The cost and control of AI-assisted work

What we're tracking

• •Making each token count is now a product feature GitHub published a piece on how Copilot handles context and routes requests between models, framed explicitly around getting more useful work out of each token you spend [1]. The interesting part is not the engineering. It is that the efficiency of the machine has become something a vendor markets to you directly, because you are the one paying for the inefficiency.
• •Software that acts for you needs to be watched SaaStr published a piece today with a blunt title: monitor your agents, both the AI ones and the human ones [2]. It opens with a story about a PR agency telling them never to contact their client again, after an executive had a bad experience — the point being that an agent acting in your name can damage a relationship before you know anything happened.
• •How the best software companies actually sell now SaaStr also covered a set of sessions from its 2026 event on how companies including Stripe, Google, Canva and Cloudflare are selling this year, with the promise that these sessions "actually showed the data, the org charts, the pricing models, and the failures behind" the usual abstract talk about AI and go-to-market [3].
• •Generated video moves further into everyday tools Google announced new video capabilities in Google Vids, letting users create longer videos and generate several at once using its Veo model [4]. The announcement describes "new ways to create and iterate on video content in Google Vids using Veo" [4], with longer runtimes and consistent characters across a clip.
• •The quiet usability change worth noticing Google also expanded event colours in Google Calendar, moving past its previous limit of eleven predefined colours [5]. On its own this is small. In the context of the rest of the day, it is a reminder that not every useful change is an AI change.
• •What to take from the day The through-line is that AI has changed what you are buying. A tool with AI in it has a running cost that moves with use, so ask how the meter is set. It takes actions in your name, so ask what record it keeps. And its pricing model is being shaped by how the vendor has decided to sell, so read that as carefully as the feature list. The video and calendar updates round out the picture: capability keeps arriving, some of it loud and some of it quiet, and the work of choosing is deciding which of it actually earns a place in how your business runs.