Around the world, the enterprise AI revolution rockets forth at full speed! Get rid of those annoying and expensive employees! Replace them with the magical truth machine!

And the huge push for Claude Code in the past few months! You can hardly log into Mastodon without seeing yet another tech luminary who’s chosen to replace his brain with a clockwork mouse. CLAUDE IS A GAME CHANGER. CLAUDE HAS TURNED THE CORNER. THE WORLD IS DIFFERENT NOW. CLAUDE IS A NEW PARADIGM. Yeah, thanks.

Unfortunately, software as a service costs money. The end of the quarter’s coming up — and a few companies aren’t so happy at the bill. This stuff is expensive, and maybe you can’t actually afford to go full Gas Town.

Consultants have been talking up AI cost control since last year. But companies weren’t worrying so much about AI costs in the far distant past of six months ago.

The Wall Street Journal ran the headline yesterday: “You’ve Finally Figured Out AI at Work — Now Comes the Bill.” They’re still very gung-ho about the AI revolution — but they’ve just noticed this stuff does, in fact, have a price tag. One that goes up when you use more of it. [WSJ, archive]

Ed Zitron has been talking to people at Microsoft and seen documents. Even Microsoft is worrying about AI usage. You know, one of the AI vendors: [Bluesky, archive]

hearing microsoft is reorganizing its AI team under the banner of “the Copilot System.” Also hearing that teams are under pressure to reduce AI token use, remit is that there needs to be “fiscal responsibility in AI ops” and that Claude Code usage is being reduced in favour of Copilot CLI.

If a company as large as Microsoft — the only hyperscaler building out AI from cashflow — is having to do token austerity, this shit must cost so much more than we think

Microsoft will gladly pay you tomorrow for a token today.

This is happening a lot further afield than Microsoft. Here’s some comments from the trenches:

• “We’re getting pushed to use AI for coding a lot and even with paid licenses to Copilot, I’ve burnt through the monthly quota in a day multiple times.” [Bluesky, archive]
• “Yep, at my work for more than a year they’ve been pushing ‘AI all the things!’ And now suddenly we’re hearing OMG the cost! Directives haven’t changed to me. Still AI all the things; I just hear grumbling from above.” [Mastodon, archive]
• “That’s when the next email came. We are using AI too much. The bill is too high. So, the original directive stands (AI first!) but they’re capping us at a very, very low token limit. Literally about 10% of what we’d become accustomed to. Execs literally sold the company on 10x’ing our output then throttled us to 10% AI usage.” [Grumpy Gamer, archive]

Use AI or else! No, you’re using too much! Also, produce ten times the features anyway!

Compare when we all went cloud. Which was more useful than AI. But then we noticed that AWS does, in fact, cost money.

Let’s assume the corporations keep their AI spend under some sort of control. That’s fine for 2026. Probably.

If you follow Pivot to AI, you know what comes next. 2027 will be just a bit nastier. I stress I could be wrong on the precise timing, but I’m pretty sure 2027 is when the venture capital subsidy for the AI vendors runs completely dry.

That’s when prices go up about ten times so the vendors can even cover their running costs. If the vendors survive.

Imagine your SaaS vendor calls and says “hey matey, your bill’s ten times as much next month. Sorry, bro!” You should expect some squawking.

You’ll be pleased to know that Microsoft, the software company that started as a dev tools company, has a solution! Here’s what Ed Zitron found Microsoft is planning: [Bluesky, archive]

One of the solutions proposed — I am not kidding — is “writing scripts to automate repetitive tasks.” It’s really funny imagining a software engineer being like “woah … like automating the boring stuff, you might say?”

The AI bubble will pop — though not as soon as any of us would like — and there will be work in the surviving companies for people who can do things halfway properly instead. Where there’s muck, there’s brass. But there’s so, so much muck.

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