EY

PR Gains C‑Suite Influence, Says EY's Rachel Lloyd

Rachel Lloyd, director of global media relations and social media at EY and president of the PR jury for The Drum Awards Festival, argues that communications is finally earning a seat in the C‑suite as reputational risk, social media and AI increase organizational visibility. She expects integrated comms teams, greater executive visibility (especially on LinkedIn), growth of the creator economy in B2B, and the use of AI tools to augment — not replace — communicators. Lloyd also outlines what she looks for in award-winning PR work: clear storytelling, measurable delivery, and creativity combined with commercial evidence.

Rillet raises $100M Series C at $1B valuation

Rillet, an AI-native accounting startup, announced a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation led by ICONIQ, with returning investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. The round closed within 48 hours, bringing total capital raised to roughly $200 million since emerging from stealth in 2024. Rillet serves about 600 customers—including public companies—and says it doubled ARR in the past three months. Its agentic AI general-ledger and ERP automation platform is designed to replace legacy systems (Intuit, NetSuite, Oracle), supports model routing, prevents customer data from being used to train foundation models, and provides governance and audit trails for agent decisions. An alliance with EY aims to embed these AI tools into finance and audit workflows, reflecting rapid investor interest in AI-native back-office software.

Avoid Overpaying for Unnecessary AI Complexity

The article explains that enterprises often apply overly complex AI architectures to simple marketing tasks, driving up total cost of ownership and verification overhead. It defines four mechanisms—rule-based, predictive, generative, and agentic—ranked by complexity, cost, and risk. The piece highlights examples and vendor/pilot pitfalls, cites EY analysis that agentic workflows raised per-interaction costs from about $0.04 in 2023 to roughly $1.20 in 2026, and references Gartner estimates that agentic tasks can use 5–30× more tokens than standard genAI chatbot interactions. The author recommends choosing the lightest mechanism that meets requirements, pricing pilots at production volume, and asking vendors for mechanism-level cost estimates including review and verification costs.