Your Gateway to Power, Energy, Datacenters, Bitcoin and AI

Dive into the latest industry updates, our exclusive Paperboy Newsletter, and curated insights designed to keep you informed. Stay ahead with minimal time spent.

Discover What Matters Most to You

Explore ONMINE’s curated content, from our Paperboy Newsletter to industry-specific insights tailored for energy, Bitcoin mining, and AI professionals.

AI

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Bitcoin:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Datacenter:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Energy:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Shape
Discover What Matter Most to You

Featured Articles

CFOs want AI that pays: real metrics, not marketing demos

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

Recent surveys and VentureBeat’s conversations with CFOs suggest the honeymoon phase of AI is rapidly drawing to a close. While 2024 was dominated by pilot programs and proof-of-concept demonstrations, in mid-2025, the pressure for measurable results is intensifying, even as CFO interest in AI remains high. 

According to a KPMG survey of 300 U.S. financial executives, investor pressure to demonstrate ROI on generative AI investments has increased significantly. For 90% of organizations, investor pressure is considered “important or very important” for demonstrating ROI in Q1 2025, a sharp increase from 68% in Q4 2024. This indicates a strong and intensifying demand for measurable returns.

Meanwhile, according to a Bain Capital Ventures survey of 50 CFOs, 79% plan to increase their AI budgets this year, with 94% believing gen AI can strongly benefit at least one finance activity. This reveals a telling pattern in how CFOs are currently measuring AI value. Those who have adopted gen AI tools report seeing initial returns primarily through efficiency gains.“We created a custom workflow that automates vendor identification to quickly prepare journal entries,” said Andrea Ellis, CFO of Fanatics Betting and Gaming. “This process used to take 20 hours during month-end close, and now, it takes us just 2 hours each month.”

Jason Whiting, CFO of Mercury Financial, echoed this efficiency focus: “Across the board, [the biggest benefit] has been the ability to increase speed of analysis. Gen AI hasn’t replaced anything, but it has made our existing processes and people better.”

But CFOs are now looking beyond simple time savings toward more strategic applications. 

The Bain data shows CFOs are most excited about applying AI to “long-standing pain points that prior generations of technology have been unable to solve.” Cosmin Pitigoi, CFO of Flywire, explained: “Forecasting trends based on large data sets has been around for a long time, but the issue has always been the model’s ability to explain the assumptions behind the forecast. AI can help not just with forecasting, but also with explaining what assumptions have changed over time.”

These recent surveys suggest that CFOs are becoming the primary gatekeepers for AI investment; however, they’re still developing the financial frameworks necessary to evaluate these investments properly. Those who develop robust evaluation methodologies first will likely gain significant competitive advantages. Those who don’t may find their AI enthusiasm outpacing their ability to measure and manage the returns.

Efficiency metrics: The first wave of AI value

The initial wave of AI value capture by finance departments has focused predominantly on efficiency metrics, with CFOs prioritizing measurable time and cost savings that deliver immediate returns. This focus on efficiency represents the low-hanging fruit of AI implementation — clear, quantifiable benefits that are easily tracked and communicated to stakeholders.

Drip Capital, a Silicon Valley-based fintech, exemplifies this approach with its AI implementation in trade finance operations. According to chief business officer Karl Boog, “We’ve been able to 30X our capacity with what we’ve done so far.” By automating document processing and enhancing risk assessment through large language models (LLMs), the company achieved a remarkable 70% productivity boost while maintaining critical human oversight for complex decisions.

KPMG research indicates this approach is widespread, with one retail company audit committee director noting how automation has improved operational efficiency and ROI. This sentiment is echoed across industries as finance leaders seek to justify their AI investments with tangible productivity improvements.

These efficiency improvements translate directly to the bottom line. Companies across sectors — from insurance to oil and gas — report that AI helps identify process inefficiencies, leading to substantial organizational cost savings and improved expense management.

Beyond simple cost reduction, CFOs are developing more sophisticated efficiency metrics to evaluate AI investments. These include time-to-completion ratios comparing pre- and post-AI implementation timelines, cost-per-transaction analyses measuring reductions in resource expenditure and labor hour reallocation metrics tracking how team members shift from manual data processing to higher-value analytical work.

However, leading CFOs recognize that while efficiency metrics provide a solid foundation for initial ROI calculations, they represent just the beginning of AI’s potential value. As finance leaders gain confidence in measuring these direct returns, they’re developing more comprehensive frameworks to capture AI’s full strategic value — moving well beyond the efficiency calculations that characterized early adoption phases.

