Do you remember your top 5?
Early mobile phone plans gave you a small number of texts per month. Then carriers introduced “top 5” — a short list of people you could message unlimited, for free. Everyone else cost extra per text. You actually thought about who made the cut.
Now that sounds completely absurd. We text anyone, anywhere, in any country, and it doesn't cross our minds for a second. The constraint that felt real and important has vanished.
AI costs are going to feel the same way. And probably faster than you think.
The Cost Curve Always Wins
Right now, people think carefully about which AI tools to pay for. Whether $20/month is worth it. Whether to batch queries or run them live. Whether a specific use case justifies the expense.
That friction is real today. But the trajectory of AI compute costs follows the same pattern as every major technology before it: cellular data, broadband internet, cloud storage, streaming video. Each one had a moment where it felt expensive and limited. Each one eventually became so cheap that worrying about the cost became the absurd part.
AI is somewhere in the middle of that curve right now. Not free yet. Not the $9/query it cost a few years ago either. Heading steadily toward a future where the cost isn't a real decision point.
I was in a session recently where I showed someone how to reduce an AI query cost from $9 per run to $0.07 — same quality, better architecture. The constraint wasn't the technology. It was the design. That gap will shrink as the tools get smarter about efficiency.
The Salon Moment
A few months ago I was speaking at a hair salon conference, showing basic AI capabilities to a room of salon owners.
I demonstrated how AI could respond to customer texts, answer questions about services, handle basic appointment inquiries. Nothing technically complex. Just a Lindy agent connected to SMS.
Their reaction hit me. They had no idea this was possible.
And then I realized: online booking had the same arc. In 2013, if a salon had online booking, it was a feature. A differentiator. Something the more tech-forward places had. By 2020, if you couldn't book online, you were the one who seemed behind.
AI for customer communication is in the 2013 phase right now. Optional. Impressive when you see it. Not yet expected.
But “not yet” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The Real Question
When I ran my first AI workshop in Austin — just invited some friends, sold tickets to test the idea — it sold out immediately. The people who came said the same thing: “I knew AI was a thing, but I didn't know it could do this.”
That gap between what AI can actually do and what most people think it can do is wide. And it's where most of the competitive advantage lives right now.
The question isn't whether AI costs will drop. They will. The question is: when they do — when every competitor has access to the same tools at near-zero cost — what's your advantage?
It won't be access. Access is a commodity. The advantage will be fluency.
What Fluency Actually Means
I teach AI skills in three levels.
The first level is AI Assisted — using chat tools like ChatGPT for individual tasks. Writing help, research, answering questions. Most people who use AI at all are somewhere in this zone.
The second level is AI Workflows — chaining tools together to build repeatable processes. Building an agent that handles your customer follow-ups. Automating the research that takes your team three hours every week. This is where real time gets saved.
The third level is Building Agents — fully automated systems running on their own with minimal human input. The kind of thing that keeps working while you're not watching.
Most people are stuck at Level 1 or haven't started. The window to progress through Level 2 and into Level 3 — while that progression still represents a meaningful skill gap from your competitors — is open now. It won't be open forever.
The Top 5 Lesson
Here's the thing about the top 5 analogy that I find most useful: it's not really about the cost.
The people who figured out how to stay in touch better during the limited-plan era — who sent emails instead of texts, who found creative workarounds, who built habits around the constraints — were better communicators when the constraints lifted. They'd already built the muscle.
The people who waited for “when it's easier” stayed behind.
AI is the same. The cost friction right now is real, but it's also forcing useful discipline: you think carefully about what to automate, you learn the architecture, you build the habit of working with AI tools instead of around them.
That practice compounds. The fluency you build now is the advantage you carry when costs hit zero and the playing field flattens.
Don't wait for the top 5 to go away before you start learning to use the phone.
Ready to build that fluency now? The 4-Day AI Sprint takes you from basic prompting to real workflows in four days of hands-on work.
