Scaling Enterprise AI Without Breaking The Bank: A CIO's Guide To AI Unit Economics
CIO, Thursday, August 27th, 2026
A framework for measuring AI's economic value -- impact times adoption times reusability divided by cost -- rather than deployment volume.
Deepika Kaushal argues CIOs should evaluate AI using unit economics: business impact times adoption times reusability, divided by total delivery cost, since recurring inference, compute, and governance costs can exceed pilot expectations at scale.
She outlines six strategies: matching technology to the task rather than defaulting to large language models, managing AI as a portfolio with exit criteria, using hybrid architecture and model routing, redesigning processes around AI rather than just automating them, measuring business outcomes, and establishing AI FinOps accountability linking consumption to results.