Beyond efficiency: The new financial metrics

As CFOs move beyond the initial fascination with AI-driven efficiency gains, they’re developing new financial metrics that more comprehensively capture AI’s business impact. This evolution reflects a maturing approach to AI investments, with finance leaders adopting more sophisticated evaluation frameworks that align with broader corporate objectives.

The surveys highlight a notable shift in primary ROI metrics. While efficiency gains remain important, we see productivity metrics are now overtaking pure profitability measures as the chief priority for AI initiatives in 2025. This represents a fundamental change in how CFOs assess value, focusing on AI’s ability to enhance human capabilities rather than simply reduce costs.

Time to value (TTV) is emerging as a critical new metric in investment decisions. Only about one-third of AI leaders anticipate being able to evaluate ROI within six months, making rapid time-to-value a key consideration when comparing different AI opportunities. This metric will help CFOs prioritize quick-win projects that can deliver measurable returns while building organizational confidence in larger AI initiatives.

Data quality measurements will increasingly be incorporated into evaluation frameworks, with 64% of leaders citing data quality as their most significant AI challenge. Forward-thinking CFOs now incorporate data readiness assessments and ongoing data quality metrics into their AI business cases, recognizing that even the most promising AI applications will fail without high-quality data inputs.

Adoption rate metrics have also become standard in AI evaluation. Finance leaders track how quickly and extensively AI tools are being utilized across departments, using this as a leading indicator of potential value realization. These metrics help identify implementation challenges early and inform decisions about additional training or system modifications.

“The biggest benefit has been the ability to increase speed of analysis,” noted Jason Whiting of Mercury Financial. This perspective represents the bridge between simple efficiency metrics and more sophisticated value assessments — recognizing that AI’s value often comes not from replacing existing processes but enhancing them.

Some CFOs are implementing comprehensive ROI formulas that incorporate both direct and indirect benefits (VAI Consulting):

ROI = (Net Benefit / Total Cost) × 100

Where net benefit equals the sum of direct financial benefits plus an estimated value of indirect benefits, minus total investment costs. This approach acknowledges that AI’s full value encompasses both quantifiable savings and intangible strategic advantages, such as improved decision quality and enhanced customer experience.

For companies with more mature AI implementations, these new metrics are becoming increasingly standardized and integrated into regular financial reporting. The most sophisticated organizations now produce AI value scorecards that track multiple dimensions of performance, linking AI system outputs directly to business outcomes and financial results.

As CFOs refine these new financial metrics, they’re creating a more nuanced picture of AI’s true value — one that extends well beyond the simple time and cost savings that dominated early adoption phases.

Amortization timelines: Recalibrating investment horizons

CFOs are fundamentally rethinking how they amortize AI investments, developing new approaches that acknowledge the unique characteristics of these technologies. Unlike traditional IT systems with predictable depreciation schedules, AI investments often yield evolving returns that increase as systems learn and improve over time. Leading finance executives now evaluate AI investments through the lens of sustainable competitive advantage — asking not just “How much will this save?” but “How will this transform our market position?”

“ROI directly correlates with AI maturity,” according to KPMG, which found that 61% of AI leaders report higher-than-expected ROI, compared with only 33% of beginners and implementers. This correlation is prompting CFOs to develop more sophisticated amortization models that anticipate accelerating returns as AI deployments mature.

The difficulty in establishing accurate amortization timelines remains a significant barrier to AI adoption. “Uncertain ROI/difficulty developing a business case” is cited as a challenge by 33% of executives, particularly those in the early stages of AI implementation. This uncertainty has led to a more cautious, phased approach to investment.

To address this challenge, leading finance teams are implementing pilot-to-scale methodologies to validate ROI before full deployment. This approach enables CFOs to gather accurate performance data, refine their amortization estimates, and make more informed scaling decisions.

The timeframe for expected returns varies significantly based on the type of AI implementation. Automation-focused AI typically delivers more predictable short-term returns, whereas strategic applications, such as improved forecasting, may have longer, less certain payback periods. Progressive CFOs are developing differentiated amortization schedules that reflect these variations rather than applying one-size-fits-all approaches.

Some finance leaders are adopting rolling amortization models that are adjusted quarterly based on actual performance data. This approach acknowledges the dynamic nature of AI returns and allows for ongoing refinement of financial projections. Rather than setting fixed amortization schedules at the outset, these models incorporate learning curves and performance improvements into evolving financial forecasts.

One entertainment company implemented a gen AI-driven tool that scans financial developments, identifies anomalies and automatically generates executive-ready alerts. While the immediate ROI stemmed from efficiency gains, the CFO developed an amortization model that also factored in the system’s increasing accuracy over time and its expanding application across various business units.

