Enterprise AI spending jumped 3.2× in 2025 to $37B (Gartner), while inference costs dropped 90%.
The paradox isn't new, it's cloud economics on fast-forward.
What took cloud 10 years to reveal is happening in AI in 2-3 years:
a) Low unit costs → elastic, untracked adoption
b) Agentic workflows multiply requests 10-50×
c) Cost drivers are architectural (retries, context bloat), not volumetric
d) Finance sees the bill only when it's too late to re-architect
Rigorous cost governance will be essential to realizing AI ROI.
