I think a lot of companies are still telling themselves a very comforting story about AI costs. The story goes like this: Tokens are cheap. Models keep getting better. A few copilots here, a few agents there, maybe a chatbot for support, maybe some code generation in CI, and somehow this all stays in the “software subscription” bucket. I do not buy that story anymore. My take is simple: tokens are starting to behave less like a cheap productivity feature and more like a volatile labor line item. And in a growing number of workflows, they are already expensive enough to compete with what companies would happily pay for junior humans. Not just junior developers. Junior assistants too. The worse part is not even the absolute price. It is the unpredictability. A junior hire has a salary. A token budget has moods. the spreadsheet starts lying very early On paper, token prices still look harmless. They are quoted per million tokens, which is a wonderful way to make real usage feel abstract.…