Your payroll bill is about to become your compute bill

Your next employee won't ask for vacation days or health insurance. They'll burn through API tokens instead. And in two years, you'll spend more on them than on your entire back office.

Flo Crivello runs an AI agent company called Lindy. He just dropped a prediction that should make every business owner sit up: in 24 months, his token bill will overtake payroll. Not because he's firing people. Because thousands of AI agents now do the coordination work that used to require three people, five tools, and constant retraining.

That same crossover is coming for your business. The only question is whether you're ready or blindsided.

I’m launching round two of my AI Cohort training for small business owners next month. Sign up below if you are interested in getting an AI kickstart.

Most owners are still thinking about AI as a tool to automate tasks. Write an email. Analyze some data. Schedule a meeting. That's useful, sure. But you're missing the bigger shift.

The real power is turning your entire workflow into an agent. Every SOP you've documented, every process you've refined, every system you've built - compress it all into executable automation.

Your integration backlog disappears because computer-use agents just do the clicks. That vendor platform with no API? The manual data entry between systems? The tools that refuse to talk to each other? Agents solve all of it.

This creates a massive advantage for two types of companies. First, new businesses that design workflows with agents at the center from day one. They're not bolting automation onto messy legacy processes.

Second, existing businesses that move fast enough to capture the arbitrage - turning documented processes into agent policies before competitors understand what's happening.

Your competitive advantage used to be hiring great coordinators. People who could juggle systems, remember details, and keep everything moving. That advantage is evaporating. The new advantage is workflow engineering speed. Companies that can turn runbooks into executable automation faster than everyone else.

Track one number: your token spend divided by your payroll. Right now it's probably close to zero. But if agent reliability keeps improving at the current pace, those lines converge within 24 months. Then they cross. At that point, you're reallocating dollars from back-office headcount and vendor sprawl to AgentOps and workflow engineering.

Lindy is the canary in the coal mine. Their agents handle email routing, lead qualification, data entry across systems, follow-up sequences, appointment scheduling, quote assembly, and AR collections.

All the glue work that usually requires multiple people and constant training. Their token bill is catching payroll because the economics shifted. Your business faces the same shift.

Start with three high-volume, medium-complexity workflows. Pick things with clear success criteria where failure is visible but not catastrophic. Deploy agents with human verification. Measure ruthlessly: time saved versus token cost, success rate, human handoff percentage. Calculate your first Token/Payroll data point. You need baseline economics before the crossover happens.

Companies that wait will still be hiring coordinators while competitors deploy agents. They'll manage vendor sprawl while competitors consolidate to horizontal platforms. They'll document SOPs while competitors execute them automatically.

The transaction cost advantage that created firms is reversing. The companies that see it coming capture the arbitrage. The ones who don't get disrupted by it.