The price per token has been falling for months. The bill keeps rising anyway. In episode 9 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I compare what we see in our organisations, and it is the same pattern on both sides: the more we develop agentically, the faster consumption grows, and it grows faster than model prices drop. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
Welcome to Edition 9 of The CAIO.
From October every AI request at Zühlke is billed to the team that made it. Token prices more than halved this summer, and the bill is still the number to watch. A cheap model that fails twice and ends with a person on the case costs more than the expensive one. The same agent on the same prompt takes two routes and sends two bills. My own dark factory burned one billion tokens over several days for a game I would not pay for. Almost no company has a person whose job is to watch that bill and switch.
Welcome to Edition 8 of The CAIO.
One question ran under almost every post this month. When a model writes the code and anyone in the company can start it, what is left that a person has to own? The two posts that reached furthest answered it from opposite ends. One showed a company where people with no engineering title ship to production. The other showed an engineering organisation where execution got so cheap that deciding became the constraint. Put them together and the control you thought you had, knowing who wrote it, is gone.
Welcome to Edition 7 of The CAIO.
I have argued for years that the model is the small part and the discipline around it is the work. It is a claim that is easy to nod along to and easy to dismiss as a consultant’s line. In July it stopped being a line. A research group tested it on 5,000 codebases and put a number on it. A systems engineer took apart a viral “37,000 lines a day” boast and showed what that volume actually costs. Both posts reached far beyond my usual audience, one of them among the highest reach I have had all year. The audience is not tired of the argument. It wants the evidence.
Welcome to Edition 6 of The CAIO.
June had one lesson that kept landing on a desk where it had rarely landed before: finance. For two years we treated AI tokens as free and competed on how many we could burn. In June the bill arrived. The price of each request had fallen, which is exactly why usage exploded and the total cost climbed past what anyone had budgeted. AI cost control became a CFO topic as fast as it became ours.
Summary # Handelsblatt examines how the shift by major model providers to usage-based billing turns tokens into a resource that companies must actively manage, much like labor, energy, and capital. The trigger, among others, is GitHub Copilot moving to token-based billing. The article shows how companies are responding to the cost pressure through budgets, model selection, and new platforms.
A year ago I called DevSecOps, continuous delivery, cloud and AIOps as the trends for 2021. Most of those landed. For 2022 the picture gets more interesting because DevOps is no longer a single wave — different parts of the market are at very different stages of adoption. To make sense of that, I map the 2022 trends onto the technology adoption lifecycle: late majority, early majority and early adopters.
