{{first_name | Hi}}, your strategic AI update is here.
Glean crossed $300 million selling AI budget cuts to CFOs, Nvidia committed $150 billion a year to Taiwan as Vera Rubin entered production, and Xcena raised $135 million betting memory is the real AI bottleneck. Buying the tools is the easy part. A new survey of 2,850 global leaders finds 73% reporting underwhelming ROI, because organizations measure AI adoption instead of output.
Innovation Snapshot
"Artificial intelligence is not a man versus machine saga; it's about humans and machines working together."
— Ginni Rometty, Former Chairman & CEO of IBM
In today's lineup:
Robots
73% of AI budgets are buying productivity theater
Real ROI from Gen AI
The AI OS eating enterprise procurement
People
Barbara Bachus cuts materials discovery from years to weeks
Love
Measure AI by what it produces, not how often it runs
The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee
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
Glean hits $300M ARR selling AI budget cuts, tripling revenue in 15 months as CFOs push back on wasteful AI spend.
Nvidia pledges $150 billion a year to Taiwan, as Vera Rubin enters full production with five times the inference power of its predecessor.
Xcena closes $135M to put AI inference inside memory, betting its chip can collapse ten-server AI setups into one.
Taiwan lifts its 2026 growth forecast to 9.64%, driven by AI export demand toward its strongest economic performance in five decades.
California clears 30 AI bills at its crossover deadline, advancing pricing, workplace surveillance, and disclosure rules toward the governor.
73% of AI budgets are buying productivity theater
Across every market surveyed, the majority of executives are ready to scale back AI budgets if 2026 profit goals aren't met. US leads at 75%.
A new G-P survey of 2,850 global leaders finds 73% report underwhelming ROI from AI, and 88% believe employees are using AI to appear productive without generating real business value. G-P calls it "productivity theater."
The pattern is familiar: tools get deployed, dashboards multiply, activity metrics climb. Revenue per employee does not.
Three things keep organizations stuck:
Adoption targets replace outcome targets, rewarding tool usage instead of measuring value produced.
AI layers over broken processes, automating the chaos rather than fixing it first.
No accountability owner translates AI activity into a P&L line, leaving spend invisible to the CFO.
The 69% ready to scale back spend are not giving up on AI. They are giving up on activity theater that produces no evidence.
What's the biggest sign your organization is getting AI activity, not AI results?
Real ROI from Gen AI
How human-centric AI delivers business results
UnitedHealth launched Avery, an AI member coordinator across 1,000-plus AI tools, with Q1 2026 results beating analyst forecasts and its benefit cost ratio falling to 83.9%, 1.6 points below projection.
BNY Mellon crossed 40% AI-authored code in Q1 2026, with Eliza 2.0 and an OpenAI partnership driving 42% EPS growth across custody and settlement operations.
General Mills deployed AI to assess more than 5,000 daily shipments, with logistics optimization generating over $20 million in supply chain savings since its 2024 fiscal year.
Tool Spotlight
Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage
The AI OS eating enterprise procurement
Recently launched 50-plus AI agents across accounting, legal, and procurement, delivering $6 billion in customer savings and a Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionary ranking.
Best for: Enterprise teams that need AI agents operating across finance, legal, IT, and procurement from a single orchestration layer.
Choose if you...
Run a complex procure-to-pay cycle and need AI to close the loop from contract review to payment without human bottlenecks.
Want more than 50 specialised AI agents that can act autonomously across departments.
Need contract cycle time reductions across legal and procurement.
Recently raised $40M to replace legacy procurement software with an AI operating system. DoorDash runs on it; the platform processes $3 billion in invoices annually across 25 countries.
Best for: Finance and procurement teams replacing a patchwork of approval workflows with one AI-native system.
Choose if you...
Need a single platform to manage sourcing, approvals, invoicing, and payments.
Want real-time visibility into committed spend before it hits the books, not after.
Are onboarding vendors across multiple countries and need a compliant, automated intake process.
3 other tools to explore
PEOPLE 👥
Meet the innovators turning bold ideas into real-world impact.
Transformation Champion
Barbara Bachus cuts materials discovery from years to weeks
Finding a new material that performs at specification can take years. ExoMatter, co-founded by Barbara Bachus, screens thousands of candidates in days using AI and quantum chemical modeling, serving Audi, Airbus, and Infineon. The company was recently named a VivaTech 2026 Female Founder Award finalist, selected from a global field.
LOVE ❤️
Practical wisdom, growth tactics, and a must-read book that will challenge the way you think.
Measure AI by what it produces, not how often it runs
Organizations track how many people use AI. Almost none measure what it actually changed. The fix: restructure productivity metrics to reward impact and shared knowledge, not hours logged with a tool.
Replace AI adoption KPIs with output-per-workflow metrics: time saved, decisions accelerated.
Assign an output owner to each deployment, accountable for the business delta, not the usage log.
Run a monthly value audit: 90 days in, no P&L movement, deprioritize.
Transformative Reads
One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:
Brynjolfsson and McAfee's The Second Machine Age makes one argument: productivity gains go to organizations that redesign workflows around their tools, not those that merely adopt them. The gap between AI investment and AI return is a management problem.
Perfect for: CEOs and CIOs whose AI stack is not moving the P&L.
In Culture
The fastest product roadmap update of 2026.
THANK YOU!
Lighthouse takes us many hours to create, and we don’t run ads or charge anything. We are dedicated to making it the best AI transformation newsletter possible.
We just ask for one thing: tell one friend about Lighthouse today!
Want daily AI & Innovation insights? Connect with me on LinkedIn or X.
Got suggestions? Just reply to this email!
Much Love,
Matt and the Future Works team
