Are You Getting Your Money's Worth from AI?

[James Shore]

I've started a new essay series:

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. Which raises the question: how do you know what you’re getting? Anecdotal reports abound, but the reasoning behind those anecdotes are often, to put it politely, *not ideal.* Some claims are outright fiction. Given the stakes, that’s a problem.

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/are-you-getting-your-moneys-worth-from-ai

Cheers,

James

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James Shore

Principal Consultant

jamesshore.com