Making AI an asset, not an expense

When customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes. As AI moves from experimentation to production, model choice is only part of the equation.

When demand becomes steady and business-critical, a consumption-only approach can turn AI spending into a variable monthly line item that is difficult to forecast as usage, workloads, and model requirements change. At that point, the question is no longer simply which model to consume, or which provider offers the lowest token price: It is how to run AI economically, predictably, and at sustained scale.

AI is moving from isolated pilots into production portfolios: assistants, retrieval-and-knowledge systems, and agentic applications. Customer-service, IT, research, and business-process agents can execute multi-step workflows across enterprise systems, creating recurring demand across models, data, and tools. This is already starting to happen. Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise reflects what many leaders are seeing: worker…