Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees
Summary
Fortune reports that corporate AI adoption faces a real cost problem: the compute and token costs of AI agents can exceed the price of human labor. The piece highlights Microsoft's shift away from Claude Code licenses toward GitHub Copilot CLI, Uber and Meta experiments with AI token dashboards, and Gartner's forecast of rising token consumption even as unit costs fall. The article frames AI economics as a bottleneck for enterprise adoption and notes executives' warnings about token-based pricing beyond the sticker price of AI tools.