This AI experiment should get every investor’s attention

Join Me in NYC for My Book Launch This Wednesday! My new book, How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Volume 2, comes out next week, so we’re throwing a party at City Winery in NYC on Thursday, October 8 to celebrate. I’ll share some of my favorite stories and lessons from the book, followed by a live Q&A and book signing. Pomp Letter readers get 20% off tickets with code ANTHONY20. Get your discounted tickets here And don’t forget to pre-order your copy HERE before the event. See you guys there. To investors, One of the leading AI companies, Mercer, just published a study that should send shockwaves through the investor community. They had 12 licensed accounts compete against frontier AI models on real-world accounting tasks. The accountants in the study had an average experience of 5.4 years. Ten of the twelve people were senior or managers, and half had Big Four experience. This expertise did not help the humans in the head-to-head competition. The accountants scored approximately 37% and they took anywhere between 30 to 180 minutes to complete the tasks. In comparison, Claude’s Opus 5 scored 100% on all 20 solo attempts and the model was done in under 10 minute each time. I don’t think anyone is surprised that frontier models are smarter and faster than humans. That seems to be a consensus view now. The most interesting part is that the humans were still slower and less accurate when they were allowed to do the tasks with the help of the models. For example, the sessions where accountants could use Claude to help them were about 15 times slower than Claude alone. So what does this mean for accountants? Are they all going to disappear? Absolutely not. Mercor wrote “this doesn’t mean accountants are replaceable. But it does suggest the job will change significantly, even if model progress stalled today.” I agree with this analysis. Just because frontier models can do specific tasks faster and better than humans doesn’t mean an entire role is replaced. Mercor, Ramp, and a number of other companies who evaluated the results of this test were all in agreement that AI still can’t close a company’s books by itself. Now could that change in the future? Sure. The technology is constantly evolving and improving, but even if that happens, we should expect accountants to focus their time and effort on higher value tasks. Remember, large companies used to have floors full of people doing the books. Now Microsoft Excel has replaced majority of those man-hours, but there are plenty of people employed in finance teams still. AI is not going to be very different. This doesn’t mean that AI won’t have some impact on the job market as companies figure out the limits of the technology or individual contributors realize they have to retrain themselves. Warren Pies recently pointed out changes in the job data when he wrote “it is becoming obvious that AI is impacting the labor market. Going back to mid-2025: Finance and Tech industries [are] -246k jobs and all other industries [are] +812k jobs. This dynamic will most likely intensify next year and expand into other industries.” People get nervous whenever change is afoot. You are going to see scary headlines and lots of fear-mongering, but all that is just noise in my opinion. Steve Rattner had a great New York Times op-ed recently where he discussed how technology has drastically improved the lives of American workers over time. He said “Since 1830, technology has cut the American workweek from 69 hours to 38 while raising real income per person roughly 20-fold. Properly managed, A.I. can do the same.” It is hard to argue with this data over the last 100 years. Seeing Mercor’s test results show frontier models can outperform accountants at specific tasks should get us all more excited about the future. No human should be required to spend their precious time on Earth doing menial tasks that can be automated by software. I will leave you with this thought-provoking post from Will Manidis on how investors should think about navigating the uncertainty ahead. He explained his “only observation on the intelligence trade as it stands today is if you even believe 1/10th of this is real, than every single equity is drastically mispriced in one way or another. But the market can only really process it one trade at a time: memories, then semis, then ____.” We are all on the rollercoaster and the acceleration is just beginning. The next few years should be fun, so just make sure you hold on long enough to enjoy the ride. I hope everyone has a great start to their week. I will talk to you next time. - Anthony J. 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