profitability.

‍