CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem. Two problems, actually.
One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.
Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.
You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.
The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke. The AI just invoices you for the outage.
And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.
To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.
You didn’t hire a replacement. You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.
Enjoy.
It's similar to the tradeoff with cloud hosting. Yeah, you were able to fire all your system admins, but now when cloudflare or aws borks you're SOL.
It’s a bad analogy. Cloud is still far better roi than running your own and having sysadmins. Anyone that has any experience knows this.
I do not agree. It's the same thing as saying renting an apartment is better because you don't have to do home maintenance or pay property taxes. The cloud is the opposite of ownership. It's a service contract for the lifeblood of your business. On prem is ownership.
I agree, but have found that a collocation is the "sweet spot" in terms of lowest total cost, while still owning all of your hardware and software. On-premise is also good, but is more expensive than a co-lo.
One big advantage of private ownership is depreciation. Servers can last for 10 years, and are fully depreciated after 5 years - which means you can use them with no capex payments (like driving your truck after it has been fully paid off).
Cloud is being a permanent renter, paying the most and getting the least.
My son is a TechGeek (Data Scientist). Your comments IMO illustrate the common sense I've always encouraged him to keep in mind in the tech world. The more TechGeeks like you the better I say. I'd rest a bit easier if it were that way.
I mostly agree with you here. Colo is still good IMO. However I think it was a lot better in the 90s when home internet connections were slow and fast ones were very expensive. Now everyone with a broadband connection could host whatever they want as long as it's not the world's most popular 4k adult midget video archive.
The only thing most homes need to self host would be redundant power setup and it's arguable about whether that is even needed because most of the time if your power is out so is your data. So to "do it right" you'd need a wireless or satellite uplink and a diesel generator at your home. Which is 100% doable in 2026.
It's not as absolute as you make it sound if you factor in the complete cost picture. Many companies are finding this out too late.
For me it comes down to trust. Is your data worth trusting another company for availability and security, or do you trust your systems and employees with that data?
That’s like me saying humans have two legs and you being like leftist Karen “akshually amputees and birth defects can have 1 or no legs “. Congrats. Those are unique snowflake edge cases
In my experience, they're less unique than you seem to think. But nobody sees the full cost picture until it's too late because only the basic operational costs are simple to quantify.