🎮【Maintenance Costs of Evolution】The Countdown to AI Replacement and the Terror of Invoices Striking IT Giants🧾 The Cold Reality of Usage-Based Billing Faced by Microsoft 📉💸

Influencers who say "AI is more cost-effective" don't know the horror of usage-based billing 🪤🧾

Hey, it's me 🕶

Listen, my friend. If you open any business magazine or social media lately, everywhere you look is flooded with the inevitable future of “AI will take human jobs” and “Introducing AI will slash costs.” It's like a guaranteed outcome.

I, too, have warned many times about a future where AI agents ruthlessly hollow out existing businesses and replace white-collar work. That prediction hasn't wavered even a millimeter.

However, in the middle of this massive voyage of replacing humans with AI, as of 2026, a very raw transitional bug (trap) has bared its fangs.

In parts of the social media timeline, disturbing news has been circulating that the IT giant Microsoft has started banning its own system engineers from using AI tools!? This has spread surprise and confusion. “Why would a company that is the ringleader of AI promotion ban it internally?” “Was AI replacement a lie after all?” The onlookers are making a fuss, but hey, don't panic. It's not that simple.

Why did the global Microsoft make such a decision? Let me dissect the all-too-mundane and gritty financial calculations behind it from a slightly cynical perspective 🔍

1. 【The Truth Behind the Incident】It's not all AI that was banned. It's that super-competent rival of theirs 🤖 ❌

First, let's correct the facts. Microsoft didn't ban all AI. What they forced their internal development teams (the Windows and Office divisions) to stop using by canceling their licenses was the coding AI tool 'Claude Code' from their competitor, Anthropic.

This tool had become a huge hit among engineers on the ground, who praised it as “so incredibly competent that I can't let it go, and it writes code at lightning speed!”

Just imagine. Microsoft has its own flagship AI product, 'GitHub Copilot,' which its subsidiary (GitHub) boasts to the world. Yet, their own genius engineers were enthusiastically using a rival company's tool, saying, “Well, Claude Code is just smarter and easier to use.”

From the management's perspective, there's no greater humiliation to their pride. “Think about our company's reputation. Stop complaining and use our own tool (Copilot)!” This very human internal corporate politics (forced dogfooding) is half the motivation for this ban.

2. 【Budget Blowout】The trap of usage-based billing where an annual budget melts away in a few months 🧮 💥

However, the real main course of this news lies in the other half of the reason— the screams coming from the finance department.

Traditional business software (SaaS) was based on fixed-rate subscriptions (all-you-can-use plans), such as "3,000 yen per account per month." That's why large companies could calculate, "We have tens of thousands of engineers, so the budget should be around this much."

However, the latest super-capable AI tools are different. They use a "usage-based billing system based on tokens (character count/computational volume)" where the more you use them, the more they cost—in other words, the same system as electricity or gas bills.

What happened as a result of engineers saying "AI is the best!" and having AI read thousands of lines of code, repeating trial and error visually, and continuing "vibe coding" (writing code based on a feeling) on a 24-hour basis? The AI meter in the background kept spinning like crazy, and Microsoft received an astronomical invoice that "used up the annual development budget in just a few months."

In overseas communities (Reddit), there are overflowing screams of irony like, "At our company, some engineers are consuming over 1 million yen in tokens per month, and it's starting to become no different from a human's salary..."

Eventually, when AI completely replaces humans and the organization itself is streamlined, costs will likely drop dramatically. But just one step before that, if you use it in a transitional way, 'keeping humans employed while letting AI run wild as their subordinate,' the company's wallet will explode before the replacement is complete. Even Microsoft, which has the strongest financial power in the world, had to hit the brakes, saying, "Wait a minute, the Claude invoice is way too crazy. Stop everyone for now!" This is the most bitter essence of this commotion.

3. 【The Plateau of the AI Bubble】The free feast is over, and the costs of the transition period are baring their fangs ⏳ 🦈

This incident teaches us that the era of AI subsidies is over.

Until now, each IT giant was digging into massive deficits to distribute cheap, high-performance AI to the masses in order to capture market share. That's why everyone misunderstood that "AI has the best cost-performance!" But they aren't volunteers either. Infrastructure maintenance costs and electricity bills have reached their limits, and as of 2026, they are starting to shift to realistic pricing (usage-based billing) that bares its fangs.

"If we introduce AI, it will be cheaper than hiring humans right now." Small and medium-sized enterprises and system integrators that swallow these sweet words of the transition period and throw AI at the field without proper cost management governance will be terrified of the scary invoices that will be sent every month from now on. Before reaching the goal of complete replacement, there is a trap here like a bug in capitalism where costs skyrocket without a ceiling the more you use it.

【Today's Lesson】Before falling in love with the intelligence of AI, check how the meter is spinning 📝

The future where AI replaces white-collar jobs will not change. Future efficiency is promised. However, in that transition period, we must not forget that AI is a glutton that eats 10 times more food (electricity and token costs) than a human.

Here are our lessons for surviving this turbulent AI era wisely.

① "Transitional AI = unconditionally cheap"—throw away that fixed idea right now 🧮 ❌ Business people accustomed to the lukewarm water of flat-rate systems will have their wallets torn apart in an instant by the carnivore known as usage-based billing. Before looking at the performance of a tool, first read the fine print of the billing model.

② Determine the boundary between internal pride and the purse strings 🪤 Microsoft's decision is a cold-blooded cost-cutting measure as much as it is a lock-in to their own products. At your company, aren't you letting the field use other companies' AI just because "it's trendy"?

③ Keep a cold-blooded control over cost-effectiveness with an eye on true replacement 🧪 📊 If you throw everything at AI and work based on vibes, all of the company's profits at the end of the month will disappear into remittances to giant tech companies (OpenAI and Anthropic). Always calculate the costs of efficiency coldly, especially on the road to the goal of complete replacement.

Behind the AI discount game initiated by big tech companies, they themselves are struggling with the costs of this transition period. Those who fail to see through this ridiculous composition will be the first to be exploited as suckers. Before you get moved by the beautiful code presented by the AI on the other side of the screen, you'd better check if your company's accounting department is looking pale 🕵

This article is a trigger for you to break out of your mental stagnation. Decide for yourself how you will ultimately act. You can't erase the past. But you can decide for yourself how to live tomorrow. See ya 🚬

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