Many CFOs are also factoring in how AI investments contribute to building proprietary data assets that appreciate rather than depreciate over time. Unlike traditional technology investments that lose value as they age, AI systems and their associated data repositories often become more valuable as they accumulate training data and insights.

This evolving approach to amortization represents a significant departure from traditional IT investment models. By developing more nuanced timelines that reflect AI’s unique characteristics, CFOs are creating financial frameworks that better capture the true economic value of these investments and support a more strategic allocation of resources.

Strategic value integration: Linking AI to shareholder returns

Forward-thinking CFOs are moving beyond operational metrics to integrate AI investments into broader frameworks for creating shareholder value. This shift represents a fundamental evolution in how financial executives evaluate AI — positioning it not merely as a cost-saving technology but as a strategic asset that drives enterprise growth and competitive differentiation.

This more sophisticated approach assesses AI’s impact on three critical dimensions of shareholder value: revenue acceleration, risk reduction and strategic optionality. Each dimension requires different metrics and evaluation frameworks, creating a more comprehensive picture of AI’s contribution to enterprise value.

Revenue acceleration metrics focus on how AI enhances top-line growth by improving customer acquisition, increasing the share of wallet and expanding market reach. These metrics track AI’s influence on sales velocity, conversion rates, customer lifetime value and price optimization — connecting algorithmic capabilities directly to revenue performance.

Risk reduction frameworks assess how AI enhances forecasting accuracy, improves scenario planning, strengthens fraud detection and optimizes capital allocation. By quantifying risk-adjusted returns, CFOs can demonstrate how AI investments reduce earnings volatility and improve business resilience — factors that directly impact valuation multiples.

Perhaps most importantly, leading CFOs are developing methods to value strategic optionality — the capacity of AI investments to create new business possibilities that didn’t previously exist. This approach recognizes that AI often delivers its most significant value by enabling entirely new business models or unlocking previously inaccessible market opportunities.

To effectively communicate this strategic value, finance leaders are creating new reporting mechanisms tailored to different stakeholders. Some are establishing comprehensive AI value scorecards that link system performance to tangible business outcomes, incorporating both lagging indicators (financial results) and leading indicators (operational improvements) that predict future financial performance.

Executive dashboards now regularly feature AI-related metrics alongside traditional financial KPIs, making AI more visible to senior leadership. These integrated views enable executives to understand how AI investments align with strategic priorities and shareholder expectations.

For board and investor communication, CFOs are developing structured approaches that highlight both immediate financial returns and long-term strategic advantages. Rather than treating AI as a specialized technology investment, these frameworks position it as a fundamental business capability that drives sustainable competitive differentiation.

By developing these integrated strategic value frameworks, CFOs ensure that AI investments are evaluated not only on their immediate operational impact but their contribution to the company’s long-term competitive position and shareholder returns. This more sophisticated approach is rapidly becoming a key differentiator between companies that treat AI as a tactical tool and those that leverage it as a strategic asset.

Risk-adjusted returns: The risk management equation

As AI investments grow in scale and strategic importance, CFOs are incorporating increasingly sophisticated risk assessments into their financial evaluations. This evolution reflects the unique challenges AI presents — balancing unprecedented opportunities against novel risks that traditional financial models often fail to capture.

The risk landscape for AI investments is multifaceted and evolving rapidly. Recent surveys indicate that risk management, particularly in relation to data privacy, is expected to be the biggest challenge to generative AI strategies for 82% of leaders in 2025. This concern is followed closely by data quality issues (64%) and questions of trust in AI outputs (35%).

Forward-thinking finance leaders are developing comprehensive risk-adjusted return frameworks that quantify and incorporate these various risk factors. Rather than treating risk as a binary go/no-go consideration, these frameworks assign monetary values to different risk categories and integrate them directly into ROI calculations.

Data security and privacy vulnerabilities represent a primary concern, with 57% of executives citing these as top challenges. CFOs are now calculating potential financial exposure from data breaches or privacy violations and factoring these costs into their investment analyses. This includes estimating potential regulatory fines, litigation expenses, remediation costs and reputational damage.

Regulatory compliance represents another significant risk factor. With many executives concerned about ensuring compliance with changing regulations, financial evaluations increasingly include contingency allocations for regulatory adaptation. An aerospace company executive noted that “complex regulations make it difficult for us to achieve AI readiness,” highlighting how regulatory uncertainty complicates financial planning.

Beyond these external risks, CFOs are quantifying implementation risks such as adoption failures, integration challenges and technical performance issues. By assigning probability-weighted costs to these scenarios, they create more realistic projections that acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in AI deployment.

The “black box” nature of certain AI technologies presents unique challenges for risk assessment. As stakeholders become increasingly wary of trusting AI results without understanding the underlying logic, CFOs are developing frameworks to evaluate transparency risks and their potential financial implications. This includes estimating the costs of additional validation procedures, explainability tools and human oversight mechanisms.

