Frontline teams actually implementing AI day-to-day are already seeing measurable ROI — falling exception rates and faster handling of customer calls — even though senior enterprise leadership hasn't recognized it yet because all they see is rising token spend.
From conversations at the AI Engineer World's Fair, Pash says implementers close to the ground already see AI paying off daily, but that signal hasn't reached top-level enterprise leadership, who only see token costs rising. ✦ AI generated
Pash · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-02 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 42:00
So they are seeing I think the return on investment on a day-to-day basis and this is very different from I think the story that you get from like the big enterprise CTO's because they're so far away from the front line that they don't actually know what's going on very closely. They're just looking at the numbers and by the numbers the token spend is going up but you know are you really seeing the return on investment.
verbatim transcript · starts at 42:00
42:00handled immediately and then all of the more difficult stuff that they used to have to like you know jump on they can now start to address and so they are seeing I think the return on investment on a day-to-day basis and this is very different from I think the story that you get from like the big enterprise c CTO's because they're so far away from like the the the front line that they
42:24don't actually know what's going on very closely. They're just looking at the numbers and by the numbers the token spend is going up but you know are you really seeing the return on investment but if you go down to that working level and you see day-to-day on like the customer calls coming in and whether they're getting handled the handling rate and the exception rate the exception rate is falling the handling
42:42rate is going up and and they're seeing that on a day-to-day basis right so this is I think where we are uh the guys who are actually implementing and close to the implementations are actually seeing the results it hasn't really filtered up into the, you know, top layer of the enterprises yet, but the CEOs who are who are AI pilled kind of know what's going to happen and they're kind of
43:08they've they've made the commitment and they're making the investment. The CEOs who are not are kind of sitting by and like, oh, you know, we're going to wait around. We're going to see what happens, like, etc., etc. That's really where we are. Um, and I think it's not it's not re really vis like it wasn't visible to me until I went to this AI engineers worldfare. Like I I think of AI people
43:30as just the people on Twitter, right? Like that's you know for for some reason my world has gotten constrained into this like small tiny world and like you know the bubble and I don't really have this good sense of what people outside the bubble are actually doing or thinking. But you go there and you meet these implementers and then you realize like all of the stuff that we talk about
43:50and we're producing in the bubble is getting used outside. People are learning how to use these tools and people are deploying and people are using them. People are seeing the return on investment but it's at the very like micro granular level right now. It's going to take some time for the numbers to filter upwards. So coming back to the two paradigms, a lot of what you're describing there