AI Isn’t Free

Sometimes ChatGPT feels like a free lunch. I can use it for 20 bucks a month and I get all kinds of value for that same 20 bucks. The reality is AI is not free and there’s two really important perspectives or ways that AI costs your business that you need to be aware of and plan for as trade-offs.

1. Token Tax:
The first one is operational. You, you’re probably aware of it because it’s there in the numbers, but it surprised many businesses. And that is the accumulating cost of token use as AI gets more and more integrated with your business. So as you add AI to your solution, your service, or you add it to some standard workflows that your team use on a daily basis, the cost of those tokens start to add up. And there’s been reports of companies being really surprised by how much that can be and burning through a full year’s budget of these tokens in three months. So you need to treat AI just like you do your other resources or cost of goods that you build into your solution or into your workflow.

2. Brain Drain:
There’s a more important cost to AI though that I wanna talk about now. And that is the cost to how you and your team think, your mindset, your capability. Just like other technologies through the years, as we choose to adopt help, to automate, to motorize, there’s a trade off. If I am no longer walking, I’m riding in a car, if I don’t do anything else, my body will atrophy, right? I will lose the capability. My muscles will no longer be able to do what they used to do. There’s a lot of parallels of different technologies that we’ve adopted. With AI, the challenge you have is that as you give AI things to do, to think about for you, to help you decide, as you offload things, are you giving away important capabilities in how your team innovates or addresses problems or strengthens their resilience? There’s a lot of different layers of this. So what this means is it’s really important for you to choose what AI helps you with. Acknowledging, understanding that there’s a trade off and what you give AI to do, you will be less good at doing. And there are things that that is just fine. The important thing is for you to choose it and not find yourself five years from now with a company that’s lost the ability to do the things that really made it special and stand out. So your competitive edge, your sustainable advantage needs to be something that you and your team owns and has the muscles to execute on.

B2B Clarity:
So choose carefully how AI helps you. There’s no free lunch.