Some companies are adopting formal risk-adjustment methodologies borrowed from other industries. One approach applies a modified weighted average cost of capital (WACC) that incorporates AI-specific risk premiums. Others use risk-adjusted net present value calculations that explicitly account for the unique uncertainty profiles of different AI applications.

The transportation sector provides an illustrative example of this evolving approach. As one chief data officer noted, “The data received from AI requires human verification, and this is an important step that we overlook.” This recognition has led transportation CFOs to build verification costs directly into their financial models rather than treating them as optional add-ons.

By incorporating these sophisticated risk adjustments into their financial evaluations, CFOs are creating more realistic assessments of AI’s true economic value. This approach enables more confident investment decisions and helps organizations maintain appropriate risk levels as they scale their AI capabilities.

The CFO’s AI evaluation playbook: From experiments to enterprise value

As AI transitions from experimental projects to enterprise-critical systems, CFOs are developing more disciplined, comprehensive frameworks for evaluating these investments. The most successful approaches strike a balance between rigor and flexibility, acknowledging both the unique characteristics of AI and its integration into broader business strategy.

The emerging CFO playbook for AI evaluation contains several key elements that differentiate leaders from followers.

First is the implementation of multi-dimensional ROI frameworks that capture both efficiency gains and strategic value creation. Rather than focusing exclusively on cost reduction, these frameworks incorporate productivity enhancements, decision quality improvements and competitive differentiation into a holistic value assessment.

Second is the adoption of phased evaluation approaches that align with AI’s evolutionary nature. Leading CFOs establish clear metrics for each development stage — from initial pilots to scaled deployment — with appropriate risk adjustments and expected returns for each phase. This approach recognizes that AI investments often follow a J-curve, with value accelerating as systems mature and applications expand.

Third is the integration of AI metrics into standard financial planning and reporting processes. Rather than treating AI as a special category with unique evaluation criteria, forward-thinking finance leaders are incorporating AI performance indicators into regular budget reviews, capital allocation decisions and investor communications. This normalization signals AI’s transition from experimental technology to core business capability.

The most sophisticated organizations are also implementing formal governance structures that connect AI investments directly to strategic objectives. These governance frameworks ensure that AI initiatives remain aligned with enterprise priorities while providing the necessary oversight to manage risks effectively. By establishing clear accountability for both technical performance and business outcomes, these structures help prevent the disconnection between AI capabilities and business value that has plagued many early adopters.

As investors and boards increasingly scrutinize AI investments, CFOs are developing more transparent reporting approaches that clearly communicate both current returns and future potential. These reports typically include standardized metrics that track AI’s contribution to operational efficiency, customer experience, employee productivity and strategic differentiation — providing a comprehensive view of how these investments enhance shareholder value.

The organizations gaining a competitive advantage through AI are those where CFOs have moved to become strategic partners in AI transformation. These finance leaders work closely with technology and business teams to identify high-value use cases, establish appropriate success metrics and create financial frameworks that support responsible innovation while maintaining appropriate risk management.

The CFOs who master these new evaluation frameworks will drive the next wave of AI adoption — one characterized not by speculative experimentation but by disciplined investment in capabilities that deliver sustainable competitive advantage. As AI continues to transform business models and market dynamics, these financial frameworks will become increasingly critical to organizational success.

The CFO’s AI evaluation framework: Key metrics and considerations

Evaluation dimensionTraditional metricsEmerging AI metricsKey considerationsEfficiency• Cost reduction• Time savings• Headcount impact• Cost-per-output• Process acceleration ratio• Labor reallocation value• Measure both direct and indirect efficiency gains• Establish clear pre-implementation baselines• Track productivity improvements beyond cost savingsAmortization• Fixed depreciation schedules• Standard ROI timelines• Uniform capital allocation• Learning curve adjustments• Value acceleration factors• Pilot-to-scale validation• Recognize AI’s improving returns over time• Apply different timelines for different AI applications• Implement phase-gated funding tied to performanceStrategic Value• Revenue impact• Margin improvement• Market share• Decision quality metrics• Data asset appreciation• Strategic optionality value• Connect AI investments to competitive differentiation• Quantify both current and future strategic benefits• Measure contribution to innovation capabilitiesRisk management• Implementation risk• Technical performance risk• Financial exposure• Data privacy risk premium• Regulatory compliance factor• Explainability/transparency risk• Apply risk-weighted adjustments to projected returns• Quantify mitigation costs and residual risk• Factor in emerging regulatory and ethical considerationsGovernance• Project-based oversight• Technical success metrics• Siloed accountability• Enterprise AI governance• Cross-functional value metrics• Integrated performance dashboards• Align AI governance with corporate governance• Establish clear ownership of business outcomes• Create transparent reporting mechanisms for all stakeholders

Read More »

Why your enterprise AI strategy needs both open and closed models: The TCO reality check

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

For the last two decades, enterprises have had a choice between open-source and closed proprietary technologies.

