The honeymoon era of enterprise AI is over. Three stories landed this week that change the conversation in your boardroom from whether to do AI to how much it will cost you, who you will buy it from, and what the geopolitical risk looks like.

In this episode:

• Microsoft and OpenAI restructure the most lucrative partnership in tech. Exclusivity is gone. OpenAI can sell on AWS within weeks, Google likely next. The real shift is architectural — Azure for stateless API calls, AWS for stateful agents — and what it means for the model decisions every CIO now has to make per workload.
• Tokenmaxxing is detonating cost structures. Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget before May. Anthropic billed one user a hundred-fifty-thousand dollars in a single month.  ...