Executives Bought a Story That Let Them Stop Counting Workers

On July 3, KPMG published a survey of 2,145 executives across twenty countries, and the numbers read like a confession. Twenty-nine percent said they have no idea where their ballooning AI costs come from. Roughly another third admitted their own confusion was the thing blocking deployment. The vendors had moved from flat rates to usage-based pricing, and the meter is now running on projects nobody fully understood.

The tidy reading here is prudence. Sit down, do the math, spare yourself the embarrassment. That version turns Jesus into a management consultant, and he was not auditioning for the job.

He told the tower story to a crowd swelling behind him, people thrilled to follow and not yet aware of what it would take. The builder in the parable is not undone by bad arithmetic. He is undone by wanting the tower more than he wanted the truth about himself, and the half-built thing stands there in public, telling everyone what he refused to know.

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 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.

Someone always sends the bill. The workers on those spreadsheets carry the image of God, and Scripture is stubborn here: a laborer's wage is not a private accounting matter, and the cry of the defrauded goes straight to God's ear. The expense nobody forecast was the human one, and the vendors were never going to invoice it.

Counting the cost, in the way Jesus meant it, starts with admitting who pays.