You Can't Sell The Best Thing AI Does
So what can you sell?
Every argument about AI and money is an argument about revenue: whose is real, whose is borrowed, whether a trillion dollars of data centres ever earns it back. It’s the wrong number.
In 2024, two economists, Avinash Collis and Erik Brynjolfsson, put a number on it:
Americans pulled about $97 billion of value out of generative AI in 2024.
Between them, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic booked roughly $7 billion in revenue. $97B in, $7B out, and the missing $90B went into the pockets of the people typing the prompts and stayed there.
this level of consumer surplus is usually it’s a footnote.
But with AI it’s the whole story, because the gap isn’t closing as the market matures; it’s widening. Brynjolfsson’s lab at Stanford now puts it at $172B a year, up from $112B the year before. The value to the median user tripling in twelve months!
Every boardroom looks at that and sees a market waiting to be captured. I think it’s the opposite. The surplus isn’t the phase before the money; I think it’s where this technology comes to rest.
Everything Climbed but the Price
The median person’s use of token tripling in a year isn’t a normal curve. It’s what it looks like when a tool goes from novelty to daily habit almost overnight. And the adoption underneath it is the steepest we have on record: GenAI reached 53% of people within three years of arriving, faster than the personal computer, faster than the internet.
[ chart: adoption-race — upload the downloaded PNG here ]
Two and a half years ago most people had never typed a prompt. Now half of them have, and the ones who have are getting three times what they got last year.
If we hold those two lines together:
Value per person climbing,
Adoption climbing -
and the strange one is the third line, the one that doesn’t move. The price.
The the startling realisation becomes…..well how did these 2 affect the pricing? Turns out barely.
Every other technology this useful eventually found the meter. Electricity got one. The telephone got one. AI got cheaper instead, then it got free, and it has stayed free while the value did the opposite.
Free Isn’t a Phase
The reassuring story is that this is just the land-grab discount - the Google move, the Facebook move. Give it away, build the habit, switch the billing on later. It’s the wrong story, because there three things are holding the price down for AI, and none of them will lift any time soon.
First:
Serving one more answer costs almost nothing. A model is expensive to train once and then cheap to run forever; the cost of your next question rounds to a fraction of a cent. The price of the raw material has already collapsed; work that ran about thirty dollars a million tokens in 2023 costs near a dime now.
Second
The models have bunched. Two years ago the best one was clearly best, and you would pay for it. Now the leading models sit within a few points of each other on most things that matter, and a buyer who won’t pay just uses the one ranked fourth, which is free and good enough. When the products are interchangeable, the price of each falls to the price of the next - and the next is nearly nothing.
Third
There’s a floor under all of it: open weights.
When a Google engineer’s 2023 memo leaked under the title “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI,” it read as panic. In 2026, to me it reads like a forecast. Models you can download and run yourself, DeepSeek’s among them, trail the paid frontier by months, not years. While a free-to-own model sits one season behind, no one can hold a price far above it for long.
Near-zero cost + converged quality + an open-weight floor.
Those are NOT teething troubles a market grows out of. They ARE the market.
The price isn’t low because the industry is young. It’s low because the thing really is close to free to make.
What’s Left to Sell
None of this means nobody makes money. It means you can’t make it on the commodity. You make it on whatever the commodity can’t touch.
Run through what stays scarce when intelligence is cheap, and the list is old:
Judgment - knowing which of the model’s three plausible answers is the right one;
Taste - the nerve to cut the other two;
Trust - the reason a buyer takes your word instead of running the prompt himself;
A Point of View - the one thing a model, trained to agree with everyone, can’t have.
None of those is AI. They’re the oldest things on the market, and the model just made them the expensive ones, by making everything around them free. Intelligence is the giveaway in the box; the scarce thing is the person deciding what to do with it.
What I can’t tell you is which scarce thing is yours. Only that “we’ll charge for the intelligence later” is the one plan the arithmetic rules out. AI does its best work for free, and always will. The invoice, when it comes, won’t be for the answer; it’ll be for knowing which answer was right.