The math nobody modeled.
You laid off the team to save money on salaries.
Now your AI bill is higher than payroll ever was. 😬
Here’s the part the deck didn’t mention: humans have a fixed cost. Tokens have an appetite.
A salaried employee costs the same whether they think hard or coast. A model charges you for every thought, every retry, every “actually, let me reconsider.” 🔥
And the work doesn’t shrink. It expands to fill the context window.
So the CFO who celebrated a leaner org chart in Q1 is now staring at an invoice that reads like a phone bill from 1998, itemized, unreadable, and somehow always going up.
The cruel twist? You can’t negotiate with a token. You can’t ask it to take a pay cut. You can’t offer it equity instead of cash.
You just pay. Per call. Per token. Per regret.
The companies winning right now aren’t the ones who replaced people with AI.
They’re the ones who paired smaller teams with sharper tools, and kept someone in the room who knew when to stop prompting.
Leverage isn’t free. It’s just billed differently.
