The economics of large language model deployment have undergone a transformation that, observed in retrospect, will be understood as one of the defining features of the current technological era. Processing one million tokens — roughly the equivalent of one thousand pages of dense prose — now costs less than eight dollars at the major commercial providers, against approximately forty dollars at the same time in 2025. The trajectory suggests that by the close of 2026, the figure may approach three dollars.

For enterprise buyers, this shift has moved AI from a line item requiring executive justification to a utility as routine as cloud storage. The workflow automation applications that were economically marginal at forty dollars per million tokens become unambiguously viable at eight. The analysis tasks that required careful prioritisation of which documents to process can now simply process everything.