AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

This is the unglamorous flip side of the AI boom, the moment finance teams realize a chatbot subscription behaved like a fixed cost and an agent fleet behaves like a variable one that can spike without warning. Usage based pricing rewards companies that can forecast token burn and punishes everyone else, which quietly changes who gets to experiment with agents at all. Worth reading past the survey stats for the detail that some firms are downgrading to cheaper models just to keep bills predictable, a very unglamorous form of AI strategy.