The bend in the hockey stick…and the bill that comes with it

The AI revolution just went vertical, and the audit is coming.

For the past three years, the growth of AI has been remarkable; in the past few months it quietly went vertical.

14 months ago, Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. Six months ago, $183 billion. Now? Over a trillion. OpenAI booked $5.7 billion last quarter…then Anthropic just guided to $10.9 billion for next quarter.

No way around it: these numbers are staggering (and we can’t reach for historical parallels any longer, for they don’t exist). Equally important, within months, the revolution will get audited. OpenAI is planning to file for an IPO with Goldman and Morgan Stanley running the book, and Anthropic is rumored to be targeting an October listing.

Here’s the catch: this stuff isn’t free. Far from it. Agentic AI can burn a thousand times more tokens than a standard query, as we’re now seeing small development teams surprising CFOs with $1+ million token costs in a single month. As a result, firms such as Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are curtailing internal AI use.

This dual dynamic (of wild growth + cost) puts the services industry squarely in the crosshairs. There are two big questions, and no good answers yet.

First, inside most every enterprise, leadership is pushing employees to “tokenmaxx,” to use AI for everything. But when the tokens for a mid-level analyst exceed their fully loaded comp (and the productivity lift is fuzzy) who owns that variance? The CFO? The CTO? The business unit P&L? The individual worker?

Second, and this is where it’s getting super-interesting: when Accenture, Cognizant, Infosys, or Deloitte now builds a system for a client, who pays the token bill? Is it COGS, passed through like contractor hours, with margin on top? Is it absorbed, the price of staying competitive on fixed-fee work? Or does it become a new line item, “AI consumption,” that reshapes the entire MSA?

The old labor arbitrage model assumed humans on the bench. The new one has a meter running in the cloud. Whoever figures out the pricing architecture first wins the next decade. The rest will be explaining variances to their boards.

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