The real economics of enterprise AI

AI’s productivity gains on specific tasks like customer service and writing code already have decent real-world evidence, but between “one person working faster” and “the company actually getting economic value” there are still several steps.

API prices are easy to look up, but they aren’t the whole bill: getting AI running, making its results trustworthy, and keeping it alive long term each carry costs you can’t see in the token price, and which is biggest depends on the specific workflow.

Having put gains and costs together, I didn’t find an “average enterprise AI ROI” worth believing: the economics depend heavily on the task, baseline, users and workflow, and the better question is under what conditions a specific workflow is worth scaling up.