There is no enterprise ROI problem with AI right now; we are in a period of exploration and experimentation with patience for ROI calculations to settle.
Oswald argues that enterprise AI spend faces no ROI crisis — companies are still in an exploration phase, tolerating uncertainty because the landscape is shifting too fast for ROI calculations to stabilize. ✦ AI generated
Oswald Nitski · 20VC · 2026-07-25 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 8:01
“Switching back, Alex Corp's second point in that show was ROI questionability. You mentioned the word ROI there, which made me think of it. Is is very present, and enterprises maybe have questionability around the ROI that they're getting. Do you think we have an enterprise ROI problem with AI today?”
I don't think there's an ROI problem right now. I think we're in a period of exploration and experimentation where there's more tolerance, more patience to get that ROI calculation right now. There's a lot of different projections around where token prices will go, where performance will go, and right now we're starting to see some amount of tightening of the screws on spend here and there. But I think the paradigm we're in is still let's see what happens because things are moving so quickly that the ROI calculation might shift too dramatically still.
verbatim transcript · starts at 8:01
8:01calculation right now. There's a lot of different projections around where token prices will go, where performance will go, and right now we're we're starting to see some amount of tightening of the screws on spend here and there. But I think the the paradigm we're in is still let's see what happens because things are moving so quickly that the the ROI calculation might shift too dramatically still. >> Two ways I want to go in this. I'll take
8:32the first way. We saw Aaron from ClickHouse say that he 6X his spend and that's what they need to do cuz we need to be at the frontier. And then you see Uber and Microsoft and some forms of I think it was Grok or X or one of Elon's companies put budgets on per user head. What do you think is the right way to be navigating this cycle? If I'm a founder
8:58listening, what would your advice be on how I should think about optimizing the balance between performance and budget? >> It totally depends on the use case. So I've I've mostly worked at hypergrowth companies where growth matters at all costs, right? And there is a willingness to spend for growth as long as the unit economics are fine. When you're looking at coding agent spend for your software engineers,