Companies Struggle to Explain Their Own AI Investment Returns

Good morning. The gap between artificial-intelligence costs and the value the technology delivers was a key topic at the WSJ Technology Council Summit in New York this week. Executives remained as bullish as ever on AI’s promise to transform business while also admitting that no one really had a handle on their 2026 token budgets, with some saying their initial planned budgets had as much as tripled this year.

Tech execs are spending big on the technology and getting enough value to justify continued investment, but they still struggle to measure exactly where the returns are coming from and where they are not.

“It’s hard to measure a lot of the ROI that happens,” said Arvind Jain, founder and chief executive of AI-powered enterprise search and work assistant platform Glean, speaking at the event on Tuesday.

Executives agreed that AI is delivering outsize value in some cases, but they found that in the majority of cases, it’s wasting more money than it’s worth. Often companies have a hard time distinguishing which is which. Better tools for observability are being developed but are still nascent, they said.