Episode Details

Harvard Business Review published a piece by Stacia Garr on August 17, 2026 arguing that today's AI adoption was fueled by heavily subsidized pricing from enterprise software vendors, that the era is ending, and that companies are shifting toward usage-based charges. Vendors have been quietly absorbing the cost of GPUs, inference and tokens to acquire customers; as that subsidy is withdrawn, AI stops being a software line item and becomes a variable consumption cost that has to be budgeted, attributed and governed.

Continue the story on unscarcity.ai:

• Compute Landlords: When AI Builders Become Rentiers
• Goodhart's Law: Why AI Metrics Always Backfire

Full episode notes on unscarcity.ai