Weekly Digest

Enterprises that maximised token consumption are seeing the bill arrive without the productivity to match, and Moody's has them moving to metered use. The waste was never the tokens. It was handing everyone the machine with no judgment about which model or which effort a task actually needs. That judgment also decides which experiments live. Sometimes it is the maker concluding a plugin will not scale past its first case; sometimes a senior calls it on instinct and a delivery date. Either way taste and a deadline make the call, and the token bill is only one input. The craft side lands in the same place, where a colour theorist's thirty years is what makes a generated palette usable.

The middlemen were supposed to be dead by now. Instead, TBO Tek grew revenue 81% on transaction value that grew 37%, which means agents paid a bigger cut on every hotel booking. Hotels drove nearly all of it; flight fees barely moved. Corporate travel, the most rule-bound segment in the industry, got working agentic AI booking before consumer travel did, because approval chains give an agent something to obey. With 94% of hotels invisible in AI search, being found now runs through someone else's curation too. When discovery gets noisy and automated, the trusted middle gets paid more, not less.