@rohanpaul_ai: It may not be long before a firm is paying more for AI tokens per employee than it is to employ that worker. The bigges…
Summary
The article discusses the trend where companies may soon spend more on AI tokens per employee than on human salaries, citing a 14.1% monthly growth in AI spending. It highlights that heavy AI adopters add more jobs, contradicting the narrative that AI replaces labor.
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Cached at: 07/15/26, 01:41 AM
It may not be long before a firm is paying more for AI tokens per employee than it is to employ that worker.
The biggest AI adopters are combining more people with far more compute.
In May 2026, the most advanced 1% of companies were already spending around $90,000 per year on AI.
If the current monthly growth rate of 14.1% continues, that number could surpass the average $192K a year a software engineer makes by the end of 2026.
During the same 24-month period, companies that spent heavily on AI added 10.2% more employees, while companies that spent a little on AI stayed roughly the same.
AI is a huge enabler of growth than a tool for cutting costs.
Companies invest a lot of money in tokens because each worker can do more work, help more customers and support a bigger business.
Entry-level jobs increased by 12% and low-intensity adopters’ numbers did not change in a statistically significant way.
a16z (@a16z): “AI was supposed to replace human labor.
It did the opposite.
For the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software.
And AI is creating more jobs than it eliminates.“
Hebbia CEO George Sivulka on what the core lessons of human management mean for agent workforces:
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