"We haven't seen anyone talking about spending less on AI next year," said Russell Fradin, CEO and cofounder of Larridin. "They're just talking about instrumenting to understand where it goes."
That shift — from spending to measuring — is exactly what Business Insider reported this week. The freewheeling phase of AI investment is giving way to something harder: accountability. Companies are coming to the consensus, Fradin told Business Insider, that they "can't 10x spend every year forever."
The signs are everywhere. Amazon pulled its internal leaderboard for tracking AI token usage after it encouraged excessive spending. Walmart set limits on tokens. Uber's COO said it's hard to justify the costs. Cisco's Chief Product Officer put it plainly: prices are "far higher than the actual value these tokens are generating at scale."
Meanwhile, BCG found that companies plan to more than double their AI spend in 2026 — from roughly 0.8% of revenue to 1.7%. Billions flowing into strategies that are, in many cases, still experimental and difficult to measure. And KPMG has a dashboard for AI agent usage, but not a leaderboard that would encourage the use of AI for AI's sake.
The article asks consultants to weigh in about how much consultants, and their clients, are spending on AI.
Spend reports don't show outcomes. Adoption dashboards don't show capability. The board meeting is on Thursday.
The question every executive is now being asked isn't whether to spend on AI. It's whether they can prove it's working. Larridin can help.
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