Created, transacted and captured value
Three quantities should be kept separate throughout the analysis.
Created value = improvement in welfare/productivity relative to the alternative
Transacted value = money actually exchanged
Captured value = producer surplus retained by a specific provider
Suppose a business process costs $100 and AI reduces the total resource requirement to $20. The technology has released up to $80 of economic capacity relative to the old process. The resulting allocation may be $5 captured by the AI provider, $15 spent on compute, integration and residual labor, and $80 retained by the customer as released economic capacity.
The provider's economic opportunity is not automatically $100 or $80. It is the portion that competitive supply permits the provider to retain.
Provider capture ≤ willingness to pay, and in competition tends toward the cost/differentiation of the next-best substitute
A spreadsheet can influence a billion-dollar acquisition without receiving a percentage of the transaction. A database can store trillions of dollars of financial records without being entitled to the value of the assets represented. Intelligence can become similarly foundational without being priced as a percentage of every outcome it enables.