Photo source: The Decoder By Naveed Qazi, Sustainability Analyst  F or much of the past decade, artificial intelligence has been marketed as a technological breakthrough that would make organisations more efficient, reduce labour costs and unlock extraordinary productivity gains. The narrative was simple and compelling. Machines would assume routine tasks, businesses would operate with fewer employees and economic output would increase. Investors embraced the vision, executives repeated it and consultants built entire strategies around it. Yet as artificial intelligence moves from experimentation to large-scale deployment, a more complicated picture is emerging. The systems expected to reduce costs are themselves becoming major cost centres. Across the technology industry, companies are discovering that advanced AI requires enormous expenditures on computing infrastructure, specialised hardware, electricity and maintenance. The economics of automation are proving less straightforwa...