AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up - And What This Means For Enterprise AI JOSH BERSIN
Summary
AI tool prices are likely to rise as model training, inference, and data-center infrastructure become much more expensive to build and operate. Enterprise buyers will feel the impact first because vendors such as Anthropic are shifting toward usage-based pricing and customers are already seeing volatile bills. Higher AI costs will force companies to prioritize only the highest-ROI use cases, which should reduce casual deployment and make failed projects easier to kill. The article argues that AI will not instantly replace broad software or labor spending; instead, it will likely shift budgets, pressure margins, and push companies toward more strategic adoption of agents and embedded workflows. It also warns that the current wave of AI infrastructure investment may eventually face a valuation and funding reset.