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Welcome back to The B2B Stack. It’s been a while since I told a founder story rather than an adtech one and this week’s edition is that, seeded off a genuinely brilliant piece from Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged. Worth reading in full if you haven’t. This is my extension of it: a thought experiment on what happens when AI adoption stops being subsidised, why that’s a founder’s decision and not an employee’s, and why getting it right might be the thing that lets the next generation of founders build bigger companies with fewer people than we ever could.
Over the 6 years since the pandemic, it’s often been said that this era is the exponential era. This is driven by the rapid changes in technology, and nothing personifies that better than the AI revolution. You’d have to have been living in a cave to not have come across the impact this technology has on everything from work to day to day life, but as the VC funded ‘grow at all costs’ era of AI starts to draw to a close, we have a new paradigm to consider alongside the usual questions around AI adoption, how to use it, where not to, how people fit alongside this tech and all the other big questions.
The one question that hasn’t really been part of this argument is cost. To date the technology has been priced ridiculously cheaply to drive adoption and reliance. As the VC era closes and the AI companies need to drive closer to sustainable growth, the costs will rise. There’s been some viral stories around this out there, and I’m picking it up to run a wider founder focussed through experiment on AI
Every piece I’ve read on the AI cost crisis treats it as an operations problem. Set smarter model defaults, like for example, maybe you don’t need the highest octane model to figure out where Microsoft’s head quarters are or what the bath temperature should be for a 6 month old. Cap the tokens. Route to something cheaper and more aligned to the task. Get finance to build a dashboard.
All of that is possibly true, and all of it is downstream of the actual decision, which doesn’t sit with an ops team or a procurement function. It sits with the founder or business ownership - but in this piece I’ll refer to it as the founder, as that’s my lens.
Whether a business ends up with a second payroll and how well that second payroll is managed is a founder-level capital allocation call, made with the same weight as a hiring plan or a fundraise, not a line item that gets discovered after the fact when the invoice lands. Or at least it should be, so my message to any reader of this is to help bring this awareness to your organisation if it’s not there yet.
Employees experience AI adoption as a tool getting better or worse, faster or slower, more or less annoying to use. More or less job threatening. More or less helpful in their day to day role and responsibilities
Founders experience it as a structural decision about what the company is actually made of. Those are not the same lens, and most of what’s been written about this crisis has been written through the wrong one.
What you’ll learn in this article:
Why a Series B founder’s viral Anthropic bill is a warning sign, not an edge case
The two cost lines that defined my first business, and why founders, not employees, are the ones who actually feel them
Why AI spend behaves like a UK income tax cliff edge, and why a founder’s job is to plan for the cliff before it arrives
Why the founder’s real skill here is balance: using AI as a genuine catalyst for speed and quality without losing the human in the loop
Why this cost crisis balances the books with headcount - meaning AI is much less job threatening and the time for employees to lean in is now - to ensure they are part of the AI native thinking and org structure of tomorrow
Why getting this balance right might let a new generation of founders build serious companies without the headcount their predecessors needed
Where I think this settles, and why it could end up healthier for everyone — including the graduates and early-career people the current system has been squeezing out
Below is how I’m actually budgeting for this at FunnelFuel, and what I think it means for team size.