The original choice for enterprises was primarily centered on operating systems, with Linux offering an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. In the developer realm, open-source languages like Python and JavaScript dominate, as open-source technologies, including Kubernetes, are standards in the cloud.

The same type of choice between open and closed is now facing enterprises for AI, with multiple options for both types of models. On the proprietary closed-model front are some of the biggest, most widely used models on the planet, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the open-source side are models like Meta’s Llama, IBM Granite, Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek.

Understanding when to use an open or closed model is a critical choice for enterprise AI decision-makers in 2025 and beyond. The choice has both financial and customization implications for either options that enterprises need to understand and consider.

Understanding the difference between open and closed licenses

There is no shortage of hyperbole around the decades-old rivalry between open and closed licenses. But what does it all actually mean for enterprise users?

A closed-source proprietary technology, like OpenAI’s GPT 4o for example, does not have model code, training data, or model weights open or available for anyone to see. The model is not easily available to be fine-tuned and generally speaking, it is only available for real enterprise usage with a cost (sure, ChatGPT has a free tier, but that’s not going to cut it for a real enterprise workload).

An open technology, like Meta Llama, IBM Granite, or DeepSeek, has openly available code. Enterprises can use the models freely, generally without restrictions, including fine-tuning and customizations.

Rohan Gupta, a principal with Deloitte, told VentureBeat that the open vs. closed source debate isn’t unique or native to AI, nor is it likely to be resolved anytime soon. 

Gupta explained that closed source providers typically offer several wrappers around their model that enable ease of use, simplified scaling, more seamless upgrades and downgrades and a steady stream of enhancements. They also provide significant developer support. That includes documentation as well as hands-on advice and often delivers tighter integrations with both infrastructure and applications. In exchange, an enterprise pays a premium for these services.

 “Open-source models, on the other hand, can provide greater control, flexibility and customization options, and are supported by a vibrant, enthusiastic developer ecosystem,” Gupta said. “These models are increasingly accessible via fully managed APIs across cloud vendors, broadening their distribution.”

Making the choice between open and closed model for enterprise AI

The question that many enterprise users might ask is what’s better: an open or a closed model? The answer however is not necessarily one or the other.

“We don’t view this as a binary choice,” David Guarrera, Generative AI Leader at EY Americas, told VentureBeat. ” Open vs closed is increasingly a fluid design space, where models are selected, or even automatically orchestrated, based on tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, cost, interpretability and security at different points in a workflow.” 

Guarrera noted that closed models limit how deeply organizations can optimize or adapt behavior. Proprietary model vendors often restrict fine-tuning, charge premium rates, or hide the process in black boxes. While API-based tools simplify integration, they abstract away much of the control, making it harder to build highly specific or interpretable systems.

In contrast, open-source models allow for targeted fine-tuning, guardrail design and optimization for specific use cases. This matters more in an agentic future, where models are no longer monolithic general-purpose tools, but interchangeable components within dynamic workflows. The ability to finely shape model behavior, at low cost and with full transparency, becomes a major competitive advantage when deploying task-specific agents or tightly regulated solutions.

“In practice, we foresee an agentic future where model selection is abstracted away,” Guarrera said.

For example, a user may draft an email with one AI tool, summarize legal docs with another, search enterprise documents with a fine-tuned open-source model and interact with AI locally through an on-device LLM, all without ever knowing which model is doing what. 

“The real question becomes: what mix of models best suits your workflow’s specific demands?” Guarrera said.

Considering total cost of ownership

With open models, the basic idea is that the model is freely available for use. While in contrast, enterprises always pay for closed models.

The reality when it comes to considering total cost of ownership (TCO) is more nuanced.

Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners explained to VentureBeat that TCO has many different layers. A few key considerations include infrastructure hosting costs and engineering: Are the open-source models self-hosted by the enterprise or the cloud provider? How much engineering, including fine-tuning, guard railing and security testing, is needed to operationalize the model safely? 

Akkiraju noted that fine-tuning an open weights model can also sometimes be a very complex task. Closed frontier model companies spend enormous engineering effort to ensure performance across multiple tasks. In his view, unless enterprises deploy similar engineering expertise, they will face a complex balancing act when fine-tuning open source models. This creates cost implications when organizations choose their model deployment strategy. For example, enterprises can fine-tune multiple model versions for different tasks or use one API for multiple tasks.

