You should understand how AI is like email. But worse.
Every email has a cost.
It costs something to generate, distribute, and store emails. These costs are understood and easily measured.
The cost of the email server is trivial. That was never the real cost of email.
The real cost is the cost of reading it, assessing it, acting on it, or choosing not to act on it.
This is the cost of human attention. There’s no dashboard for it.
Some organizations figured email out. Not by buying better servers. They did it by building discipline around the human side. Norms were set about when to send or forward and when not to. Rules about who actually needs to be copied. Cultural permission not to respond to everything instantly.
They managed the expensive, human component instead of optimizing the cheap part.
Right now, everyone is measuring AI by its IT costs. Tokens, compute, latency. The numbers on invoices and dashboards. But the organizations that will win with AI will be those that build discipline around the human and team elements.
When servers are cheap, it’s easy to let email bury your people.
The real cost of AI will never be the inference bill. It will be the cost of human attention, collaboration and judgment. These are the things no dashboard measures and no models replace.