Procurement on Rishi's Bloghttps://blog.bansalai.com/tags/procurement/Recent content in Procurement on Rishi's BlogHugoen-US&copy; 2026 Rishi BansalWed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000The End of the AI Flat-Rate Era: How Vendor Pricing Shifts Became Enterprise's Compute-Risk Problemhttps://blog.bansalai.com/posts/ai-flat-rate-era-tokenomics/Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.bansalai.com/posts/ai-flat-rate-era-tokenomics/<div class="lead !mb-9 text-xl"> Between November 2025 and June 2026, every major AI vendor rewired how it charges for usage. Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, and Google each migrated enterprise contracts from flat per-seat fees to consumption-based token pricing. The headline seat prices look cheaper. The bills are not. </div> <p>A conservative estimate puts a typical Fortune 500 company&rsquo;s annual AI cost above $30 million. One healthcare enterprise consumed a trillion tokens over six months before its finance team understood what was driving the charges. Uber exhausted its full-year AI budget by April. These aren&rsquo;t edge cases — they&rsquo;re the leading edge of a structural shift that most enterprise finance teams haven&rsquo;t priced in yet.</p>