PARIS - French news magazine L'Express quoted Jamaal Glenn in a feature examining the cost of AI agents, rising token consumption, and the economic pressure underneath flat-rate subscriptions.
Glenn told the publication that the prices most users see do not yet reflect the full cost of inference. In his follow-up account of the interview, he wrote: “Users are getting a deal right now that doesn't reflect the actual cost of inference.” He expects the end of that subsidy to show up through higher prices, tighter limits, or both.
“Enterprise users will see cost increases before consumers. Consumers are more price-sensitive, and the broader media narrative is tied to consumer prices, giving the labs an incentive to protect that tier for as long as possible.”
Glenn also drew a distinction between AI activity and AI productivity. Software engineering has produced visible gains, he argued, while less structured and less deterministic work remains further from the disruption suggested by many headlines. “Consumption does not go hand in hand with productivity,” he wrote. “There's a lot of conflation between AI activity and AI productivity.”
For organizations, Glenn recommended treating AI inference as an expensive, variable-cost software program. His framework begins with understanding fixed-price subscriptions versus API use, then building visibility into inference spend, assigning ownership to an AI-native leader, and testing whether workflows still produce returns at two or three times today's prices.
“The most valuable expertise to build in-house is inference efficiency. How do you get the same output at a lower cost?”
The quotations above come from Glenn's published expansion of his L'Express interview. The French feature quoted him three times; the expansion preserves the fuller answers he supplied around the published story.
Read Glenn's complete interview expansion →
About Jamaal Glenn
Jamaal Glenn is an executive, investor, entrepreneur, writer, speaker, and board director. He is Chief Financial Officer of SoLo Funds and founder and CEO of JG Holdings. He chairs The Pivot Fund and serves as a board director, treasurer, and audit committee chair at LION Publishers.