Monologue: Everyone Suddenly Cares About AI ROI

Summary

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Better Offline: Monologue – Everyone Suddenly Cares About AI ROI

Host: Ed Zitron
Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Date: May 29, 2026
Episode Length: ~15 minutes (Core monologue: 03:00–14:48)

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Episode Overview

In this incisive monologue, host Ed Zitron tackles the tech industry’s sudden anxiety over the inability to measure ROI (“Return on Investment”) for artificial intelligence investments. Drawing from recent high-profile examples and leaks, Zitron skewers the executive and managerial class for neglecting basic ROI analysis, recounts the industry’s rapid shift from exuberant AI spending to panicked self-reflection, and highlights how billing changes are exposing the unsustainable economics behind the current AI boom.

With his signature caustic wit and unfiltered critique, Zitron not only exposes fundamental flaws in AI business models but also lampoons industry leadership for ignoring elementary questions that could’ve avoided hundreds of millions (even billions) in wasted spend. He predicts industry-wide pullbacks and a reckoning for companies that confused “innovation” with unchecked financial hemorrhaging.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Executive Panic About AI ROI (03:00–05:00)

• Industry sentiment: Zitron opens by discussing how the question “How do we measure AI ROI?” is suddenly everywhere, sparked by recent admissions from major tech companies.
• Uber example: Uber COO Andrew McDonald admitted their AI costs are now hard to justify and poorly linked to measurable outcomes, highlighting a broader industry trend.
• Quote (Ed Zitron, 03:27):

  “Didn’t fucking think of that one, did you fellas? Oh no, I would have come up with that before I spent all the fucking money, but I don't know. I don't run a fucking business.”

2. Obfuscation & Ignorance in AI Spend (05:00–06:30)

• Billing models: For years, companies bought AI via subsidized subscriptions, encouraging heavy use without tracking true costs or value.
• Lack of metrics: Companies “deliberately obfuscate” usage and cost information. Few attempted to assess whether spending on AI actually provided meaningful returns.

3. Shocking AI Token Expenditure (06:30–08:30)

• Massive, uncontrolled spend: Zitron lists recent bombshells:
  • A major payment processor burned $1.5M in Anthropics tokens in one week, with a single user accounting for $100K.
  • Zillow consumed 95% of its annual AI budget in less than 5 months.
  • Uber burned its yearly token budget by mid-April.
  • A CFO consultant reported a company spending $500 million in just a month.
• Quote (Ed Zitron, 07:55):

  “Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I know I’m ranting. I guess that’s what I do on these monologues. But you spent half a billion dollars, you fuck nuts. Have no idea why you did that, did you?”

4. The Absence of ROI Measurement (08:30–10:10)

• Industry-wide blindness: Zitron details how none of the companies he spoke to have mature or even makeshift ways to measure whether AI initiatives generate value.
• Inept metrics: Some companies gauge “AI success” by crude indicators, like the percentage of code pull requests written by AI—regardless of quality or impact.
• Quote (Ed Zitron, 09:24):

  “I thought they’d have a few. I thought they’d have some sort of weird metric that they came up with... But I didn’t think no one would have any idea though. I truly didn’t. It’s so funny. It’s so f—it’s so fucking funny. It’s the funniest thing. I’m right.”

5. AI Hype vs. Reality (10:10–11:30)

• Unsustainable economics: Billions have been funneled into AI primarily because the costs were hidden. Now, with token-based enterprise billing exposing true expenses, skepticism and hard questions are surfacing fast.
• Industry denial: Most “AI boosters” either ignore the concern or punt it into the future, promising theoretical measurement solutions that never materialize.
• Quote (Ed Zitron, 10:41):

  “All of these people who’ve been talking about how amazing AI is are now going, ‘Well, you know, we need to have very difficult decisions. We need to, need to measure it somehow.’ And the value of AI has been entirely framed around unsustainable, unprofitable, impossible to measure tools that beguile imbeciles and those that don’t want to think about reality.”

