Accuracy, latency, and cost: the three dials of an agent system

Every agent system, ours included, is constantly making a three-way trade-off most buyers never see: accuracy, latency, and cost. You cannot maximize all three at once, and the choices a vendor makes among them shape the product you actually get. It helps to understand the dials, because they let you ask sharper questions.

The three dials

• Accuracy: more careful reasoning, more verification, more model calls — better answers, higher cost and latency.
• Latency: how fast a result comes back, which trades against how much checking happens behind it.
• Cost: every model call and verification step has a price that scales with volume.

Why finance tilts toward accuracy

In a consumer chat app, latency and cost dominate; a slightly worse answer instantly is fine. Finance inverts the priority. A wrong number is expensive and a wrong action is dangerous, so the right tilt is toward accuracy and verification, accepting a little more latency and cost to get there. An agent that double-checks its match before clearing a payment is making the correct trade for this domain.

Where the dials should be adjustable

The best systems do not pick one global setting; they spend accuracy where it matters. A high-stakes payment gets more verification than a low-value reconciliation. Being able to allocate the accuracy budget to the riskiest decisions — rather than treating every task identically — is part of what makes an agent system fit for finance.

When you evaluate a vendor, you are partly evaluating where they set these dials. Ask. The answer tells you whether they built for finance or ported something built for somewhere else.