67 It’s similar to the cloud migration wave. Everyone moved to the cloud, declaring it a cost saver. Eighteen months in and finance was asking why compute costs were climbing faster than the business was growing. AI is at that same moment, except it’s compounding faster. If you don’t get a handle on token spend now and tie it back to real results, you’ll be having that “what happened to our margins?” conversation in a year – except the line item will be several times the size. So what should you ask in your next board meeting? Keep it simple: what’s stuck, why, what it’s worth to fix, and what proof do you have – from actual delivered work, not just tool usage stats – that you will get that value back. That means treating unused AI capacity you’ve already paid for as the real waste and watching pay-as-you-go AI spend as its own line item. The answer to idle committed capacity is more work put through it, not a smaller commitment. Plus, every hour of friction you remove is more work the same spend can absorb. Proof is what unlocks the next tranche of investment, not what stops it. And it means being honest about which numbers are proven and which are still estimates. AI’s value doesn’t show up just because you deployed a tool. It shows up when people using it get better at it, and when that skill turns into work that actually ships and holds up – measured against what it cost you, in both time and token spend, to get there. It also depends on naming the work that should stay human – the architecture, the judgement calls, the signoff – because a measurement programme that leaves that unsaid is one your own people will quietly resist. Until we connect all of that, the AI story and the financial story will keep telling two different versions of the same spend. If your board is asking where the AI value is and you don’t have a confident answer yet, that’s exactly the conversation we have every day. We run this discipline on our own delivery first, instrumented rather than asserted, which is why we are willing to argue for it in public. At Algoworks, we help you find your leverage, cut your friction and get AI showing up where your board actually looks: the financials. Photo: iStock/standret
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