6. Blame & Broken Business Models (11:30–13:15)

• Anthropic & OpenAI under scrutiny: Citrons points out these AI giants are pushing businesses onto token billing with token “incentives”—but offer no real solutions for cost control or ROI.
• Gaming basic math:

  “Profit is revenue minus costs. It really is that. Except these people have been ignoring that for years and making people feel stupid for asking those questions.” (Ed Zitron, 13:04)

• The grift: The business model, Zitron argues, is basically grifting off executive ignorance and tech-sector willful blindness.

7. No Real Solutions & Industry Reckoning (13:15–14:40)

• No silver bullet: Moving workloads to cheaper models (like Deepseek) is technically possible but impractical for most organizations due to reliability, complexity, and lack of tangible proof.
• The forecast: Over the next 3 months, Zitron predicts significant budget pullbacks and a wave of skepticism from executives who finally have to reckon with AI cost realities.
• Quote (Ed Zitron, 13:54):

  “If nobody can measure the ROI of AI in general, why would they spend anything?... This is a problem that needed to be solved yesterday. And neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has an answer for bringing down costs, let alone those of their customers.”

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• Zitron on executive ineptitude:

  “Most middle managers are fucking scum. They exist only to steal work from people and nag them and harass them. If you’re not one of those, great, you shouldn’t be offended by this.” (05:34)

• On industry-wide denial:

  “It’s like the end of Death of Stalin when they’re all standing around being like, ‘he looks great.’ Everyone’s just like, yeah, of course we all love AI. Of course we all know this... But do we have a way of measuring if it’s actually doing that? No one does, not a single one of them does.” (09:58)

• On OpenAI’s incentives:

  “Nobody does it better than Clammy Sam Altman. Clammy Sam, Clammy Sammy. We love clammy. $1,000 just for you, honey. You can use it, whatever you want. Please pay me.” (11:57)

• On executive “grift”:

  “It’s a grift targeting a society wide executive ignorance of production itself.” (14:21)

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Conclusion & Next Steps

Zitron closes by predicting industry pullbacks, unresolved cost issues, and a growing confrontation with basic financial truths that the AI sector conveniently ignored during years of hype-driven expansion. There are no “real solutions,” just a looming reckoning.

He teases upcoming guest Paul Kudrowski and promises continued investigation into tech’s most embarrassing missteps—delivered, as always, with razor-sharp sarcasm and zero patience for executive bullshit.

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Episode Core Monologue:

• [03:00] – Introduction and setup
• [05:00] – Billing models and lack of metrics
• [06:30] – AI spending horror stories
• [08:30] – The futility of measuring ROI
• [11:30] – Industry stalling and token billing
• [13:15] – No solutions, future outlook
• [14:40] – Close and next week’s preview

