Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The AI vendors just started watching the meter. CFOs need to watch the return.

On June 18, OpenAI gave ChatGPT Enterprise admins new credit usage analytics and spend controls. It’s a single view of credit consumption broken down by user, product, and model, default workspace budgets, per-group limits, and a Cost API for pulling the data into their own systems. Two days earlier, Microsoft shipped Copilot Cowork with spending limits, budget allocation, usage alerts, and user-level caps. This is a step in the right direction.

Customer lifetime value (CLV): formula, calculation, and how to improve it

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue a business expects from a single customer over the entire relationship, minus the costs of serving them. The standard SaaS CLV formula: Average Revenue Per Account x Gross Margin % / Monthly Churn Rate. For a $500/month customer with 75% gross margin and 5% churn: CLV = $7,500. That number can swing materially once AI spend per customer is built into gross margin, something many SaaS companies still don't do.

The secret behind Carnegie's fortune and the lesson for the AI era

Point A: 1835. Andrew Carnegie is born in a weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland. The cottage has one main room, which the Carnegies share with another family. Point B: 1901. Andrew Carnegie becomes the richest man in the world when Carnegie Steel Company wins the Iron vs. Steel industrialists’ war, and he sells the company to J.P. Morgan for the modern equivalent of $450 billion.

CloudZero Dimension Studio: A drag-and-drop UI at the foundation of AI ROI

The core of ROI is visibility. If you can clearly see … 1. What it costs to produce the thing you make, and 2. How much money it makes you … then calculating ROI is easy. But with AI, as with the cloud before it, getting that visibility is extremely challenging. Why? Because the cost data associated with each is inherently chaotic.