When Software Starts Consuming AI: Cheaper Tokens, Bigger Bills
Vesa Manninen
About this talk
When Software Starts Consuming AI: Cheaper Tokens, Bigger Bills.
AI inference is getting cheaper, but that does not mean AI bills will shrink. The reason is consumption. Agentic AI usage is already significant, especially in software engineering, while autonomous execution of enterprise business processes is still early.
As agents move into orders, invoices, customer cases and other recurring workflows, AI consumption can begin scaling with business activity rather than headcount. One business event may also trigger multiple model calls, tool calls, retries and agents.
This changes the FinOps challenge: understanding AI cost is no longer only about tokens and unit prices. We need to connect consumption to the work being performed and design the economics before scaling the autonomy.
