#3 💸 The Hidden Cost of "Just Use More AI"

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Top posts from this week

💸 The "use AI as much as possible" era is ending.

After years of pushing AI tools on employees with few limits, CIOs and CTOs are now capping usage and retraining teams to opt for smaller, cheaper models rather than defaulting to the largest available, as AI spending climbs toward a projected $2.5 trillion this year. The lesson scales down well: matching the tool to the task, not just adopting AI everywhere you can, is what keeps costs from quietly spiraling as your own usage grows.

📊 Your AI vendor's next price increase may be baked into the technology itself.

Gartner now forecasts that running AI agents will cost more than five times as much per task by 2028, even as the underlying AI gets cheaper per word, because more capable agents simply use far more of it to complete a task. It's a good reason to ask any AI vendor how their pricing scales as your usage grows, not just what it costs today.

📌 A quieter story worth knowing: even "free" AI coding tools have a price tag.

In this week's roundup, DeepLearning.AI flags Meta's new discount tier for its coding assistant, which dramatically cuts costs for developers who agree to let Meta train on their code and work sessions. It's a clear example of a pattern worth watching for in any AI tool your business adopts: the cheapest tier is rarely free; it's usually paid for with your own data rather than your wallet.

In this live, hands-on workshop, you'll spend two hours turning your biggest time suck into a working Claude skill, plus leave with a 30-day plan for rolling it out to your whole team. No technical background needed, just your own real workflow to work from.

Wednesday, August 26 at 11am ET. Limited seats available.

🤖 "Automate it" isn't one strategy; it's two very different ones.

​This n8n breakdown draws a clear line between RPA, bots that click around inside an app the way a person would, and workflow automation, which connects systems directly behind the scenes. For most small businesses, the practical guidance holds up well: lean on workflow automation as your default, and save RPA-style tools for the rare legacy system that has no other way in.

🎙️ Two of the most popular AI note-takers: one clear winner depends on your team's size.

​Zapier's hands-on comparison of Fathom and Fireflies found Fathom simpler and better suited to solo users or small teams, while Fireflies pulls ahead for larger teams that need deeper CRM integrations and more granular controls. A useful, no-nonsense pick if your team is still taking meeting notes by hand.

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