Ryan Gross, Head of Data & Applications at cloud native services provider Caylent told VentureBeat that from his perspective, licensing terms don’t matter, except for in edge case scenarios. The largest restrictions often pertain to model availability when data residency requirements are in place. In this case, deploying an open model on infrastructure like Amazon SageMaker may be the only way to get a state-of-the-art model that still complies. When it comes to TCO, Gross noted that the tradeoff lies between per-token costs and hosting and maintenance costs. 

“There is a clear break-even point where the economics switch from closed to open models being cheaper,” Gross said. 

In his view, for most organizations, closed models, with the hosting and scaling solved on the organization’s behalf, will have a lower TCO. However, for large enterprises, SaaS companies with very high demand on their LLMs, but simpler use-cases requiring frontier performance, or AI-centric product companies, hosting distilled open models can be more cost-effective.

How one enterprise software developer evaluated open vs closed models

Josh Bosquez, CTO at Second Front Systems is among the many firms that have had to consider and evaluate open vs closed models. 

“We use both open and closed AI models, depending on the specific use case, security requirements and strategic objectives,” Bosquez told VentureBeat.

Bosquez explained that open models allow his firm to integrate cutting-edge capabilities without the time or cost of training models from scratch. For internal experimentation or rapid prototyping, open models help his firm to iterate quickly and benefit from community-driven advancements.

“Closed models, on the other hand, are our choice when data sovereignty, enterprise-grade support and security guarantees are essential, particularly for customer-facing applications or deployments involving sensitive or regulated environments,” he said. “These models often come from trusted vendors, who offer strong performance, compliance support, and self-hosting options.”

Bosquez said that the model selection process is cross-functional and risk-informed, evaluating not only technical fit but also data handling policies, integration requirements and long-term scalability.

Looking at TCO, he said that it varies significantly between open and closed models and neither approach is universally cheaper. 

“It depends on the deployment scope and organizational maturity,” Bosquez said. “Ultimately, we evaluate TCO not just on dollars spent, but on delivery speed, compliance risk and the ability to scale securely.”

What this means for enterprise AI strategy

For smart tech decision-makers evaluating AI investments in 2025, the open vs. closed debate isn’t about picking sides. It’s about building a strategic portfolio approach that optimizes for different use cases within your organization.

The immediate action items are straightforward. First, audit your current AI workloads and map them against the decision framework outlined by the experts, considering accuracy requirements, latency needs, cost constraints, security demands and compliance obligations for each use case. Second, honestly assess your organization’s engineering capabilities for model fine-tuning, hosting and maintenance, as this directly impacts your true total cost of ownership.

Third, begin experimenting with model orchestration platforms that can automatically route tasks to the most appropriate model, whether open or closed. This positions your organization for the agentic future that industry leaders, such as EY’s Guarrera, predict, where model selection becomes invisible to end-users.

Read More »

The inference trap: How cloud providers are eating your AI margins

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

AI has become the holy grail of modern companies. Whether it’s customer service or something as niche as pipeline maintenance, organizations in every domain are now implementing AI technologies — from foundation models to VLAs — to make things more efficient. The goal is straightforward: automate tasks to deliver outcomes more efficiently and save money and resources simultaneously.

However, as these projects transition from the pilot to the production stage, teams encounter a hurdle they hadn’t planned for: cloud costs eroding their margins. The sticker shock is so bad that what once felt like the fastest path to innovation and competitive edge becomes an unsustainable budgetary blackhole – in no time. 

This prompts CIOs to rethink everything—from model architecture to deployment models—to regain control over financial and operational aspects. Sometimes, they even shutter the projects entirely, starting over from scratch.

But here’s the fact: while cloud can take costs to unbearable levels, it is not the villain. You just have to understand what type of vehicle (AI infrastructure) to choose to go down which road (the workload).

The cloud story — and where it works 

The cloud is very much like public transport (your subways and buses). You get on board with a simple rental model, and it instantly gives you all the resources—right from GPU instances to fast scaling across various geographies—to take you to your destination, all with minimal work and setup. 

The fast and easy access via a service model ensures a seamless start, paving the way to get the project off the ground and do rapid experimentation without the huge up-front capital expenditure of acquiring specialized GPUs. 

Most early-stage startups find this model lucrative as they need fast turnaround more than anything else, especially when they are still validating the model and determining product-market fit.

“You make an account, click a few buttons, and get access to servers. If you need a different GPU size, you shut down and restart the instance with the new specs, which takes minutes. If you want to run two experiments at once, you initialise two separate instances. In the early stages, the focus is on validating ideas quickly. Using the built-in scaling and experimentation frameworks provided by most cloud platforms helps reduce the time between milestones,” Rohan Sarin, who leads voice AI product at Speechmatics, told VentureBeat.

