The Applied-AI Requirement, Seen from My Own Desk A few months ago, I began evaluating a paid license from some of the leading AI providers on the assumption that my advisory work would eventually outgrow the free AI app tiers. It has not happened yet. Each time I approached the point of subscribing, a new free or entry-level release arrived that adequately covered what I actually needed: drafting, research synthesis, and editorial refinement. My requirements were never exotic. They were representative of a large share of knowledge work, which is precisely the point. This is not a story about frugality. It is a story about an AI capability moving target. The capability that once justified a premium license a year ago is now embedded in the free tier of the same provider, or matched by a competitor's low-cost model. Independent benchmark trackers have shown the performance gap between open and proprietary models narrowing from double digits to less than one percentage point within ...
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