Part 2 of Show Me the Market | By Vishal | October 2026 In my previous piece, I argued that AI cannot pay for itself at current pricing tiers. Roughly $3 trillion of debt and obligations sits behind the industry, and a subscription-based market, modelled generously, comes to tens of billions to low hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The gap is too large to close with seats at $20 a month. Neither is the expectation that each individual can sustain multiple 20$ subscriptions – that leaves the B2B revenue stream. That, while looking attractive, is, on deeper analysis, not quite as compelling a case for AI sustenance. The B2B industry operates on a concept of share of profits or percentage of revenue or a similar metric when it comes to technology spends – and they have to spread it across multiple solutions, with being but a share of it. Clearly something has to give – either the models have to change, or the market has to crash – or even both. Current approaches are sim...
By Vishal | October 2026 The question a marketer keeps asking I am not saying there is no AI market. The technology has proven itself, and the models are good. My question is different, and as a marketer it is my first, second, third, fourth and fifth question: show me the market. Who pays, from which budget, how much, and what do they stop paying for in return? This piece works through that question with numbers. The figures are rough, the assumptions are stated, and where I could not verify something I say so. 1. The debt behind the boom The scale is in trillions, not hundreds of trillions, and that is still enormous. • About $1.35 trillion of debt sits on the balance sheets of five hyperscalers (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle), plus roughly $1.65 trillion of off-balance-sheet AI obligations such as long-term data centre, compute and power contracts (Nikkei Asia analysis, as reported by YourS...