Monologue: Everyone Suddenly Cares About AI ROI

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI’s move to token-based billing has revealed that absolutely nobody has a way of measuring AI’s ROI - and how these massive costs might finally burst the bubble. Companion newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/ Axios: AI sticker shock hits corporate America https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs Uber COO story: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5 Please subscribe to my premium newsletter - save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:08Ed Zitron?

  Call Zone Media. Hi, me, Mo Ed Zitron, and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue.

• 2:23Ed Zitron?

  It's a triumphant week here at the Zitron household. As I mentioned earlier in the week, Uber COO Andrew McDonald said, and I quote, "That its AI costs were becoming harder to justify and that the link was not there between spending money on AI tokens and creating more useful features." In the days that have followed, the AI industry has been embroiled in a conversation that mostly comes down to one thing. "Hey, does anyone have any way to measure the ROI of AI?" Didn't fucking think of that one, did you fellas? "Oh no, I would have come up with that before I spent all the fucking money, but I don't know, I don't run a fucking business." That's because up until recently, most companies have been able to pay for a subscription with subsidised token rates, meaning that for every dollar of their subscription,

• 3:07Ed Zitron?

  they could burn anywhere from $3 to $13 worth of tokens. They just had rate limits, whatever they did, just ate into those rate limits. And they didn't really think about the token cost. In fact, every one of these companies deliberately obfuscates that information. You can find it through CC usage, which you need to the command line interface, and there's also slash usage with Anthropic. Regardless, as a result of all of this, nobody was really measuring the actual positive outcomes of AI services, or even how much a particular task would burn in tokens, which means that with the advent of token-based billing for enterprises, everyone is just guessing about how much their annual budget should be based on virtually no useful information. Imagine you're doing something for years, years and years,

• 3:51Ed Zitron?

  and you're claiming it's the future and it's going to change everything. It's going to change your business and other businesses. It's the future of your revenue and their revenue. Oh my God, it's so amazing. But not once did your clever MBAR say, "Why don't we make sure it actually is?" No one did that, not one of them. Not one of these fuckers. I've been checking all week. I've been talking to people all week. In truth, though, measuring ROI is pretty difficult for a lot of knowledge work, because it requires you to actually know what a person does for a living and what doing a job is like, and what the outcomes of said job are, and what the actual, like, good results at the end may be, which is a lot to ask for middle managers and CEOs who mostly go to and from lunch

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  and explain why other people's work is actually theirs. And I want to say, if you're a middle manager hearing this, more than likely, I'm completely correct about you. Most middle managers are fucking scum. They exist only to steal work from people and nag them and harass them. If you're not one of those, great. You shouldn't be offended by this. This is not about you. But if you are, you're probably one of the people who's going to email me, in which case, weee, weee, go cry to someone else. I don't give a shit. But the lack of measurement of both task cost and ROI has executives already crying for mercy. An engineer at a popular payment processor recently told me that their organization has, in the last week, burned over one and a half million dollars in Anthropic tokens with one user, one person, burning over a hundred thousand dollars in that time period.

• 5:20Ed Zitron?

  Over at Zillow, engineers have burned through 95% of their annual cursor budget in less than five months, much like Uber's CTO revealed to Laura Branton over at The Information that it had burned its entire annual token budget by the middle of April. Axios's Maddie Mills reported that a consultant advising a CFO at an unnamed company said that an organization had spent 500 million dollars in the space of a month on Anthropic's tokens. Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. I know I'm ranting. I guess that's what I do on these monologues, but you spent half a billion dollars. You fuck nuts have no idea why you did that, did you?

• 6:02Ed Zitron?

  None of you do. None of these companies do. They don't. They don't have any idea why they're doing this. Executives only do this when they're very sick. We've got, we've got to give them some cat milk, or maybe take them to the vet to finally deal with the problem ourselves. But the AI industry doesn't really have a response to all of this, other than to say that somebody- Could theoretically make a way to measure ROI in the future based on some metrics that nobody can can explain. I've read thousands of words now of random Twitter posts, mostly AI generated, of course, by people that don't realize that it's obvious. Say that these huge posts and they always like, yeah, you know, the the next thing in in AI. It's going to be tokenomics measurement and extrapolation of ROI measurements from there.

• 6:45Ed Zitron?

  They're just saying, yeah, at some point, maybe we need to know why we're doing this. Not just the, because we all love AI. It's like the end of, sorry, the beginning of Death of Stalin. When they're all standing around being like, he looks great. Everyone's just like, yeah, of course, we all love AI. Of course, we all know this and we're. We all know that AI is the most special and beautiful thing and it's changing my life and your, of course, my life as well. Yes, it's so amazing. But like, do we have a way of measuring if it's actually doing that? And no one does. Not a single one of them does. You see, the problem is they don't want to face that everybody should have measured ROI from the beginning.

• 7:26Ed Zitron?

  And only avoided doing so because subsidized subscriptions allowed everybody to ignore the problem right up until it was too late. Anthropic's supposed explosion of growth appears to have come entirely from experimental revenue. Organizations that have no way of measuring costs or return on investment, run by business idiots who don't know what real work is. Directly incentivizing workers to use more AI right up until their CFO says, hey, I just saw we spent tens of millions of dollars on this. Um, is it producing anything of value? Like, can you, can you just, can one of you? And what's insane is, I would expect, and never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would be everyone.

