This will undoubtedly be the flavour of the month across the internet, particularly on platforms such as LinkedIn. People will suddenly be saying, “Aha! AI isn’t saving the world. CEOs are seeing the cost of all that token usage and realising that they shouldn’t have replaced people.”

Yes, some CEOs will be receiving unexpectedly large bills, but there is nothing new about the underlying problem. It is the same challenge every corporation faces when assessing value for money and trying to understand the total cost of a decision before committing to it.

My favourite recurring example is the comparison between contractors and permanent employees. Taken as a whole, a good contractor does not cost more than a permanent employee, provided you pay a sane market rate and you get what you asked for delivery-wise. Permanent employees come with many additional and often less visible costs, including benefits, training, leave and potential employment liabilities.

This does not mean that one option is automatically better than the other. It simply means that avoiding consultants or contractors does not always produce the savings an organisation expects. A good consultant who delivers genuine value is as good a deal as a dedicated employee. {This is a shameless plug}.

The same principle has appeared throughout the history of business outsourcing. It may look inexpensive to outsource work to the cheapest available supplier in another country, but is it really cheaper if the result is increasing technical debt and creating remediation costs further down the line?

Going back even further, buying cheap tools may appear to be a cost-saving exercise. However, if they need to be replaced repeatedly, they may ultimately cost far more than buying the right tools in the first place.

AI is no different. Every generation falls for some version of the same promise. When something appears too good to be true, it usually is. Everything has a cost, and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

What we need to avoid now is another knee jerk reaction. AI is brilliant and is a major step up in what corporations do day to day. However, it is not a universal solution, and its costs go beyond simply doing the work and providing the necessary computing power.

Vast amounts of investment have been poured into AI companies, and those investors will eventually expect a return. One way or another, that is likely to mean that prices will rise and costs will increase.

So, we return to the same advice that finance departments have been giving organisations since time immemorial: look at the complete cost of a decision.

Do not ask only how much something will cost this year. Ask what it could cost over the next ten years. Consider the supporting systems, the people, the remediation work, the supplier risks and the potential cost of changing direction later.

Before making large-scale changes, take the time to understand what you are buying, what it will replace and how much the service is likely to cost over its entire lifetime.

As a deeply technical person, I have always slightly resented PowerPoint. It can feel like communication with extra steps, or like turning everything into a very basic “See Spot run” version of the world. That said, I am aware that, from a manager’s point of view, when they have so much information thrown across their desk, something neatly laid out and clear can make their job much easier.

However, I have recently been lucky enough to work with someone with significant accessibility needs, and I am now seeing PowerPoint in an even grimmer light.

Often, other forms of communication are asked to be converted into a PowerPoint slide for the sake of presentation, even when the email containing the original data is perfectly readable by everybody. Yet the expectation remains that it has to be fancied up before adult humans are considered capable of coping with it.

This has always struck me as slightly annoying and needless work, but it had never really occurred to me how much of a non-inclusive pain it can be for people with accessibility issues.

A lot of the templates people use for PowerPoint, particularly those from larger vendors, are designed with sheer beauty in mind. They are often created by professional designers, and they can look brilliant. But they can also be an absolute devil to edit if you are not fully able-bodied and a wizard with a mouse. They are often far more like works of art than practical means of communication.

I do appreciate how good a polished PowerPoint slide can look, and I do appreciate the clarity they can sometimes bring. But are they always necessary? Do we need to produce a beautiful slide rather than one that is merely clear, easy to edit, and suitable for communication?

So next time you are adding complex background images and hundreds of little dots to make a Gantt chart, have a think about how someone who only has voice commands would edit it.