The technology will become increasingly integral to firms’ processes and operations, Neil Bunn, Google’s director of customer engineering for Canada, predicted at a Global Risk Institute event in Toronto on Wednesday. As a result, “you are paying the least for AI that you will ever pay for AI, in your life.” (The Logic)

Talking point: Businesses are increasingly counting the costs of their AI applications, with many switching to cheaper open source models for tasks that don’t require the reasoning power of the most advanced systems. Firms that try to use AI coding agents to build in-house replacements for software and autonomous tools they would otherwise buy from outside suppliers are “failing to remember some lessons from what was a very chaotic era of the dot com,” Bunn said, citing the challenges of having to run and maintain that much custom technology. While overall AI expenses might grow, Anthropic applied AI field CTO Eric Burns countered that businesses are likely to get greater returns on that spending as tokens—the unit of AI models’ output—get cheaper. Firms are worried they will “drown in these costs” because they’re projecting based on today’s prices, he said. “Just wait, and it’s going to be an 80 per cent gross profit margin before you know it.”  

Sponsored Content

Why cybersecurity needs to match pace with AI

By Jessica Aftimus Rosa

How to shift your workforce from AI experimentation to adoption

By Jessica Aftimus Rosa

The real-world economic offshoots of sovereign AI

By Deborah Aarts

Paid promotional content