The Invisible AI Bill

There's a story everyone is telling about AI in organizations - productivity is up, output is up, the leverage of every individual contributor is multiplying. The dashboards confirm it. The earnings calls celebrate it. The consultants have decks. There's another story almost no one is telling. Not because it's hidden - because it's slow, distributed, and doesn't show up on any quarterly report. It's the story of what is being quietly spent to buy that productivity. Capital that doesn't appear on any balance sheet because nobody knows how to count it. Call it the invisible bill. Knowledge that was never written down is leaving anywayA lot of what experienced people in any organization actually know was never documented. It lived in mentorship - in code reviews, in hallway conversations, in the moment a senior engineer leaned over and said "yeah, but we don't do it that way here, and here's the scar that taught us why" A junior asked, a senior explained, and in that exchange hundreds of…