Why Some People Pay a Fortune for AI Help While Millions Get It Free
So here’s the circus trick happening in AI right now: some companies are literally paying $900 an hour for consultants. Nine. Hundred. Dollars. Per hour.
Meanwhile, my neighbor’s kid is using ChatGPT to write essays for free, my mom’s asking it for banana bread recipes, and about 700 million people worldwide are chatting with AI every week—mostly without paying a dime.
What’s going on? Who broke reality?
The Split Nobody’s Talking About
We’re living in this surreal moment where the exact same tech either costs you your kid’s college fund… or nothing.
On one side: firms like PromptQL, charging CEOs $900/hour to explain what a prompt is. The CEO even admitted MBA types “don’t have an intuition for what AI can do.” That gap in intuition? Apparently worth a small yacht per week.
On the other side? Regular folks are using AI for… everything. Planning vacations. Fighting about whether hot dogs are sandwiches (they’re not, stop it). And according to OpenAI, 73% of messages aren’t even work-related anymore.
Why Companies Pay Through the Nose
Here’s the kicker: that $900/hour isn’t for writing better prompts. It’s because 95% of enterprise AI projects fail. Yes, ninety-five. MIT ran the numbers.
So what are companies actually buying? Someone who can untangle 20 years of legacy systems, office politics, and Excel sheets labeled “final_FINAL_reallyfinal3.xlsx” and somehow wedge AI into the mess.
And half the job? Convincing execs AI isn’t coming for their jobs, while convincing managers it definitely is coming for all the boring parts of theirs. It’s half tech, half therapy, half improv theater. (Yes, that’s three halves. Welcome to corporate math.)
Meanwhile, in Normal-Person Land
Regular people are using AI like duct tape:
29% for practical guidance (fix my faucet, plan my trip, help me text my crush without sounding deranged)
24% for info (because Google = ads + cookie banners + pain)
24% for writing (emails, unsent drafts to exes, Yelp reviews that cut deep)
10% for tutoring (aka free private education in places where tutoring costs a kidney)
This is where it gets spicy: growth is exploding in Lagos, Mumbai, São Paulo. If you’re there, you suddenly have access to the same AI as someone in San Francisco. Level playing field? Try bulldozed-flat playing field.
The Funny Divide
Enterprises use AI like an unpaid intern: “automate this task.”
Regular people? They split between questions and tasks. And here’s the twist: the questions—the “what should I do with my life” type asks—get rated way higher in quality. Turns out, people love having a smart friend who never sighs at your dumb questions.
Work folks mostly use AI for writing, but not novels—just “make this email to Brad in HR less stabby.”
The Freaky Part (In a Good Way)
Almost half of adult messages come from people under 26. They’re not learning to code. They’re learning to delegate. They’re growing up with AI tutors, AI writing buddies, AI everything.
And the gender gap? Gone. Early ChatGPT was a dude-fest. Now it’s basically 50/50—because once it stopped being just about code and started being about life, everyone piled in.
So What Does It All Mean?
We’re watching expertise get unbundled in real time. The same thing that costs a bank $900/hour is free for a teenager with Wi-Fi.
In five years, paying that rate will look as ridiculous as paying someone to set up your Gmail account. The kids using ChatGPT for homework today? They’ll be tomorrow’s employees asking, “Why are you still hiring consultants when you could just… ask the AI better?”
The winners won’t be the people who know the most. AI already knows. The winners will be the ones who know what to ask, what problem to point it at, and when to trust the machine versus when to ignore it.
Bottom Line
Right now, AI expertise is simultaneously the cheapest and most expensive thing in tech. Fortune 500s panic-buy consultants while teenagers use the same AI to cheat on chemistry homework.
The revolution isn’t coming. It’s here. And it doesn’t care if you’re a CEO or a college kid—it’s just waiting for your next question.
P.S. If you’re paying $900/hour for AI consulting, ask your intern first. There’s a non-zero chance they already solved it on their lunch break.
Bibliography
Fortune. “AI Engineers are being deployed as consultants and getting paid $900 per hour.” Fortune, September 14, 2025.
Anthropic Economic Index: Tracking AI’s Role in the US and Global Economy. Anthropic, 2025.
OpenAI. “How People Use ChatGPT.” OpenAI, 2025.