📈 AI is paying off
This is an excerpt from the Sunday newsletter.
⚡️ Today’s edition is brought to you by Lindy.
Your next hire won’t be human – it will be AI. Lindy lets businesses create AI agents with just a prompt. These AI employees handle sales, support, and ops 24/7, so you can focus on growth.
AI ROI
Seventy-five percent of large US firms already report a return on investment from AI, according to Wharton Business School’s latest update from its three-year enterprise study. Roughly two-thirds of firms report spending more than $5 million annually on generative AI budgets. More than one in ten are spending $20 million.
Extrapolated across some 20,000 comparable American firms, this suggests a conservative floor of $66 billion in annual genAI spending. This is slightly above our estimates for revenues in the global generative AI ecosystem, excluding China. Therefore, I suspect that the Wharton respondents included internal budget allocations in their estimates, which we typically do not. The study used a solid cross-sectional survey, though it remained dependent on self-reported responses. Either way, 88% expect to increase spending.
It’s remarkable that most firms are seeing positive returns within three years of ChatGPT’s debut. Usage is deepening rapidly – 82% of respondents engage with generative AI weekly, 46% daily – but the pattern is uneven. Middle managers lag their executives, and hiring expectations vary widely across levels. Whether this early surge can sustain itself remains to be seen.
This study triangulates well with other indicators. JPMorgan reports that 150,000 employees use its LLM tools daily. Results from the hyperscalers show that AI demand continues to drive growth in their cloud businesses. (Microsoft Azure, for example, grew 40% year-over-year to nearly $85 billion in revenue, with perhaps one-fifth attributable to AI services.)
See also:
Today’s edition is supported by Lindy.
If ChatGPT could actually do the work, not just talk about it, you’d have Lindy.
Just describe what you need in plain English. Lindy builds the agent and gets it done.
→ “Create a booking platform for my business”
→ “Handle inbound leads and follow-ups”
→ “Send weekly performance recaps to my team.”
Save hours. Automate tasks. Scale your business.
MEDIA Entrepreneur at "Egoist Arts & PARTS" Int. Exhibition - Imagemaker plc - UNDIVIDED MEDIA inc
3d💯 ✅️ until next big 💰💰💰 crash 😱🤭 😉😎
Chief Marketing Officer | Scaling High-Growth SaaS Companies | Ex-SAP, McKinsey
4dThese figures are 🔥 and a useful counterpoint to the MIT study debacle. If the methods/definitions of ROI hold up (sample, time window, self-report vs audited), this suggests we’ve moved past “does AI help?” to “where and how does it help?”
Advancing Deterministic AI through Dimensional Intelligence™ | Consultant & Keynote Speaker on Verifiable, Ethical, and Human-Aligned AI Systems.
4dThe spending curve is impressive, but the return on investment should not just be measured in dollars. It should be measured in correctness. Three-quarters of firms report ROI, yet almost none can explain their models’ reasoning chain. That means they are profiting from outputs they cannot audit. Dimensional Intelligence was built to fix that gap. It turns AI from an expense line into an asset class by making every decision traceable, provable, and repeatable. Real ROI comes when intelligence can explain itself. Our currency is truth and correctness.
AI adoption is clearly accelerating! Interesting to see such high ROI and investment levels, how do you see mid-sized firms keeping pace with these trends?
Many firms gain by automating rule-based workflows and by validating microcredentials to cut hiring friction. At Certs365™, we help businesses in enabling this by using blockchain-backed certifications, which are tamper-proof and instantly verifiable. This makes each process significantly faster and ensures security at each step.