Frontline teams actually implementing AI day-to-day—like a Midwest logistics company and a back-office accounting firm—are already seeing falling exception rates and rising handling rates, even though this return on investment hasn't yet become visible in big-enterprise CTO-level metrics.
At the AI Engineer World's Fair, Pash found that non-Silicon-Valley operators are already seeing concrete day-to-day ROI from AI—fewer exceptions, faster handling—well before this shows up in the numbers that big enterprise leadership actually watches. ✦ AI generated
Pash · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-09 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 40:57
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 CT causes because they're so far away from like the front line that they don't actually know what's going on very closely.
verbatim transcript · starts at 40:57
40:57calls or exceptions that used to happen are now getting handled 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 CT causes because
41:21they're so far away from like 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 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
41:39handled the handling rate and the exception rate the exception rate is falling the handling rate is going up and and they're seeing that on a day-to-day basis right so this is I think where we are the guys who are actually implementing and close to the implementations are actually seeing the results it hasn't really filtered out into the top layer of the enterprises yet. But the CEOs who are who are AI
42:05pill kind of know what's going to happen and they're kind of 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 etc. That's really where we are. And I think it's not it's not really visible. It wasn't visible to me until I went to
42:24this AI engineers world warfare. Like 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. [music] Staying with Pasha's field notes this time from the discourse. He'd been running suspicious posts through Pangram
42:48Labs, the AI writing detector. And one Shamath post became a live experiment in whether anyone even cares. [music] Essentially when I post something on X, which which I know people are going to object to. I run it through Pangram Labs at least once because uh I don't want to be accused of uh you know sloppying the timeline. Slopifying the timeline with AI sloifying by myself. That's fine. One