The AI Shift: Rethinking ROI and Product Fluency in the Enterprise

Yeah, I might add a question for us to come back to around your point on systems engineering, because I didn't know that.

And now that I do know that, we might have to talk about what the heck is this harness thing and like what's true and what's not and where are companies on that.

So we might come back to that later.

But, you know, one of the things when you and I first met and first started talking was really looking at the intersection of, you know, you mentioned your role as portfolio strategy.

And within a company, looking at a company's products, thinking about it in terms of a portfolio and really being able to ask the question, where is the ROI to be found? And kind of taking that model and that way of thinking, helping companies work that way, you know, looking at it from a very detailed financial perspective.

And then, you know, I think right-sizing the operating model to make sure we have the right talent with the right problems, like with the right ROI.

I think it's a really interesting thing to look at now because I see a lot of folks Initially, when they were rolling out AI, thinking about it like they would roll a tool out where let's get everyone using this tool.

But most of the tools we use don't change the cost day to day necessarily.

And, you know, you can't have someone accidentally spend all of your Jira budget in a couple weeks.

weeks, you know, or your Selenium budget, you know, immediately like that.

And so it's really interesting because now, you know, product folks, engineer, they kind of have this financial role that they didn't used to have when they're thinking about what model to use, what model to use token.

So how are you helping companies think about, hey, this isn't just a tool, it's an investment decision and talk a little bit about like how you help like look at like ROI in a portfolio, because I think that's a really key perspective that teams need right now.

Yeah, so, I mean, this is a really good topic.

ROI is something that I've spent the last several years really kind of educating portfolio companies and businesses on how to think about.

Obviously, in the past, when you thought about ROI and you thought about the investment, it was primarily... people was the largest cost.

Labor, your labor pool, which still is obviously a significant cost.

You need some sense of compute and storage and networking and other things, but those were much more manageable and you had ways to sort of deal with that.

Now you have token cost.

So you have this dichotomy between labor costs and token costs.

And And originally, tokens were pretty cheap.

And you had a set of tokens.

You really have to worry about it that much.

But now they've sort of 30xed in cost.

And with every new model, not only are you consuming more tokens, but the cost of those tokens are more.

And so it's really a dramatic rise in that cost.