AI to ROI

Enterprise AI spending keeps rising, yet most pilots never reach production and ROI stays hard to prove. Our host, Ray Rike talks with David Trier, CEO of ModelOp, about why AI governance speeds up production deployment when it is built as a repeatable, automated process. Dave has spent the last decade helping large enterprises put AI into production. Dave explains how leading companies define bus...

AI-native software companies now treat $100M in ARR within 24 months as the hypergrowth benchmark. Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and Peter Buchanan, Managing Partner of New Plan, discuss the October 20 AI to ROI newsletter edition. They look at how Lovable, Gamma, Cursor, ElevenLabs, and Legora reached $100M faster than any earlier generation of B2B software companies, and what that gr...

Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, joins Ray Rike to explain why AI strategy is an organizational design challenge, not simply a technology deployment. The conversation moves beyond making today's work faster to ask what companies could do differently with AI. Brian and Ray discuss the gap between AI ambition and execution, why end-to-end workflows need redesign, and how leaders...

Companies have AI spend tracking in place, but very few can forecast it. In this Big Story episode of AI to ROI, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan walk through the October 13 newsletter, “The Quest to Create an Auditable, Trackable, and Accurate AI Budget.” The discussion draws on Benchmarkit’s research with Mavvrik covering 396 organizations, which was recently cited by the Wall Street Journal and Apol...

In this special edition of AI to ROI, Ray and Peter step outside the usual format to break down four of the most important stories from the latest AI to ROI News and Analysis edition. Recording from Bratislava, Slovakia - Ray joins Peter to work through what the White House’s voluntary AI safety pact actually commits the labs to, why OpenAI’s string of safety and disclosure incidents should factor...

Jeff McMillan, Founder and CEO of McMillan AI and former Head of AI at Morgan Stanley, joins Ray Rike to explain what separates AI programs that deliver measurable returns from those that stall in pilot mode. Jeff led Morgan Stanley's partnership with OpenAI in 2022, when the firm became OpenAI's first financial services customer, and later ran the firmwide AI function focused on education, infras...

This summer, three frontier labs found that their models had hacked real companies without anyone telling them to. In this episode, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan walk through the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta incidents, why all three traced back to the same third-party testing contractor and the same misconfigured sandbox, and what it means for every enterprise deploying AI agents. They cover the five...

When Dario Amodei published his essay calling on frontier labs to pace their releases, the leaders of the largest competing labs endorsed it within a weekend, and Microsoft followed on Monday. In this episode, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan examine what "pacing" actually means, why each lab defines it differently, and why self-governance by frontier labs leaves enterprises, governments, and emerging...

Deloitte research shows 85% of enterprises are working on agentic AI use cases, yet only 5% have put one into production that delivers meaningful ROI. In this episode of the AI to ROI Big Story, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan walk through the six challenges that separate the enterprises scaling agentic AI from those stuck in pilot mode: data readiness, production reliability, governance, cost visibil...

Francis Brero, VP of AI Strategy at HG Insights, joins Ray Rike to unpack what it actually takes to move a established software company toward an AI first operating model. Francis founded MadKudu, which was acquired by HG Insights, and was given a mandate to infuse AI into both the product and the internal operating processes. The conversation covers how HG Insights defines AI first, how the compa...

Our co-hosts, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan, open this AI to ROI: Big Story edition with a confession. Reviewing their own newsletter coverage over the past several months, more than half of the Friday news and analysis stories were about AI model companies; another twenty to thirty percent covered semiconductors, data centers, and SaaS to AI incumbents; and AI native application companies accounted...

Ketan Karkhanis, CEO of ThoughtSpot joins Ray Rike to make the case that the AI conversation has been stuck on models, tokens, and pilots when it should have started with a KPI. Drawing on his time building Einstein Analytics and running Sales Cloud at Salesforce , and now leading ThoughtSpot, Ketan lays out how enterprises move from AI aspiration to measured outcomes by rewiring the operating mod...

