AI saved you 10 minutes. Explaining it cost 20.
Sage and PwC's Beyond the Black Box research put a number on AI's hidden cost: finance professionals spend 12.9 hours a week reconstructing and explaining AI outputs, with 26% of AI time savings lost to verification. The 71% rejection rate the headlines led with is the future cost; the 12.9 hours is what your firm pays now — usually out of partner time. The fix is to stop shipping AI deliverables alone and start shipping them with a research memo and a cross-model verification report.
