The AI stack is starting to look suspiciously like the cloud stack

Cloud people are getting déja vu and I have seen it on their faces. We spent 15 years pulling infrastructure away from developers so no one had to think about servers and now the industry is stacking AI on top of that same stack with the same promise on the box “you won't have to think about this anymore” I run an AI agency and most of the job costs a number of people and I built an AI system to avoid hiring an AI team. I also found that every layer that removed thinking eventually paid someone a salary. A freight brokerage brought me in this year. They'd added an AI layer that reads shipper emails and drafts quotes but the desk still has outdated rates.The drafts were not released on their own. Weekend pickups and new routes were wrong, so the senior dispatcher checked them before sending them out. The owner said they had seen this movie before and moved to the cloud and they were managing the cloud. The part that actually icks me is the ownership. Cloud kept the lines clean, your code on their machines and when something broke, you knew whose problem it was. With an AI model, a wrong quote might be the model's fault, bad data, or approval and no one can measure costs. So we measured it anyway. I shadowed the dispatcher for a week with a notepad, and I spent about 20 hours per week on drafts. At $31 per hour, that would be about $31,000 per year. She is an AI babysitter and she never applied for the job. The complexity from the old process doesn't disappear. The process became more complex and added layers: servers moved to a cloud bill, a devops hire, manual quoting, and an AI checking job. The fix wasn't ripping the AI out. We kept the AI, but it now checks each draft against the rate sheet and its contract terms, sends only the clean ones, and queues the mismatches for the shipper. She has been down from 20 hours a week to about four.