The cost of “ease”

While cloud makes perfect sense for early-stage usage, the infrastructure math becomes grim as the project transitions from testing and validation to real-world volumes. The scale of workloads makes the bills brutal — so much so that the costs can surge over 1000% overnight. 

This is particularly true in the case of inference, which not only has to run 24/7 to ensure service uptime but also scale with customer demand. 

On most occasions, Sarin explains, the inference demand spikes when other customers are also requesting GPU access, increasing the competition for resources. In such cases, teams either keep a reserved capacity to make sure they get what they need — leading to idle GPU time during non-peak hours — or suffer from latencies, impacting downstream experience.

Christian Khoury, the CEO of AI compliance platform EasyAudit AI, described inference as the new “cloud tax,” telling VentureBeat that he has seen companies go from $5K to $50K/month overnight, just from inference traffic.

It’s also worth noting that inference workloads involving LLMs, with token-based pricing, can trigger the steepest cost increases. This is because these models are non-deterministic and can generate different outputs when handling long-running tasks (involving large context windows). With continuous updates, it gets really difficult to forecast or control LLM inference costs.

Training these models, on its part, happens to be “bursty” (occurring in clusters), which does leave some room for capacity planning. However, even in these cases, especially as growing competition forces frequent retraining, enterprises can have massive bills from idle GPU time, stemming from overprovisioning.

“Training credits on cloud platforms are expensive, and frequent retraining during fast iteration cycles can escalate costs quickly. Long training runs require access to large machines, and most cloud providers only guarantee that access if you reserve capacity for a year or more. If your training run only lasts a few weeks, you still pay for the rest of the year,” Sarin explained.

And, it’s not just this. Cloud lock-in is very real. Suppose you have made a long-term reservation and bought credits from a provider. In that case, you’re locked in their ecosystem and have to use whatever they have on offer, even when other providers have moved to newer, better infrastructure. And, finally, when you get the ability to move, you may have to bear massive egress fees.

“It’s not just compute cost. You get…unpredictable autoscaling, and insane egress fees if you’re moving data between regions or vendors. One team was paying more to move data than to train their models,” Sarin emphasized.

So, what’s the workaround?

Given the constant infrastructure demand of scaling AI inference and the bursty nature of training, enterprises are moving to splitting the workloads — taking inference to colocation or on-prem stacks, while leaving training to the cloud with spot instances.

This isn’t just theory — it’s a growing movement among engineering leaders trying to put AI into production without burning through runway.

“We’ve helped teams shift to colocation for inference using dedicated GPU servers that they control. It’s not sexy, but it cuts monthly infra spend by 60–80%,” Khoury added. “Hybrid’s not just cheaper—it’s smarter.”

In one case, he said, a SaaS company reduced its monthly AI infrastructure bill from approximately $42,000 to just $9,000 by moving inference workloads off the cloud. The switch paid for itself in under two weeks.

Another team requiring consistent sub-50ms responses for an AI customer support tool discovered that cloud-based inference latency was insufficient. Shifting inference closer to users via colocation not only solved the performance bottleneck — but it halved the cost.

The setup typically works like this: inference, which is always-on and latency-sensitive, runs on dedicated GPUs either on-prem or in a nearby data center (colocation facility). Meanwhile, training, which is compute-intensive but sporadic, stays in the cloud, where you can spin up powerful clusters on demand, run for a few hours or days, and shut down. 

Broadly, it is estimated that renting from hyperscale cloud providers can cost three to four times more per GPU hour than working with smaller providers, with the difference being even more significant compared to on-prem infrastructure.

The other big bonus? Predictability. 

With on-prem or colocation stacks, teams also have full control over the number of resources they want to provision or add for the expected baseline of inference workloads. This brings predictability to infrastructure costs — and eliminates surprise bills. It also brings down the aggressive engineering effort to tune scaling and keep cloud infrastructure costs within reason. 

Hybrid setups also help reduce latency for time-sensitive AI applications and enable better compliance, particularly for teams operating in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and education — where data residency and governance are non-negotiable.

Hybrid complexity is real—but rarely a dealbreaker

As it has always been the case, the shift to a hybrid setup comes with its own ops tax. Setting up your own hardware or renting a colocation facility takes time, and managing GPUs outside the cloud requires a different kind of engineering muscle. 

However, leaders argue that the complexity is often overstated and is usually manageable in-house or through external support, unless one is operating at an extreme scale.

