FOMO Dressed Up as Strategy: The Hidden Costs of AI
Jason Harrison, COO of The Up&Up Group, joins TechCentral’s TCS+ to discuss the hidden costs of enterprise AI adoption, from governance and integration to legal risk, cloud spend and environmental impact. He argues that businesses should move beyond hype-driven investment and adopt a practical test-and-learn approach to building AI systems that are useful, responsible and scalable.
While every board wants to talk about AI, and while capital is pouring into projects across the world, organisations look for the promise of efficiency, scalability, and speed. As the hype continues, it’s becoming clear that the price of this technology is only a fraction of the total cost.
The Up&Up Group’s, COO, Jason Harrison joined an interview on TechCentral's TCS+, and explored a hard truth: much of today’s AI spend is "fear of missing out" dressed up as strategy.
Watch the full interview on the hidden cost of AI
Harrison draws on the experience of The Up&Up Group experimenting with and implementing AI to share insights into the gap between the big bold promises and the practical realities of deploying AI in enterprise environments, especially at the integration layer.
The Unseen Costs of AI Use
When calculating the cost & ROI of AI implementation or use, most financial spreadsheets capture the obvious line items: software licenses, tokens, development hours, and vendor fees. In reality, the real cost of ownership runs far deeper.
Harrison notes that there are critical hidden cost centres that leaders should account for:
1. Governance and Policy: Ensuring AI models are safe and compliant requires a substantial policy framework, review and legal support. We should also not forget about IP rights.
2. The Cost of Errors: What happens when an agent goes off-script? This can damage brand reputation, create financial liability, or even expose intellectual property.
3. Operational and Cloud Costs: If unmanaged, AI agents can run forever, leading to huge processing power requirements and a surprisingly high cloud hosting charge at the end of the month.
4. AI’s Energy Footprint: Harrison also flags AI’s heavy energy footprint. Responsible organisations and brands must calculate this environmental cost as part of their broader sustainability goals.
Shifting to a "Test & Learn" Philosophy
At The Up&Up Group, we look at AI not through the lens of anxiety, but through the lens of integration.
As Harrison notes, “separating signal from noise has become a leadership skill in its own right”
Rather than investing in all-encompassing AI systems, we rather advocate for a "test and learn" philosophy:
- Keep Experiments Low-Risk: Run multiple, inexpensive AI experiments close to the actual work.
- Keep Governance Close: Harrison cautions against “one-size-fits-all” AI implementations, sharing that good governance must be close to the daily work, not just in the boardroom.
- Scale What Proves Value: Commit integration resources to AI initiatives that prove repeatable & effective.
- Human Intelligence with AI: Not as a replacement for human creative thinking, but a tool to expand what is possible, responsibly.
Harrison maintains a positive outlook on AI and its potential to change society, particularly in Africa, despite his realistic assessment of the technology's high costs. Harrison makes a subtle but crucial point for any leader considering their next AI investment: whereas the developed world uses AI to find answers, African businesses might wind up utilising it to learn how to think.
From Incredible Promise to Intelligent Practice
At The Up&Up Group, we’ve taken an approach to AI that ensures we do not lose focus on what makes our brand and our clients successful at the end of the day. By finding tangible ways this technology can complement what we do, with strategic clarity, we turn guesswork into business growth.
Read our full white paper, From Incredible Promise to Intelligent Practice: Translating Generative AI Into Real World Practices, where we showcase the practical implementation of AI, highlighting learnings and shares perspectives from across our creative group of companies and Client partners.
Listen to this episode of TechCentral’s TCS
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