the ai budget cut was never about the price

microsoft just cut how much people in its cloud and ai group can spend on ai tools, from up to $100,000 a month per employee to around ten thousand dollars in most cases.

and inside meta, the internal users of one big ai coding tool reportedly fell by about half, from roughly 60,000 to 30,000....

everyone's calling it the end of the ai spending party. i don't think it's that. i think it's the moment companies stopped paying for activity and started asking what they got.

i had a debrief this morning with a founder whose core market is huge in dollars and tiny in headcount.... a handful of companies, a handful of decision makers. the market next to it is the opposite. hundreds of thousands of small businesses on two continents.

that second market is where outbound makes sense, and he was in. but his biggest fear wasn't price. it was this.... burning his team's hours on meetings with people who were never going to buy, before he ever reaches the right person.

that's the same fear the big companies just acted on. they didn't cut ai because it doesn't work. they cut it because nobody could show which dollars produced what.

here's how i answered him. you give us about fifty profiles of your ideal buyer. we build a list of five thousand from those. you spot check it and approve it before a single invite goes out. the booking form asks ten qualifying questions, and the pre interview is a sniff test. by the time you're on a real call, that person has been filtered three times.

think of a coffee filter. you don't get a better cup by dumping in more grounds. you get it by being picky about what drips through.

the flip is this. budgets don't get cut because a tool is expensive. they get cut because the output is unmeasured. a tool that produces three qualified conversations a week survives every review. a free one that produces noise doesn't

he's building out his commercial team first and wants to start in the new year. i respect that. the team has to exist before the pipeline does, otherwise you're definately wasting the meetings you fought for.

long term, every line in every budget faces the question microsoft just asked. what did this produce, and can you prove it?

if you want to see how we set up the filtering, it's all on the offer page. you hold every relationship, and nobody promises you a number.

so audit your own spend this week.... which line item could you defend if someone cut it by ninety percent tomorrow?