About This Episode
Harvard Business Review published a piece by Stacia Garr on August 17, 2026 arguing that today's AI adoption was fueled by heavily subsidized pricing from enterprise software vendors, that the era is ending, and that companies are shifting toward usage-based charges. Vendors have been quietly absorbing the cost of GPUs, inference and tokens to acquire customers; as that subsidy is withdrawn, AI stops being a software line item and becomes a variable consumption cost that has to be budgeted, attributed and governed.
Our Take
The meter is not the bad news: it is the first honest price signal AI has ever had, since the subsidy hid a physical electricity-and-silicon cost behind a software price; the real danger is that companies cap the token bill, the one number that is easy to measure, and quietly buy worse work.