I am tired of hearing AI’s enormous price tag treated as evidence that the technology has failed in terms of cost effectiveness. We are paying the upfront cost of a transformation that will reshape how work gets done, and that cost will hurt. The real danger is not spending too much today.
It is refusing to change while everyone else learns how to work differently. I have seen this pattern before. During the dot-com era, businesses spent millions building websites, e-commerce operations, and digital marketing systems before the returns were obvious.
Others took years to mature. But it was companies such as Amazon, which stayed with the transformation, that ultimately changed their industries. Becoming a change maker has never been cheap.
AI is now entering that same uncomfortable middle ground. Forbes reported that more than 142,000 technology jobs were eliminated in the first five months of 2026 while major technology companies committed roughly $700 billion to AI infrastructure. That raises a legitimate question: Are companies cutting people because AI can do their jobs, or because leaders believe AI eventually will?
Those are two very different decisions. Workers worry about disappearing jobs. Young people worry that the first rung of the career ladder is disappearing.
We should invest intelligently and bring people through the transition. But I reject the idea that the answer is to stop investing in AI. Here is where companies are getting into trouble.
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