Amy Webb FTSG - the cost of abundance

I have written the business cases for technology pilots, and I have built the governance frameworks those pilots then had to survive, so Amy Webb's latest FTSG newsletter read less like research and more like a field report. Drawing on more than a hundred CEO conversations, she describes pilots that succeed on their own terms and never scale because each one drags its own legal, regulatory and approval pipeline behind it, and leadership teams now receiving five times as many decks because a deck that took a week takes a day.

The productivity gains are real. Production genuinely costs less than it did, and any operating model that refuses to admit that is being sentimental. Yet the saving does not bank itself, because AI has turned out to be less a productivity line than a tax on executive attention. Everything produced five times faster still has to be read, challenged, decided on and defended, and that work lands on the same small group of executives whose calendars were already the scarcest resource in the company.

That reframes the economics. A dollar saved on production and spent back on adjudication is not a saving; it is a transfer into the most expensive line in the business. When Webb asks CEOs where they would redeploy ten per cent of newly freed capacity, she reports that nobody has an answer, which suggests the constraint was never production at all. Companies budgeting for tokens and not for the decision overhead those tokens generate are not investing; they are accumulating a liability against their own leadership team, and no model release will pay it down.

The response is not another AI strategy offsite. It is rationing: deciding explicitly what gets escalated, what gets decided and by whom, and what never gets reviewed at all. Attention is the binding constraint on AI value, and the organisations that budget for it as deliberately as they budget for compute will compound while the rest drown in insta-decks. If your P&L shows the savings with no matching growth in the decision queue, I would genuinely like to see it.