Episode #17
Ep 17: Why are AI bills rising while token costs drop?
AI bills are climbing even as token prices fall. NCS Chief AI Officer Edward Chen says most companies are measuring the wrong thing. He breaks down why “token oblivious” spending and agentic loops are quietly rewriting enterprise budgets, and why counting tokens used is a hollow proxy for value created. Chen explains how NCS reframes ROI around outcomes instead, and how Singtel's "Sunshine Core" platform routes work to the cheapest model that'll do the job — with cost gaps between open-weight and closed models running as high as 10x.The conversation turns to physical AI, where Chen warns the real budget trap is not compute: it is data. Robots that shine in a demo hit a wall in messy, real-world environments, and closing that gap means costly proprietary data collection most enterprises have not budgeted for.
