Something’s about to happen to the cost of AI, and most organisations haven’t seen it coming yet.
I’m predicting the end of the cute $20-a-month AI subscription. The vertical AI platforms cropping up across knowledge-work sectors are increasingly being priced like the people the AI companies want you to “augment” (read “replace”). I foresee some AI tools being priced at thousands per year per seat, because the human roles they’re trying to replace cost tens or hundreds of thousands in wages.
The signals are already pretty loud overseas. The serious adopters aren’t waiting for the new prices for the agentic tools to fall. They’re absorbing the new costs and pressing harder, because the outsized payoffs are landing for them.
For most NZ businesses, this is going to feel like a massive shock. Your finance person hasn’t got a mental model for it. Neither has your board. The reflex will be to cut the tools, to assume the whole AI thing was overhyped, to pull back at exactly the wrong moment.
The companies that will come out of this in good shape will be the ones who’ve spent the last few years building AI literacy across leadership and operations. Not just buying licences. Not just running the odd workshop. Building the skill to direct the AI spend, measure what’s coming back, and reshaping it into work the business couldn’t do prior. Without that skill and literacy though, the bigger AI prices coming will look like waste.
The remedy is the same one I’ve been banging the drum on for years. Build the AI skill at both ends of the business (leadership and operations), deliberately. The licences anyone can pay for, even if they radically scale in the next 12 months. The skill and literacy is what takes the time.
Sources & citations
- Bloomberg — JPMorgan's Dimon says AI cost savings now matching money spent (Oct 2025) — JPMorgan's $2B AI spend, $2B savings, "tip of the iceberg" quote.
- Thomson Reuters Institute — 2026 AI in Professional Services Report — Survey of ~1,500 professionals across 27 countries; organisation-wide AI use doubled in a year.
- Grant Thornton — Q1 2026 CFO Survey: CFOs accelerate tech spending as AI momentum increases — 68% of CFOs raising tech and digital spend, the highest reading in 21 quarters.
- Artificial Lawyer — Legal AI has a growing token price problem (Jun 2026) — Harvey AI's shift from flat per-seat subscription to usage-based enterprise pricing.
- TechCrunch — Sierra raises $950M as the race to own enterprise AI gets serious (May 2026) — Sierra at 40%+ of the Fortune 50, US$15.8B valuation.
- Newsweek — Abridge expands nursing AI platform to 250+ health systems (2026) — Abridge deployed across 250+ US health systems.
- Global Banking & Finance Review — Hebbia processes one billion pages as financial institutions deploy AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale (2026) — Hebbia used by 40% of the world's largest asset managers by AUM.
- Marketing AI Institute — 2025 State of Marketing AI Report — SmarterX survey of 2,100+ professionals; 74% say AI is critical / very important, only 25% of organisations have scaled.
