AI ROI is an allocation problem
AI spend is going parabolic, and the labels on the bill (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) are about all a CXO gets to work with. The hard part of tying that spend to outcomes is structural. A major portion of AI spend isn’t COGS. It’s the spend on coding agents producing the software, the spend on building marketing content, the spend on custom sales tooling, the spend on Intercom agents and Sybill analysis.