What I'm seeing at work now is the companies selling AI stuff to companies - mostly Microsoft in my neck of the woods. For me as an employee, using copilot is a trivial thing, not my wallet. But just like with AWS where a developer doesn't really need to worry about how many machines their merge request starts up and lets run, the bills will start to creep up to the companies.
For now Copilot is a fixed $20 / month / person, but it's only a matter of time before it becomes metered, or the advanced models cost more credits. This is also why they're pushing for agents, because a single query is cool and all, how much it costs in compute is reasonably predictable, but an agent can do a lot of interesting things and do 100x the usage of a single query, and put 100x the charge on the corporate credit card.
It'll probably have a chilling effect, with companies being like "ok maybe let's tone down a bit on the AI usage", just like how they hire consultants to bring down their runaway AWS costs.
For now Copilot is a fixed $20 / month / person, but it's only a matter of time before it becomes metered, or the advanced models cost more credits. This is also why they're pushing for agents, because a single query is cool and all, how much it costs in compute is reasonably predictable, but an agent can do a lot of interesting things and do 100x the usage of a single query, and put 100x the charge on the corporate credit card.
It'll probably have a chilling effect, with companies being like "ok maybe let's tone down a bit on the AI usage", just like how they hire consultants to bring down their runaway AWS costs.