• 8:08Ed Zitron?

  I thought that there'd be a couple of organizations who could be like, they have a messy metric, they've hammered out. They've really, they bone smashed it like clavicular, but with metrics. Oh, we're gonna make this look good and then we'll be able to say this number went up. I thought they'd have a few. I thought they'd have some sort of weird metric that they came up with. They don't. I have to be talking to this fuckers all week. I've been asking them. And no one does. In fact, at one company, they were literally saying, yeah, the way we measure someone's AI use and whether it's good or not, is how many pull requests they've done via AI and pull request being someone's going to email and be mad about this calm down. The thing that you do when you say, hey, here is the change I want to make to this code or this thing. This is the plan. Do you agree? Yeah, they're measuring the

• 8:53Ed Zitron?

  percentage of those written by AI. That is a positive metric. That's what they're measuring. I didn't think no one would have any idea, though. I truly didn't. It's so funny. It's so fu- it's so fucking funny. It's the funniest thing. I'm right. I've been right about this four years. I've been saying for years that when organizations pay the actual cost of AI, not subsidized subscriptions that allow you to burn effectively as much as you want, they bolt and start asking questions. All of these people who've been talking about how amazing AI is are now going, well, you know, we we need to have very difficult decisions. We need to need to measure it somehow. And the value of AI has been entirely framed

• 9:35Ed Zitron?

  around unsustainable, unprofitable, impossible to measure tools that beguile imbeciles and those that don't want to think about reality. To be clear, OpenAI also appears to be moving most businesses towards token-based billing by giving them $1,000 in credits to use on Codex to soften the blow. Fucking Sam, no, nobody does it better. Nobody does it better than Clammy Sam Altman. Clammy, Clammy Sammy, we love Clammy. $1,000 just for you, honey. You can use it whenever you want. Please pay me. And that's the thing. OpenAI, broken business as well, but there's no real solution here. There's none. And I think the next three months are going to be illuminating and probably feature pullback across a ton

• 10:19Ed Zitron?

  of organizations as they ask questions they should have been asking since fucking 2023. It's insane. I was ma- I would, as I sound completely insane myself, as I sound completely crazed, but people were calling me crazy in 2024, being like, yeah, you know, when businesses pay the real cost, they're not gonna, people were acting like I was a fucking lunatic. Well, who's crazy now? Would a crazy person laugh like this? Anyway.

• 10:45Ed Zitron?

  There are no real solutions here, though. Folks, there are no real solutions. While somebody theoretically could move their workloads to DeepSeek or a cheaper model, it's unlikely that there are inference providers that can support that much traffic or even provide that much stability. You have to remember, a big organisation is putting a lot more pressure on DeepSeek than, say, a casual coder, someone who's just running their own GPU. And you have to do far more than just turn on GPUs. You actually have to build for an organisation that would be theoretically spending millions, a massive inference stack that cannot crap out. It's one of the reasons people pay Anthropic and OpenAI, even though Anthropic's barely stable. I also don't have any substantive proof that DeepSeek V4 or other models can replace an Opus?

• 11:29Ed Zitron?

  I was about to say Opeth there? Not editing that. Or Codex model, even if they are dramatically cheaper. We have no proof of this, and despite the conversation, no one's doing it. Not heard it. Not heard anyone say this. Also, in the end, if nobody can measure the ROI of AI in general, why would they spend anything? Now, AI boosters are currently either completely ignoring this subject, which is what's happening with the obvious ones, or they're going to answer by saying that we're in the early days and that there are weekly breakthroughs that will solve these problems. Been a lot of fucking weeks so far. Been a lot of them. Well, like, what, like 400 of them? 450? Coming up in 500 weeks?

• 12:12Ed Zitron?

  But this is a problem that needed to be solved yesterday, and neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has an answer for bringing down costs, let alone those of their customers. Even if they were magically profitable overnight. Even if they were, they're not. They are not profitable in inference. Their customers are spending too much money. Their customers do not have cost control. That makes it very hard to budget for how much you'll spend. Basic business stuff. Basic stuff. I'm not innovative in my thinking here. You know, it's like that tweet that was like, yeah, walking around a college campus, looking into a business school class. And it's like, profit is revenue minus costs. It really is that, except these people have been ignoring that for years and making people

• 12:57Ed Zitron?

  feel stupid for asking those questions. I also must be clear that these companies cannot slow down. Anthropic and OpenAI project to have over $350 billion in combined annual revenue by 2030. And they're gonna need it because between them, they've made over 1.1 trillion dollars in compute commitments. If their revenue growth is entirely based on dim-witted executives allowing a no IT loads refused compute dump for no apparent return on investment, that is not a stable, sustainable, or even a growth business. It's a grift targeting a society-wide executive ignorance of production itself. I look forward to telling you more about it next week. I've had a lot of fun this week. Got Paul Kudrowski coming back on the show on Tuesday.

• 13:40Ed Zitron?

  Actually, Wednesday is, sorry, 12am ET Wednesday. I should really know that by now. It's been years. And then, yeah, I'll have another monologue for you. It's been a lot of fun. I hope you're enjoying it. Zitron out.

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