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Transcript

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Callzone Media hi Mimo Moed Zitron. And welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. Better Offline It's a triumphant week here at the Zitron household. As I mentioned earlier in the week, Uber COO Andrew McDonald said, and I quote, that its AI costs were becoming harder to justify and that the link was not there. But between spending money on AI tokens and creating more useful features. In the days that have followed, the AI industry has been embroiled in a conversation that mostly comes down to one thing. Hey, does anyone have any way to measure the ROI of AI? Didn't fucking think of that one, did you fellas? Oh no, I would have come up with that before I spent all the fucking money, but I don't know. I don't run a fucking business. That's because up until recently, most companies have been able to pay for a subscription with subsidized token rates, meaning that for every dollar of their subscript, they could burn anywhere from 3 to $13 worth of tokens. They just had rate limits. Whatever they did just ate into those rate limits and they didn't really think about the token cost. In fact, every one of these companies deliberately obfuscates that information. You can find it through CC usage, which you need to the command line interface, and there's also slash usage with anthropic. Regardless, as a result of all of this, nobody was really measuring the actual positive outcomes of AI services or even how much a particular task would burn in tokens. Which means that with the advent of token based billing for enterprises, everyone is just guessing about how much their annual budget should be based on virtually no useful information. Imagine you're doing something for years, years and years, and you're claiming it. It's the future and it's going to change everything. It's going to change your business and other businesses. It's the future of your revenue and their revenue. Oh my God, it's so amazing. But not once did your clever MBA ask say, why don't we make sure it actually is no one did that. Not one of them. Not one of these fuckers. I've been checking all week. We talking to people all week. In truth, though, measuring ROI is pretty difficult for a lot of knowledge work because it requires you to actually know what a person does for a living and what doing a job is like and what the outcomes of said job are and what the actual, like, good results at the end, maybe. Which is a lot to ask for middle managers and CEOs who mostly go to and from lunch and explain why other people's work is actually theirs. And I want to say, if you're a middle manager hearing this, more than likely I'm completely correct about you. Most middle managers are fucking scum. They exist only to steal work from people and nag them and harass them. If you're not one of those, great, you shouldn't be offended by this. This is not about you. But if you are, you're probably one of the people who's going to email me, in which case go cry to someone else. I don't give a shit. But the lack of measurement of both task cost and ROI has executives already crying for mercy. An engineer at a popular payment processor recently told me that their organization has, in the last week, burned over $1.5 million in anthropic tokens with one user, one person, burning over $100,000 in that time period. Over at Zillow, engineers have burned through 95% of their annual cursor budget in less than five months, much like Uber's CTO revealed to Laura Bratton over at the Information that it had burned its annual token budget by the middle of April. Axios's Matty Mills reported that a consultant advising a CFO at an unnamed company said that an organization had spent $500 million in the space of a month on anthropics tokens. Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. I know I'm ranting. I guess that's what I do on these monologues. But you spent half a billion dollars, you fuck nuts. Have no idea why you did that, did you? None of you do. None of these companies do. They don't. They don't have any idea why they're doing this. Executives only do this when they're very sick. We got to give them some cat milk or maybe take them to the vet to finally deal with the problem ourselves. But the AI industry doesn't really have a response to all of this other than to say that somebody could theoretically make a way to measure ROI in the future based on some metrics that nobody can explain. I've read thousands of words now of random Twitter posts, mostly AI generated of course, by people that don't realize that it's obvious, say these huge posts. And they always like, yeah, you know, the next thing in AI, it's going to be tokenomics, measurement and extrapolation of ROI measurements. From there, they're just saying, yeah, at some point maybe we need to know why we're doing this. Not just the because we all love AI. It's like the end of it, sorry, the beginning of death of Stalin when they're all standing around being like, he looks great. Everyone's just like, yeah, of course we all love AI. Of course we all know this and we're. We all know that AI is the most special and beautiful thing and it's changing my life. And your, of course, my life as well. Yes, it's so amazing. But like, do we have a way of measuring if it's actually doing that? And no one does, not a single one of them does. You see, the problem is they don't want to face that everybody should have measured ROI from the beginning and only avoided doing so because subsidized subscriptions allowed everybody to ignore the problem right up until it was too late. Anthropic's supposed explosion of growth appears to have come entirely from experimental revenue organizations that have no way of measuring costs or return on investment, run by business idiots who don't know what real work is directly incentivizing workers to use more AI. Right up until their CFO says, hey, I just saw we spent tens of millions of dollars on this. Is it producing anything of value. Like, can you, can you just. Can one of you? And what's