"Continuous innovation, the refusal of repetition and what is already known."¹ a quote from Michele Ferrero, the creator of Ferrero Rocher, Nutella, and TicTacs. It may seem unlikely inspiration for financial services, but in today’s AI Agent driven world, it is a strategy for survival.

We are in the midst of the most profound capability shifts in the history of business. AI systems have exploded in performance and collapsed in cost. Reasoning ability, as measured by GPQA, short for General Procedural Question Answering, a benchmark that tests how well a system can think through complex, multi-step tasks, has improved beyond expectations; the cost to process this intelligence has dropped by more than 99 percent in the past 24 months. And AI Agents provide the connective tissue that maps business processes to these reasoning tools.

To make this real, if today it costs $10 of inference to process 2500 pages (~1m tokens) of financial contracts, by 2027 that same task will cost a dollar. No business in the history of businesses has every experienced, or been able to harness, such productivity at such reasonable cost. This is not incremental efficiency, it is a redefinition of what is economically possible, a means of continuous innovation. Agents that can reason investor reporting, compute net asset values, create interactive schedules of investments, and generate dynamic business intelligence dashboards for less than the cost of a junior analyst, with higher quality, and in a fraction of the time.

Leadership that refuses the mundane will empower their people. Let accurate, provable, AI Agents handle the mundane, repeatable, but critical processes and workflows, letting the valuable attention of experienced people move upstream.

The cost and reasoning curve is not theoretical, it is real, and accelerating. According to new data published by Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick, models in 2025 are already approaching human PhD-level reasoning for less than 50 cents per million tokens.²

In a world where knowledge compounds faster than capital, the most dangerous thing a financial firm can do is keep doing what worked in the past.

Refuse the mundane with iClerk AI Agents for finance and accounting.

¹ “Continuous innovation, the refusal of repetition and what is already known.” — Michele Ferrero, as quoted in Con la testa e con il cuore by Salvatore Giannella, 2014

² Mollick, Ethan. “Shifting Frontier of AI Model Performance and Cost,” posted on X, June 17, 2025, 7:32 PM PT.