What Happens When AI Labor Gets Much Cheaper?

Aaron Levie says cheaper AI labor can unlock demand that the old price kept off the market. If a kind of work could be bought at a tenth of the old cost, there could be about 50 times the demand for it. High-end legal review at $2,000 an hour, or $1,000 an hour, can be done by an agent for $5 or $10 an hour. People did not hire as many lawyers as the work required, because the price shut them out. At the lower price, more review happens, including more patent filings.

The same shift shows up inside a company budget. Hiring a person can cost $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000, depending on the job. An agent might cost $1,000. Work that always lost the budget fight gets funded, because there is no minimum price to get started and no ceiling on the return. Teams then use that function in cases where they never hired a person, bottlenecks move, and those areas get more money.