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As big tech pushes AI spending to max, you may be helping pay for it
As the tech industry’s giants race to build out AI infrastructure — Microsoft spent $34.9 billion in just one quarter while Meta plans to spend up to $72 billion this year — they may not be the only ones footing the multi-hundred-billion-dollar bill.
The consumer is increasingly facing AI-soaked subscription tiers as tech firms attempt to monetize their huge investments and bundle their software offerings with difficult-to-separate-out AI tools that can make it tough for customers to opt out — and more expensive if they don’t.
One example is Microsoft 365, which now includes Copilot AI features in many of its tiers. The company recently introduced Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 per month, which bundles Copilot Pro features with Microsoft 365. Previously, Copilot Pro cost $20/month on top of existing subscriptions, and to use it in desktop Office apps, customers also needed a separate Microsoft 365 Personal ($6.99/month) or Family ($9.99/month) plan — bringing the total to roughly $27–$30/month. The base Microsoft 365 subscription itself has become increasingly essential as Microsoft de-emphasizes standalone Office purchases and makes cloud integration more central to document workflows.
Similar bundling of AI tools is becoming the norm from Alphabet to Adobe.
For instance, in March 2025, Google Workspace added its Gemini AI assistant into Business and Enterprise plans with price increases of about $2–$4 per user per month — roughly a 16%–33% jump depending on the tier — and with AI features that, in most cases, can’t be removed or opted out of. For a 50-person company on Business Plus, that means an additional $2,400 annually.
Adobe rebranded Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Pro starting mid-2025, with prices increasing from $59.99 to $69.99 per month (or $659.88 to $779.99 annually) — a $10-per-month hike linked to expanded generative AI capabilities such as unlimited standard image and vector generation.
Whether the customer wants the AI or not isn’t really the point, according to experts — it’s the cachet that costs.
“AI is all the rage right now and that buzz fuels what marketers call perceived value bias,” said Elizabeth Parkins, professor of practice at Roanoke College. “When something’s labeled ‘AI-powered,’ people assume it must be smarter or more useful, even if it barely changes their experience. That sense of progress makes the extra subscription feel justified — until consumers start asking whether they’re paying for innovation or just the illusion of it,” she added.
Microsoft, Adobe, and Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Fred Hicks, assistant vice president and chief information officer at Adelphi University, said the companies are adding the extra charges to help pay for multi-billion-dollar data centers and their insatiable appetite for energy.
“The cost of running GPU clusters and power consumption is so high that baking it into subscriptions is how they can recoup costs. We have seen software licensing turn into subscription models,” Hicks said, citing Microsoft and Adobe Creative Cloud as examples of the approach that was adopted before the gen AI boom. “This creates a funding model of constant income over a single-cost perpetual license. AI subscriptions follow the same philosophy,” he said.
Personalized AI can pay off over time
Hicks says that AI baked into everything is going to be ubiquitous at some point in the near future because firms that do not have it will lose an edge in the market. For consumers, paying the price may pay off over time due to the personalization that can be fine-tuned by AI if it is in your life on a regular basis.
“Personalization using the same AI model trains on your habits and preferences. It will become more accurate in personalizing the user’s needs. This requires a long-term engagement and subscription,” Hicks said.
But over-subscription will become an issue, like it already is with streaming services, prompting consumers to review what they really need and purge at least some subscriptions for cost savings. That may be easier said than done though when it comes to software.
“Debundling AI subscriptions from other services will almost be impossible. Google and Microsoft now include basic AI with many of their application subscriptions. Higher tiers are required for deeper integration, increasing costs,” Hicks said.
Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner, a U.S.-based SaaS company, says that a quiet but significant shift is underway.
“AI itself isn’t only improving products but redefining how pricing structures work. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Google are using AI ‘enhancements’ to justify recurring revenue where one-time licenses used to suffice,” Sorensen said, adding that subscription models make sense as they create predictable income but do hide incremental costs.
Consumer pushback is emerging
“Many consumers are starting to notice this shift. After a while you start to notice that you are paying $10 here and $20 there for features not being used and not actively opted into,” Sorensen said — and that extra revenue which may benefit companies for now could be in for more pushback in the future.
“Some pushback is emerging, particularly in creative and productivity communities, but I do believe this model is only going to grow,” Sorensen said. He thinks what is likely to happen is that companies will build up “AI premium intelligence” tiers which will eventually turn software ownership into perpetual rental.
Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora, an enterprise software company that provides a platform for businesses to launch, manage, and monetize subscription-based services, says that AI-infused products and price hikes are an increasingly vexing problem for consumers.
“All companies are layering AI into their products, but it’s the largest companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Google who are often hiking prices without clear justification. Other companies like Zendesk are taking a more transparent and customer-friendly approach by correlating AI pricing to outcomes, so you only pay when an AI resolves a ticket,” Tzuo said.
If consumers balk enough at paying more, especially if use cases prove to be underwhelming to many, there will be a future where AI is pay-as-you-go, Tzuo said.
“We’re seeing an explosion of interest in usage-based pricing for AI, where customers have control over what they pay for based on what they consume,” he said. “AI is shifting what that ‘value’ means, and paying based on usage helps companies prove it. How often you use a product or see a result should speak for itself,” Tzuo added.
The increased AI bundling is simply an extension of what has been happening online for years, according to Ananya Sen, assistant professor of information technology and management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. “The issue is how you can subscribe in one click, but to unsubscribe you have to make a phone call. In some sense what we are seeing with AI products is a continuation of that but maybe at a greater scale,” Sen said.
Since many people don’t understand AI products as well as existing software tools, they may not know what they are opting into, but one irony is that subscriptions today may end up being more secure than is in the best interest of consumers. That’s as a result of behavioral psychology, he says.
“There is an inertia once you opt in — it’s harder to opt out, you have to make an active choice. Companies are banking on and exploiting this,” Sen said. “And when it comes to AI products, it is a fast-evolving space. It is hard for a normal online consumer who uses these different tools to keep track — it becomes a bandwidth issue, your mental bandwidth and attention,” he added.
Sen says consumers need to be active in their own subscription ecosystem. “There has to be some responsibility on the consumer side. But it is a two-way street. These small dollar values add up,” Sen said.
Many consumers still have one advantage: they remain on free basic versions of software. But companies will do what they can to migrate more to subscription products. “Even when you think of the big players, a large proportion of the users use the basic free version. Even for the most prominent players, it is hard to get people to convert to a subscription,” Sen said.
