AI ROI: Show Me The Math | EP8: How CFOs Forecast AI Budgets

How do you forecast an AI budget when the pricing model is changing underneath you? That is the question facing every CFO, CIO, and Chief AI Officer accountable for AI spend. For the past two years, enterprise AI coding has run on subsidized economics. That arrangement is ending. Every major AI vendor is converging on metered, usage-based pricing, and the inputs that made AI budgets forecastable are being removed. In Episode 8 of AI ROI: Show Me The Math, Paul Brzozowski breaks down what he calls the subsidy cliff: the point where AI pricing flips from venture-subsidized to true cost, and every organization that never built measurement meets it with no forecast. Covered in this episode: - Why fixed-price AI coding licensing is ending, and when renewals start converting - The real-world math: how a $2,000-$3,000 monthly workload becomes $15,000-$30,000 - What a 5 to 10x cost increase means at enterprise scale - The valuation engine behind the repricing, from $380B toward $900B - Why the cost stayed invisible, and why that is now a problem - The gap between AI cost visibility and AI value visibility - Productive consumption versus runaway consumption: which tokens ship code and which are waste - Coding IQ: measuring the leap from generated output to shipped, production-grade code - What CFOs, CIOs, and Chief AI Officers need to build before the next renewal CHAPTERS 00:00 The end of subsidized AI 01:15 The subsidy era is ending 02:30 The problem: a structural repricing 04:00 Why it went unmanaged 05:10 The Cisco signal 06:20 Cost visibility without value visibility 07:30 The answer: measuring Coding IQ 09:00 What this means for the CFO, CIO, and Chief AI Officer 09:45 The path forward ABOUT THE SERIES AI ROI: Show Me The Math analyzes the numbers behind enterprise AI adoption, cost, and return. No hype. Just the math. ABOUT THE HOST Paul Brzozowski is co-founder of Olakai, the Enterprise AI ROI & Governance Platform that helps organizations measure, govern, and scale their AI stacks. He hosts Enterprise AI Unlocked and the AI ROI: Show Me The Math series. New episodes regularly. Subscribe to follow the series. #EnterpriseAI #AIROI #CFO #CIO #AIGovernance