The creators of Claude Code addressed one of the biggest enterprise issues of our time: how companies can track the return on AI spending.
Boris Cherny, developer of Anthropic’s largest coding tool, outlined a four-step framework for enterprise AI adoption in a series of X posts on Thursday.
In the third step, Cherny talked about measuring the benefits from AI after employees implement it into their workflows.
“Once the team has buy-in, how do you track it? Usage (dashboards, etc.) is worth monitoring, but it measures activity, not return,” he wrote.
Rather than just measuring the burnout of AI tokens on a dashboard, he said, it’s better to ask whether companies will spend engineering effort on the task.
“If so, how much does it cost in manual labor? That’s what you get back,” Charney added.
He went a step further in his next X post, saying that “the rewards are huge when fixes and maintenance happen in the background,” allowing the team to focus on building. This is when companies can begin “initiatives that were previously out of scope,” he added.
This isn’t the first time Charney has talked about return on investment from AI spending. In a recent chat with Scale AI, he said that while companies are right to think about how much value they can get from AI, the benefits could take other forms, such as allowing engineers to generate code faster.
Cherny’s post comes as the “tokenmaxxing” trend that dominated the AI scene in the first half of this year subsides. Businesses are now looking at ways to get more value for their money. Coinbase and Vercel executives have publicly shared strategies to cut costs without restricting employees’ use of AI, including using cheaper Chinese models.
Return on investment for AI is a big topic of conversation every day, and it’s influenced by loud voices in the business world. On Wednesday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC that companies are seeing AI costs “rising rapidly.”
“So, of course, like any other resource that we use, we’re all going to be reasonable,” Dimon said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week at Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley conference that AI ROI is a hot topic.
“Everyone is asking what they can do to reduce spending and increase value,” he said in an interview with CNBC from an event in Idaho.