McKinsey has put numbers on the thing every finance chief has noticed. A unit of intelligence keeps getting cheaper; the invoice keeps getting larger. One in five organisations now says cost is limiting what it does with AI, and the cost of the same task can vary thirtyfold between runs.
Companies are moving steady, predictable workloads to owned infrastructure while keeping the cloud for everything spiky, and both sides claim vindication.
Telemetry costs growing faster than the systems they watch have made data pipelines a budget line worth re-architecting.
CISOs are consolidating dozens of point products onto platforms, trading marginal capability for integration and one renewal fight.