A July 2026 KPMG survey found leaders blindsided by AI bills. The half-built tower was never a budgeting error. It was a shortcut nobody checked.
For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doesn't first sit down and count the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it?
Luke 14:28
On July 3, KPMG released a survey of 2,145 executives across twenty countries, and the numbers read like a confession. Twenty-nine percent admitted they have no idea where their ballooning AI costs come from. Roughly another third said their own confusion was the thing blocking deployment. The vendors had quietly switched from flat rates to usage-based pricing, and the meter is now running on projects nobody fully understood.
It would be easy to file this under prudence and move on. Sit down, do the math, spare yourself the embarrassment. The verse is almost too tidy for the moment.
But the builder in the story is not undone by bad arithmetic. He is undone by the fantasy that skipped the arithmetic entirely, and the tower stands half-finished where everyone can see it. That is the shape of this story. The appeal of the shortcut was never really the savings. It was the permission to treat people as a line item you could zero out before checking whether the tool could actually do their jobs.
Magical thinking, one writer at Futurism called it. The magic was not that AI would be free. The magic was that you could stop valuing the humans on the payroll and no one would send a bill for that.
The bill came anyway. It always does. What should unsettle us is not the sticker shock but how eagerly a whole generation of leaders believed a story whose entire appeal was that it let them look away from the people in front of them.