The Last Penny: Rethinking Value in the Age of AI

It Finally Happened

The presses fell silent and, for the first time in over 230 years, the U.S. Mint cranked out its final penny. Why? Because producing a coin worth just $0.01 now costs nearly $0.04. Every new penny created, ironically, represents a tiny loss—a holdover from the past that quietly wastes money.

Companies stuck in legacy programs face the same fate. That penny in your pocket? It’s a program or process “valued” for tradition, not for measurable business outcomes. Every year, organizations spend millions on “quality” initiatives, certifications, process improvement protocols, and compliance checklists that look impressive on paper but never translate to top-line impact or actual operational wins. They’re the pennies of business: shiny, widespread, and, if you’re honest, practically worthless.

When Good Intentions Lose Value

Just like those pennies filling piggy banks, car ashtrays, jars in your pantry, and containers in your laundry room, some quality programs started with purpose: to standardize and improve performance. But the business landscape flipped. AI- and automation-driven disruption means “how things have always been done” is almost guaranteed to be slow, expensive, and uncompetitive.

When your old penny processes cost more to run than the ROI they yield, they quietly become a drain. Across the enterprise software and services landscape, the warning signs show up as:

• Massive investments in certifications, training, or analytics platforms with no quantifiable impact on customer retention or revenue.

• Teams still using labor-intensive “best practices” despite automation eliminating 90% of manual steps elsewhere.

• Sizable consulting spend on workflows that haven’t changed since the last regulatory overhaul, but now function as bureaucracy, not value drivers.

From Pennies to Investments: Modernizing Value

Ask yourself: would you launch a nationwide campaign just to keep pennies in circulation? Of course not. Yet too many firms are still rounding down performance and efficiency just to keep old programs alive. The result: wasted talent, wasted capital, and a company full of underleveraged “change initiatives” looking for ROI that never comes.

The solution is the organizational equivalent of “rounding up.” Instead of dozens of low-yield, inflexible programs, invest in a few high-impact solutions powered by AI, automation, or adaptive talent models. Quality shouldn’t mean more process; it should mean more results—less noise, higher signal.

Scrutinize every program’s true cost (not just dollars, but time, opportunity, and focus), and its measured output: Does it deliver more value than it consumes? If not, it’s just another penny in the jar. Thinking like this means

shifting your budget from a mass “transactional quality” spend to targeted, AI-enabled solutions that actually move the needle.

Courage to Change

Letting go of the penny is hard because it’s familiar. But holding on, especially in business, simply guarantees more loss. Now is the time for companies to audit their “penny” programs, drop what doesn’t pay off, and reinvest in tech-powered approaches that scale, learn, and prove their worth.

Drop the old quality process (that can’t prove quantifiable impact) into the penny jar, seal it, and move forward. With every liberated resource, you gain flexibility, agility, and results.

In a market moving faster quarter-over-quarter (pun intended), the only coin that matters is the one that buys real progress.