There is no enterprise ROI problem with AI today — we are in a period of exploration and experimentation where there is tolerance and patience to get the ROI calculation right because things are moving too quickly for the calculation to be stable.
Oswald argues the current AI investment climate is not facing an ROI crisis. Instead, enterprises are in an exploration phase, willing to tolerate uncertain returns because the pace of change makes any ROI calculation potentially obsolete quickly. ✦ AI generated
Oswald Nitski · 20VC · 2026-07-25 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 8:00
“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 8:00
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,