The AI Bill Is Coming. Businesses Aren't Ready

Cyberpunk Survival Guide author Greg Fish breaks down the economics behind AI token pricing and why the free ride is ending faster than most businesses realise. Every AI request costs money, measured in tokens: the subdivisions of language a large language model processes on the way in and the way out. The more complex the request, the more tokens burned, and the bill lands whether the answer was useful or not. Fish explains why that pricing has always been intentionally hard to track, and why it was designed that way: get companies dependent on the infrastructure, then collect once switching costs make it painful to leave. The investors funding the data centres and compute expansions want returns now. AI companies are hiking prices to deliver them. And businesses that built workflows around cheap AI access are about to find out what that dependency actually costs. Topics: AI pricing model, AI tokens explained, AI business costs, tech bait and switch, LLM profitability GUEST: Greg Fish | cyberpunksurvivalguide.com Originally aired on 2026-06-17