What happens if you take the fear out of AI?

Can you remember the last time a technology was sold to you purely through fear? If you exempt AI, I can’t remember the last time one was marketed to us not through its benefits, but through the downsides of not adopting it.

But that’s precisely what we’re getting with AI: fear-based marketing. If you don’t adopt AI, you’re screwed, or so we’re being told.

And that’s a problem. New technologies need an exploration phase, a period of time when people muck around with them and see what works. And we’re being denied that as we’re chased into mass adoption by the fear of mass-unemployment or business failure.

Fear is an effective marketing strategy

The reason for this is clear. As Kevin Indig put it on Search Engine Land:

Fear sells. Tapping into our primal fight-or-flight response is a sure way to get attention. And layoffs act as a double agent in this environment: They make companies that underperform or overhired look good (“Look, we don’t need as many people anymore because we’re so innovative!”) and feed the substitution positioning narrative.

And AI companies really need to sell their products in a way that previous disruptive technologies didn’t. OpenAI is losing money hand-over-fist:

2025 — OpenAI Had $13.07 Billion In Revenue, $34 Billion In Costs and Expenses, and $20.92 Billion In Losses, with a net loss attributable to the company of $38.53 Billion

These are almost unimaginable numbers, purely subsidised by investors, to keep the costs of AI to consumers and businesses low.

Paying the true cost of AI

And when those consumer costs start to approach the reality, then suddenly panic starts hitting users:

Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio.

It was only a few months ago that Accenture was requiring senior staff to use AI:

An Accenture spokesperson told CNBC the report was correct. They added: “Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work. That requires the adoption of the latest tools and technologies to serve our clients most effectively.”

The sudden reversal of that shows how much we are all, collectively, shoving our head deep in the warm, comforting sand about the true costs of AI. And even todays successful projects might look less appealing if we have to pay what AI compute actually costs.

(Full disclosure: Accenture was a client, until a month ago.)

Hello inflation, my old friend

We won’t be able to hide from those costs for much longer, even if we don't use AI. The second order impacts are hitting. After years of tech getting cheaper and more accessible, AI is causing a rapid reversal. Need a new Mac, like I do? I have bad news:

The iPhone maker has hiked the prices of some laptops and tablets by almost 20%, saying the electronics industry is facing an "unprecedented challenge" due to an "extraordinary surge" in demand for chips to power AI data centres.

And don’t think you can escape the bad news through playing on your gaming console:

Not long after Apple's announcement, Xbox said it had decided to significantly raise the price of its popular gaming console for the second time in less than a year due to the current "components crisis". The Microsoft-owned company said on Thursday that the price of its basic console will go up by $100 (£75) to $499, while the price of a console with more memory will go up by $150, to $749. New prices will take effect from August.

AI's insatiable need for more and more computing power is sucking out the RAM and chips needed for our digital lifestyles, making them massively more expensive.

And all that’s before we even start touching on the environmental costs of all this.

We need to slow down on the AI panic

I think it’s clear that the power of AI is being massively over-hyped right now. I’m hearing from more and more sources that the majority of their first wave AI projects are failing because the results aren’t good enough, or the time needed to check its work negates any gains. The upwards pressure on AI token cost is only worsening that.

We need to step back and remember that we know how to do this. Fear is blocking us from seeing what to do. We have to stop panicking, stop trying to rewire our businesses overnight, and start playing, cheaply and experimentally, until we understand what this technology is – and isn’t. Then, and only then, can we rewire our businesses based on what we learn. And I’d bet a significant chunk of cash that was AI is good for will turn out to be new different things we weren’t doing before, rather than just replacing existing processes. Because that’s what technology always does.

Play, learn, integrate. Think, analyse, share experiences. There’s reasons to be afraid, but they should weight more heavily on the heads of the AI company CEOs with the unimaginable burn rates and the insignificant incomes than it does on us. If they fail, their technology will survive. And we will find economic, effective and useful ways of using it.

But only if we stop being afraid, and start playing.