insane is I would expect, and never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would be everyone. I thought that there'd be a couple of organizations who could be like, they have a messy metric they've hammered out. They've really, they bone smashed it like clavicular. But with metrics. Oh, we're going to make this look good and then will be able to say this number went up. I thought they'd have a few. I thought they'd have some sort of weird metric that they came up with. They don't have to be talking to this fuckers. All week I've been asking them and no one does. In fact, at one company they were literally saying, yeah, the way we measure someone's AI use and whether it's good or not is how many pull requests they've done via AI and pull request being someone's going to email and be mad about this. Calm down. The thing that you do when you say, hey, here is the change I want to make to this code or this thing. This is the plan. Do you agree? Yeah. They're measuring the percentage of those written by AI. That is a positive metric. That's what they're measuring. I didn't think no one would have any idea though. I truly didn't. It's so funny. It's so f. It's so fucking funny. It's the funniest thing. I'm right. I've been right about this for years. I've been saying for years that when organizations pay the actual cost of AI, not subsidized subscriptions that allow you to burn effect as much as you want, they fall and start asking questions. All of these people who've been talking about how amazing AI is are now going, well, you know, we need to have very difficult decisions. We need to, need to measure it somehow. And the value of AI has been entirely framed around unsustainable, unprofitable, impossible to measure tools that beguile imbeciles and those that don't want to think about reality. To be clear, OpenAI also appears to be moving most businesses towards token based billing by giving them $1,000 in credits to use on Codex to soften the blow. Fucking Sam. No. Nobody does it better. Nobody does it better than Clammy Sam Altman. Clammy Sam, Clammy Sammy. We love clammy. $1,000 just for you, honey. You can use it, whatever you want. Please pay me. And that's the thing. OpenAI broken business as well, but there's no real solution here. There's none. And I think the next three months are going to be illuminating and probably feature pullback across a ton of organizations as they, they should have been asking since fucking 2023. It's insane. I was, I would. As I sound completely insane myself, as I sound completely crazed, but people were calling me crazy in 2024, being like, yeah, you know, when businesses pay the real cost, they're not going to. People were acting like I was a fucking lunatic. Well, who's crazy now? Would a crazy person laugh like this? Anyway, there are no real solutions here though, folks. There are no real solutions. While somebody theoretically could move their workloads to Deepseek or a cheaper model, it's unlikely that there are inference providers that can support that much traffic or even provide that much Stability. You have to remember a big organization is putting a lot more pressure on deepseek than say, a casual coder, someone who's just running their own gpu. And you have to do far more than just turn on GPUs. You actually have to build for an organization that would be theoretically spending millions. A massive inference stack that cannot crap out. It's one of the reasons people pay Anthropic and OpenAI even though Anthropic is barely stable. I also don't have any substantive proof that Deepseek V4 or other models can replace an Opair Opus. I was about to say opeth there. Not editing that or Codex model. Even if they are dramatically cheaper. We have no proof of this. And despite the conversation, no one's doing it. Not heard it. Not heard anyone say this. Also, in the end, if nobody can measure the ROI of AI in general, why would they spend anything? Now, AI boosters are currently either completely ignoring this subject, which is what's happening with the obvious ones, or they're going to answer by saying that we're in the early days and that there are weekly breakthroughs that will solve these problems. Being a lot of fucking weeks so far. Been a lot of them. Got like 400 of them, 450 coming up in 500 weeks. But this is a problem that needed to be solved yesterday. And neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has an answer for bringing down costs, let alone those of their custom customers. Even if they're. Even if they were magically profitable overnight, even if they were, they're not. They are not profitable. In inference, their customers are spending too much money. Their customers do not have cost control. That makes it very hard to budget for how much you'll spend. Basic business stuff. Basic stuff. I'm not innovative in my thinking here. You know, it's like that tweet that was like, yeah. Walking around a college campus looking into a business class, school class. And it's like, profit is revenue minus costs. It really is that. Except these people have been ignoring that for years and making people feel stupid for asking those questions. I also must be clear that these companies cannot slow down anthropic and OpenAI project to have over $350 billion in combined annual revenue by 2030. And they're gonna need it because between them They've made over $1.1 trillion in compute commitments if their revenue growth is entirely based on dim witted executives allowing a no, it loads refused compute dump for no apparent return on investment. That is not a stable sustainable or even a growth business. It's a grift targeting a society wide executive ignorance of production itself. I look forward to telling you more about it next week. I've had a lot of fun this week. Got Paul Kudrowski coming back on the show on Tuesday. Actually Wednesday, sorry, 12:00am ET Wednesday. I should really know that by now. It's been years and then. Yeah, I'll have another monologue for you. It's been a lot of fun. I hope you're enjoying it. Zitron Out,

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