Intelligence Has a Cost
As AI moves from the chat window into business processes, its economics become part of management.
For many companies, the first phase of AI was about access: giving people tools, testing models and finding useful applications.
The next phase is different. AI is beginning to operate inside the processes themselves. Applications call models automatically, sometimes thousands of times a day, and every one of those operations consumes resources.
This changes the economics of software.
Leadership will need to understand not only what AI can do, but what it costs to run, how that cost scales, which models should handle each task and when cloud, commercial or open-weight alternatives make better business sense.
This week’s cover story looks at that emerging discipline: the economics of tokens, and how to manage intelligence as a production resource.