The Attention Subsidy Is Ending

A lot of business models depend on a subsidy that nobody talks about: your attention.

Telecom, insurance, SaaS, utilities. Their pricing assumes you won’t do the math. Not because you can’t, but because it’s not worth your time. Comparing phone plans means reading fine print across carriers, checking bundled interactions, verifying coverage edge cases. Each decision can easily become a couple of hours of focused work. Multiply by every recurring commitment, and the rational move is to stay put.

Companies know this. Their retention models are built on it. The switching cost isn’t a fee. It’s attention. And attention is finite.

That cost is about to collapse.

What changed

AI can now act on your behalf: access your files, read your contracts, pull current offers, and produce structured analysis you can validate in minutes.

Two things converged. The models got reliable enough for real analytical work (structured comparisons against your actual contracts produce accurate results now, not hallucinated ones). And products shipped that give AI access to the raw material it needs: your documents, your email, your browser.

What I’m seeing

I turned these tools on my own recurring commitments recently. Things that had been sitting untouched for years. The analysis to justify a change always felt like one more evening I didn’t want to spend. The bottleneck was never the decision. It was the homework. I cleared about a dozen of them in a single week.

And I want to stress: the pattern scales directly to business. Any company that locks into a supplier and doesn’t periodically re-evaluate becomes semi-captive. Not through contracts, but through the friction of comparison. The same attention subsidy that keeps consumers on suboptimal phone plans keeps businesses on suboptimal vendor agreements.

Why this matters now

Consumer attention has been a reliable moat. When the cost of evaluating alternatives drops to near zero for millions of people simultaneously, that moat drains.

The models work. The products exist. Adoption is forming the way technology shifts always do: slowly enough that incumbents rationalize it, then suddenly.

The businesses most exposed are the ones whose retention was never about product quality. It was about friction. Telecom, insurance, financial services, SaaS with complex pricing tiers. I’m very curious to see which of them figures this out first.