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IBM just put tens of thousands of consultants behind OpenAI. Uber and Pony are taking 2,000 robotaxis to Europe. OpenAI crossed $40B in annualized revenue. The deployment wave is real, and the token bill is arriving faster than most planned. EY surveyed 534 executives: 98% reconsidered their AI strategy once the costs hit.
"AI saves time' is no longer a sufficient business case when the costs are mounting… priorities must be focused on doing different things, not the same things differently."
— Dan Diasio, EY Global AI Consulting Leader
In today's lineup
Robots
Lock the AI cost baseline before deployment
Real ROI from Gen AI
Know what your AI costs before your CFO finds out
People
Rafael Quintanilla bets AI's biggest payoff is in factories, not offices
Love
Set the AI baseline before a line of code is written
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Reading time: 3 min.
ROBOTS 🤖
How are robotics and AI changing industries? We break down the latest news, tools, and innovations for you.
Top Insights
IBM partners with OpenAI on enterprise AI training tens of thousands of consultants across financial services, government, and telecom.
Uber and Pony.ai bring 2,000 robotaxis to Europe expanding autonomous vehicle deployment from pilot to commercial scale.
OpenAI revenue hits $40B run rate doubling from 2025 as AI coding software drives 20%+ monthly growth ahead of IPO.
Apple trains its own AI model for China with Alibaba becoming the first foreign company approved for a proprietary in-country model.
Alphabet's $900M SpaceX stake hits $94B after IPO a 100x return on patient capital in AI-adjacent infrastructure.
Lock the AI cost baseline before deployment
EY surveyed 534 SVP-and-above leaders: 98% reconsidered their AI strategy once the token bills arrived. Last year, 35% planned to spend $10M+ on AI. Today, only 23% have. Agentic systems cost roughly 30x more per interaction than simple workflows.
One in three run agentic AI without a financial baseline. Only 64% monitor token usage.
What the 23% hitting their targets do:
Set a Finance-approved baseline before deployment: cost-per-workflow, not cost-per-seat
Run token monitoring with anomaly alerts tied to approval workflows
Treat AI spend like capital: value per dollar, Finance-validated
They locked the baseline before deployment. Not after the bills arrived.
Real ROI from Gen AI
How human-centric AI delivers business results
Borouge deployed Honeywell's Experion Cognition at its Ruwais facility, making it the petrochemical industry's first fully autonomous control room, with the system predicting process incidents 12 minutes before alarms fire and protecting against $2M+ outages.
Shell extended its C3 AI predictive maintenance to 13,000+ pieces of equipment across six continents and improved compressor mean time between failures 12%, trimming maintenance planning from weeks to days.
Unilever deployed AI digital twins with Accenture across its global factories, cutting waste 20% and lifting capacity 10% at its Raeford, NC plant, with 8% cost reduction across all sites.
Tool Spotlight
Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage
Know what your AI costs before your CFO finds out
Maps AI and cloud spend across OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Azure, and GCP into one model, then uses AI agents to detect anomalies and route fixes through existing approval workflows. Raised $40M Series C from Insight Partners in June 2026. Best for CIOs who need a real number before the next CFO conversation.
Launched August 6, 2026. Connects token costs to business outcomes (cycle time, cost avoided, conversion rates) in one view for technology and finance executives. Gartner: 84% of finance leaders still can't measure AI ROI. Public preview now, GA Q3 2026. Best for CIOs and CFOs who need to prove AI value to the board.
3 other tools to explore
Amnic suits early-stage AI teams who need multi-cloud FinOps with native LLM cost ingest and anomaly detection built in.
CloudZero suits engineering-led organizations who need AI spend attributed by feature and team without tagging mandates.
Flexera suits enterprises already on Flexera for SaaS governance who need AI cost tracking across agents, models, and compute in one view.
PEOPLE 👥
Meet the innovators turning bold ideas into real-world impact.
Transformation Champion
Rafael Quintanilla bets AI's biggest payoff is in factories, not offices
Rafael Quintanilla left Accel, where he invested in defense and industrial resilience, to build AI's highest-value application: operations in aerospace, energy, logistics, and manufacturing. Arrakis is the platform. Within six months, NYSE-listed industrial customers are reporting procurement cycle times cut 90%. In July, the company raised $38M in Series A funding.
LOVE ❤️
Practical wisdom, growth tactics, and a must-read book that will challenge the way you think.
Set the AI baseline before a line of code is written
Anders Liu-Lindberg writing in Forbes puts it plainly: most organizations deploy AI first and measure later. Without a pre-deployment baseline, there is no credible before-and-after. A slide-deck claim is not a verified outcome.
The CFOs who do report ROI set the baseline before deployment. Finance-signed. Agreed before a line of code is written.
Gartner puts the failure rate at 84%. Better governance before deployment is the variable that changes it.
Transformative Reads
One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman splits cognition into two systems: fast and intuitive (System 1), slow and deliberate (System 2). AI budgets get approved in System 1. Pre-deployment baselines require System 2. The leaders who read this will recognize exactly where their organization keeps skipping the switch.
In Culture
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Much Love,
Matt and the Future Works team
