AI Math is not Adding Up - Where is the ROI?
About this episode
Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan discuss the disconnect between AI investment and its visibility in ROI, exploring the implications for enterprises.
Token spend is exploding across the enterprise, but the value it creates remains largely invisible on corporate dashboards. In this week's Big Story episode, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan unpack why AI investment and ROI visibility are moving in opposite directions, and what enterprises need to do about it. Drawing on Ramp data, Exponential View, Semianalysis, and Ray's recent conversation with Russ Frayden, CEO of Lariden, the two dig into the measurement infrastructure gap that is turning individual AI productivity gains into an unmeasured expense line. The productivity paradox. Individual output is up across engineering, sales, and research functions, but those gains are not translating into company-level financial impact. Ray connects this to Parkinson's Law and explains why more productive workers do not automatically produce more profitable companies. AI dark output. Peter introduces the concept from Semianalysis: real economic value created by AI that never registers on a P&L, using the example of a legal document that drops from $400 to $5 to produce, where the savings disappear while the token expense shows up in plain sight. The cost to compensation shift. Ray walks…
More episodes of AI to ROI (fka Metrics that Measure Up)
- AI is a Compensation Scale Expense
- AI-Native Services: The $100B Disruption of Professional Services
- The AI Coding Wars, Inflection Point and the Cursor-SpaceX Deal | AI to ROI: The Big Story
- AI Governance, Ethics, and the Stewardship Framework: A Conversation with Evan Schwartz, Chief Innovation Officer at AMCS Group
- Big Book of AI Metrics
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the AI to ROI (fka Metrics that Measure Up) podcast page.