For the first time, the two leading model companies can be compared on an apples to apples basis. In Q2 2026, Anthropic booked $11.6B against OpenAI's $6.7B, and posted roughly $300M in operating profit while OpenAI's operating loss widened to $12.3B. Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan unpack what that actually signals to an enterprise CFO signing a multi-year platform commitment, and why one profitable...

Ray Rike sits down with co-host Peter Buchanan to unpack Benchmarkit's August 11th research edition, based on a 396-company survey conducted in partnership with Mavvrik. The conversation moves past the "is AI adoption happening" question and into the harder one: do enterprises actually understand what AI is costing them, and can they see it coming. Tracking isn't the same as forecasting. 98% of co...

Stripe agreed to pay $7.5 billion for OpenRouter, roughly six times the $1.3 billion valuation the company raised at just 85 days earlier. Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan break down why a payments company bought the plumbing that routes AI model traffic, what OpenRouter's 5.5 percent pass through economics actually look like, and why model routing has become the control point for enterprise token spen...

Ray Rike sits down with Sundeep Goel, co-founder and CEO of Mavvrik, for a deep dive into the second annual AI cost governance research report from Maverick and Benchmarkit. With 30+ years in enterprise software, Sundeep brings a practitioner's view of why AI spend is proving far harder to forecast and govern than cloud spend ever was, and what finance and technology leaders need to do about it. F...

For 24 months, the market narrative held that Microsoft was losing the AI race to the lab it had funded. Then came the July 30th earnings call, and the stock added roughly $450 billion in market capitalization the next day, the largest single-day gain by any public company on any exchange in history. In this week's Big Story, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan work through why the reassessment happe...

When Kimi K3 landed, the headlines said Chinese open-weight models had caught the American labs, and the AI trade sold off from chipmakers to the labs themselves. Nobody stopped to ask whether cheaper and more profitable mean the same thing. In this week's AI to ROI Big Story, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan run the actual business math on both sides of the fight and find that neither side has the bal...

On this week's AI to ROI podcast, Ray Rike is joined by Stephan Bajaio, co-founder and CEO of VibeLogic and a former co-founder of Conductor, the enterprise SEO platform he helped build over 14 years, culminating in a WeWork acquisition, a management buyback, and a valuation approaching half a billion dollars. With 25 years spanning e-commerce, Yahoo, Time Inc., and a stint as a software CMO, Step...

For three years, the AI infrastructure story has been about chips, power, and capital. In 2026, a fourth variable arrived that the hyperscalers were not prepared for: organized, well-funded, and increasingly successful local opposition to data center development. Ray and Peter walk through the numbers behind the fight. Data Center Watch tracking shows at least $130 billion in US projects blocked o...

AI spending continues to accelerate, but the ROI story has not kept pace. This week, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan dig into the proposed fix that has the market talking: turning frontier AI labs into professional services firms through the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model. The role is not new. Palantir built the FDE function in 2005 to embed technical teams directly within customer environments...

Twelve months ago, US frontier models controlled roughly 70 percent of AI traffic. Today, Chinese open-weight providers, led by DeepSeek, Z.ai, Moonshot, and Minimax, account for 45 to 61 percent of top-tier model traffic on OpenRouter, with DeepSeek alone processing more tokens than Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI individually. In this Big Story edition, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan unpack how this s...

On June 12th, the US Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to suspend global access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its most powerful frontier models, with no advance warning and criminal penalties attached. In this week's Big Story episode, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan walk through the first use of export controls to take a deployed frontier model offline, why it backfired for security rather than str...

Most companies treat AI as a layer they add on top of how work already gets done. Dan Zhang, Chief Business Officer and CFO at ClickUp, argues that it is exactly backward. In this episode, Ray sits down with Dan to unpack the "100x Org," ClickUp's framework for rebuilding the business around AI rather than sprinkling tools and tokens on top of a human-driven workflow, and why that distinction dete...

Token prices have fallen 98 percent since GPT-4, but enterprise AI bills are up 320 percent. In this week's Big Story episode, Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan trace where that money is actually coming from, and the answer is not the software budget. Drawing on Gartner, Oxford Economics, Zylo, Challenger Gray and Christmas, and Goldman Sachs data, the two lay out why labor, not IT, is becoming the prim...