The Politeness Tax
A woman in Chaguanas opens ChatGPT on her phone between customers. Good morning, she types. How are you today. She waits. Then she asks her real question, about a supplier invoice. When the answer comes back, she types thank you so much, this really helps, before closing the app.
None of those extra words changed her answer. All of them cost something.
That something is small and easy to miss. It is also, according to the man running the company behind the tool, real enough to matter.
What is actually confirmed
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said publicly that people typing please and thank you into ChatGPT has cost his company tens of millions of dollars in electricity. He put a number on a single query too, roughly 0.3 watt hours of power and about 0.3 milliliters of water. On its own, that is nothing. Multiplied across billions of messages a day, it is a real operating cost, confirmed by the person who would know.
Beyond that figure, the ground gets soft fast. Other estimates of AI energy and water use swing wildly depending on what is being measured and who is doing the measuring, and several widely shared numbers are disputed or vendor sourced. This piece is not going to repeat those. One confirmed number, stated plainly, is worth more than 5 uncertain ones stacked for effect.
The habit says more than the electricity bill does
Here is the part worth sitting with. The politeness is not really about kindness. It is a small, constant signal that people are starting to relate to AI as though it were a person, someone who might be offended by a blunt instruction, someone who works harder if buttered up first.
It does not. It has no feelings to manage. What it responds to is clarity.
That distinction matters more in Trinidad and Tobago than the general conversation about AI usually admits. Most of the small business owners in this market are running everything from a phone, no website, no desktop, no assistant typing on their behalf. A WhatsApp message and a ChatGPT tab, side by side, in whatever 5 minutes exists between customers. Every unnecessary exchange is not just a fraction of a cent in electricity. It is time a business owner does not have.
What changes when the pleasantries go
Drop the greeting and the sign off, and two things happen at once. The response comes back faster, because there is less to process before the model reaches the actual request. And the response tends to be sharper, because the instruction is no longer buried under a paragraph of warm up.
State the outcome wanted. Give the context that actually shapes the answer. Skip everything else. This is not a trick. It is closer to how the tool was built to be used.
Where the kindness should go instead
None of this is an argument for being cold. It is an argument for putting courtesy where it belongs, with the people around a business owner, not with the software running on their phone. AI is a tool. Tools do not need to be thanked. They need to be used well.
The habit worth building is not politeness toward AI. It is precision. That is the actual skill separating the businesses getting real output from these tools and the ones still treating them like a chat with a stranger.
Learning that skill, prompting with the clarity that gets a business real results, is exactly what gets taught inside the School of AI for Business, built for entrepreneurs across Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean who are done guessing with these tools.
One more tax worth ending
There is a second tax most business owners are paying right now, and it has nothing to do with electricity. It is the tax of figuring AI out alone, one confusing prompt at a time, with no one to tell you what actually works.
The School of AI for Business exists to end that tax too. Join a free community of Caribbean entrepreneurs learning to use these tools with the same clarity this article just asked of you. No small talk needed to get in either. Just show up.
