Beyond the AI Euphoria: Are We Just Trading Payroll for AI Bills?
Description and use
Companies replace developers with AI tools, expecting cost savings, but AI bills grow to match payroll, and delivery performance does not improve.
Problem
Companies replace developers with AI tools, expecting cost savings, but AI bills grow to match payroll, and delivery performance does not improve.
Outcome
The AI bill matched the payroll savings, and project delivery did not improve, indicating that AI adoption did not create new value but merely shifted costs.
Workflow
- Reduce team size by five developers
- Adopt AI coding assistants, agents, premium model subscriptions, and API access
- Increase remaining developers’ workload to include AI direction, review, and bug fixing
- Track AI usage and costs
- Compare payroll costs to AI bill
- Assess delivery performance
Evidence
One of our clients made a decision that many companies are making right now. They reduced their development team by five programmers and asked the remaining developers to work faster through mass adoption of AI tools: coding assistants, AI agents, premium model subscriptions and API access for automated workflows.
On paper, the saving was clear: roughly €25,000 per month in salaries and related costs.
A few months later, the picture looked different. The monthly AI bill (seats, API consumption, agent runs, integrations and the tooling around them) had grown to roughly the same €25,000.
After the change, it still did. The deadlines were missed just as before.
- Record date: 2026-11-03T17:13:56.558Z