Knowing the ground ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock

Aside from the fact the AI guy looks exactly like Prince Andrew, the concept of not knowing the ground applies. Excess tokens created are based on noise in the system caused by entities not knowing what they're doing. I saw this countless times as a "wonderful" consultant and it hasn't changed save that the velocity of the noise in question has increased due to the kind of tech being used in 2026. As per The Mythical Man Month,  adding more people to a late project makes it later applies when the time needed  to properly analyze the situation carefully is ignored, thus insuring  the cost of using AI to "solve" the problem at hand turns it into a cash cow burning event for the ages. 

By now, it’s clear that the only way the tech industry can justify the cost of AI is if it replaces vast swaths of the human workforce with machines that run 24/7.

The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.

According to a new survey from “Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, a significant number of corporate executives are reeling from sticker shock over new usage-based AI pricing schemes. Though enterprises could once count on AI companies to subsidize the price of large language models via flat-rate contracts, that’s no longer a given, as the rising cost of computational power forces the entire tech sector into a defensive posture.

The KPMG report, initially flagged by the Register, surveyed 2,145 senior execs across 20 countries, finding that an astonishing 29 percent of them had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.

A further third confessed that their own cluelessness about AI economics was a barrier to successfully deploying AI in the workplace, the Register notes.

Click on the image to download the PDF if you dare. This was part of a series on helping
clients do what the boffins in this blurb are not doing, Knowing the ground. The Art of War applies. :)