Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth from AI?

Software development has emerged as the biggest beneficiary of AI automation. One CIO I talked to recently, with 170 people in his organization, measured a 2.1x increase in productivity from AI. That productivity came at a cost. His top users of AI each spent $21,000 on tokens per month. Another engineering leader spends six to eight thousand dollars per engineer per month. This is a non-trivial amount of money. Eventually, it has to come from somewhere, and it will probably come from your personnel budget. Now we’re talking about real consequences for real people’s lives. But there are real business consequences for not acting, too. If you’re going to make those choices—and somebody is going to—they need to be good ones. That means you need to know more than the costs. You need to know the benefits, too. Are you getting a good return on your investment in AI? Is there another way of using AI that would be better? Which raises the question: how do you know what you’re getting?…