the companies building the ai are spending about four dollars for every one the market pays them back.

ai infrastructure spend is running near $400 billion a year against roughly $100 billion in enterprise ai revenue, chip stocks slid into a bear market this summer, and fund managers just logged a record reading on overspend worry. the gap belongs to the hyperscalers, but the buying habit it normalized landed on you: seats, tiers, and capacity bought ahead of any workload that asked for them, on the theory that the capability would find a use later. it shows up in your p&l as licenses nobody activated and a committed tier you keep renewing because unwinding it now looks worse than paying for it. the move going around is to wait out the shakeout and buy cheaper in a year, which is the same unattached purchase with a later date on it.

do the version that holds: name the one workflow costing you the most hours this quarter, buy only what that workflow needs, and write the number it has to move before the renewal lands. a vendor who cannot price against a single workflow is asking you to fund their capacity, not your throughput.