You’ve got Jevons Paradox wrong. It’s not the compute.
If enterprise success has always come down to allocating scarce resources efficiently and effectively.
and if AI is making a whole class of once-scarce resources, such as analysis, code, content and expertise nearly free at the margin;
and if access to non-frontier models is becoming a commodity;
and if your competitors have access to the same intelligence as you do;
and if the same models, in two different companies, will only product different results depending on who’s asking the questions and who’s judging the answers;
and if the cost of AI output continues continues falling while demand for inference continues to rise (the mainstream view on Jevons Paradox);
and if more analyses, more drafts, more code, more agents are doing more things;
then human attention and judgement become both your only differentiator and your scarcest resource. This is the real Jevons Paradox.
The job of management hasn’t changed. It’s still resource allocation. The winners in the AI era won’t be the companies with the best models or fewest employees. They’ll be the ones that figure out how to deploy human attention and judgement most effectively.