PwC expert: firms overpay for frontier AI models on simple tasks

PwC's Allan Dabre said most enterprises are "buying a race car to deliver groceries" by paying frontier-model prices for routine work. Smaller models can handle document sorting, summarization and request routing faster and cheaper, especially when fine-tuned on company data.

• PwC: most enterprises pay frontier-model prices for tasks a smaller model handles better
• Switchboard uses a mid-tier model for about 90% of its AI tasks
• Experts advise measuring total cost per task, not just inference price
• Complex multi-step tasks still favor larger models