Right now, as an industry, we are running almost entirely on COGS and calling it innovation. Kelsey Hightower gave a talk at PlatformCon called Zero Token Architecture, and the whole thing compresses down to one sentence: infer once, export, run without inference. He’s right. I want to give you the vocabulary that makes it land in a budget meeting, because I work at a company that ships hardware, and we already have words for this.
AI has made code cheap and abundant. The scarce resource is now knowing what to build, not how. This is creating a rapid split between companies that sell workflows and companies that sell capabilities. Only one of these will survive.