THE NUMBER
About 7 in 100.
That is how many companies can actually point to a measurable return on the money they spend on AI, according to KPMG, a big accounting and consulting firm that surveyed more than 2,100 senior business leaders across 20 countries this spring. Everyone is paying. Almost nobody can prove it is working. Measuring what your own automation is worth is exactly what this newsletter is about.
3 THINGS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW
A company’s AI renewal came back four to five times higher, after the price dropped
When Priceline went to renew a routine AI coding tool, the bill came back four to five times more expensive than the year before. The odd part: the price per use had actually fallen. These tools bill by usage, like a utility meter, not a flat monthly seat, so once the whole team used it every day the bill blew past the plan. Nobody was watching the meter.
An operator found 16 AI subscriptions on her statement, more than her accountant costs
An independent operator running a one-person shop pulled her bank statement and counted sixteen AI subscriptions, about £612 a month. She sorted them by how often she actually used each one, cancelled nine, and lost nothing. Same output, same work going out the door. More than half were just quietly billing her.
AI got about 98% cheaper per use this year. Company bills went up anyway.
By some measures the price of a single AI task fell close to 98% through 2026, and company AI bills rose regardless. The FinOps Foundation, an industry group that tracks what firms spend on cloud and AI, found 73% said their costs came in higher than planned. Cheaper per use is not cheaper. The only number that tells you anything is the total cost per task.
THE DEEP DIVE
Almost nobody can answer this question, and that is the answer
Here is the finding, and it is not about a company. KPMG asked more than 2,100 senior business leaders one plain question this spring: can you point to a measurable return on the money you spend on AI? About 7 in 100 said yes. Four in ten admitted they cannot even see clearly what they are spending in the first place.
So if you cannot say what your automation earns you, you are not behind. You are with the other 93%, and that group includes companies with whole finance departments.
The reason is the same everywhere. Everyone bought the tools. The bill arrives as a tidy monthly subscription that looks small, so it never gets a second look. But the subscription is not the cost. The cost is your time supervising the thing, the work you redo when it gets something wrong, and how rarely you actually run it. None of that lands on the invoice, so nobody sets it next to the value. And a cost you never measure is a return you can never prove.
The 7% are not smarter. They did the arithmetic. Here is how you join them.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
You have measured everything in your business except this. The subscription is the smallest part of what an automation costs you. Your own time to run it and fix it is the rest, and it never shows up on a bill. Here is the whole number, for one thing you run.
Pick one automation you actually use, and pull up what it charges you. The monthly or yearly fee. That is the sticker price, and it is the part everyone already knows.
Write down two things the bill leaves out. First, how much of your own time it eats in a normal week: setting it up, checking it, fixing what it gets wrong. Second, how often it runs (a day, a week, a month). Rough numbers are fine.
Decide what an hour of your time is worth. If you are not sure, use what you would pay someone else to do this task by hand.
Open Claude Code and hand it those numbers. On a Mac, open Terminal; on Windows, open PowerShell; type
claudeand press enter. Then type: “This tool costs me [X]. I spend about [Y] hours a week on it and my time is worth [Z] an hour. It runs [N] times a month. Work out what one run actually costs me, all in, and tell me whether that beats paying a person to do it by hand.” Let Claude do the arithmetic. That is the part you do not have to think about.Read the number, then decide: keep it, renegotiate it, or kill it. Cheaper per run than doing it by hand, keep it. Close, that is your cue to cut the usage or the plan. More expensive, you just found an automation you have been paying to keep.
Do this once and you will not look at a subscription the same way again. The number you just made is the one nobody sells you, and you can point it at every other tool you run.
WHAT’S COMING
Next issue: the break-even. The number of times a task has to run before an automation pays for itself, and how to spot the ones in your business that will never get there.
Manu