HI: Human Intelligence

One thing I find fascinating about the AI industry right now:

At the same time AI adoption is exploding, more executives are starting to question AI ROI.

For the past few years, the narrative was simple:

"Use more AI."

Today the conversation is changing.

Companies are discovering that AI isn't just intelligence.

It's infrastructure.

It's compute.

It's inference.

It's token consumption.

And all of that costs real money.

We're already seeing organizations become more selective about how they use AI, routing requests to cheaper models, limiting usage, and questioning whether the results justify the spend.

Which leads to an interesting paradox.

The people who were supposedly going to be replaced first, developers and other power users, will end up becoming some of the biggest paying customers.

Not because AI replaced us.

But because getting consistently useful results at scale carries a real cost.

The closer AI gets to human level capabilities, the closer its operating costs start to resemble the economics of human intelligence.

I call that HI: Human Intelligence.

We've compared AI against human workers as if one would completely replace the other.

What if the future looks different?

What if AI becomes another layer of cost that companies must justify the same way they justify salaries, contractors, consultants, or software licenses?

In that world, the key question isn't:

"Can AI do it?"

It's:

"Can AI do it economically?"

And I think that's the question the industry is only beginning to wrestle with.