“Our calculations show that an on-prem GPU server costs about the same as six to nine months of renting the equivalent instance from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, even with a one-year reserved rate. Since the hardware typically lasts at least three years, and often more than five, this becomes cost-positive within the first nine months. Some hardware vendors also offer operational pricing models for capital infrastructure, so you can avoid upfront payment if cash flow is a concern,” Sarin explained.

Prioritize by need

For any company, whether a startup or an enterprise, the key to success when architecting – or re-architecting – AI infrastructure lies in working according to the specific workloads at hand. 

If you’re unsure about the load of different AI workloads, start with the cloud and keep a close eye on the associated costs by tagging every resource with the responsible team. You can share these cost reports with all managers and do a deep dive into what they are using and its impact on the resources. This data will then give clarity and help pave the way for driving efficiencies.

That said, remember that it’s not about ditching the cloud entirely; it’s about optimizing its use to maximize efficiencies. 

“Cloud is still great for experimentation and bursty training. But if inference is your core workload, get off the rent treadmill. Hybrid isn’t just cheaper… It’s smarter,” Khoury added. “Treat cloud like a prototype, not the permanent home. Run the math. Talk to your engineers. The cloud will never tell you when it’s the wrong tool. But your AWS bill will.”

Read More »

Model minimalism: The new AI strategy saving companies millions

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has made it easier for enterprises to envision the kinds of projects they can undertake, leading to a surge in pilot programs now transitioning to deployment. 

However, as these projects gained momentum, enterprises realized that the earlier LLMs they had used were unwieldy and, worse, expensive. 

Enter small language models and distillation. Models like Google’s Gemma family, Microsoft’s Phi and Mistral’s Small 3.1 allowed businesses to choose fast, accurate models that work for specific tasks. Enterprises can opt for a smaller model for particular use cases, allowing them to lower the cost of running their AI applications and potentially achieve a better return on investment. 

LinkedIn distinguished engineer Karthik Ramgopal told VentureBeat that companies opt for smaller models for a few reasons. 

“Smaller models require less compute, memory and faster inference times, which translates directly into lower infrastructure OPEX (operational expenditures) and CAPEX (capital expenditures) given GPU costs, availability and power requirements,” Ramgoapl said. “Task-specific models have a narrower scope, making their behavior more aligned and maintainable over time without complex prompt engineering.”

Model developers price their small models accordingly. OpenAI’s o4-mini costs $1.1 per million tokens for inputs and $4.4/million tokens for outputs, compared to the full o3 version at $10 for inputs and $40 for outputs. 

Enterprises today have a larger pool of small models, task-specific models and distilled models to choose from. These days, most flagship models offer a range of sizes. For example, the Claude family of models from Anthropic comprises Claude Opus, the largest model, Claude Sonnet, the all-purpose model, and Claude Haiku, the smallest version. These models are compact enough to operate on portable devices, such as laptops or mobile phones. 

The savings question

When discussing return on investment, though, the question is always: What does ROI look like? Should it be a return on the costs incurred or the time savings that ultimately means dollars saved down the line? Experts VentureBeat spoke to said ROI can be difficult to judge because some companies believe they’ve already reached ROI by cutting time spent on a task while others are waiting for actual dollars saved or more business brought in to say if AI investments have actually worked.

Normally, enterprises calculate ROI by a simple formula as described by Cognizant chief technologist Ravi Naarla in a post: ROI = (Benefits-Cost)/Costs. But with AI programs, the benefits are not immediately apparent. He suggests enterprises identify the benefits they expect to achieve, estimate these based on historical data, be realistic about the overall cost of AI, including hiring, implementation and maintenance, and understand you have to be in it for the long haul.

With small models, experts argue that these reduce implementation and maintenance costs, especially when fine-tuning models to provide them with more context for your enterprise.

Arijit Sengupta, founder and CEO of Aible, said that how people bring context to the models dictates how much cost savings they can get. For individuals who require additional context for prompts, such as lengthy and complex instructions, this can result in higher token costs. 

“You have to give models context one way or the other; there is no free lunch. But with large models, that is usually done by putting it in the prompt,” he said. “Think of fine-tuning and post-training as an alternative way of giving models context. I might incur $100 of post-training costs, but it’s not astronomical.”

Sengupta said they’ve seen about 100X cost reductions just from post-training alone, often dropping model use cost “from single-digit millions to something like $30,000.” He did point out that this number includes software operating expenses and the ongoing cost of the model and vector databases. 

“In terms of maintenance cost, if you do it manually with human experts, it can be expensive to maintain because small models need to be post-trained to produce results comparable to large models,” he said.

Experiments Aible conducted showed that a task-specific, fine-tuned model performs well for some use cases, just like LLMs, making the case that deploying several use-case-specific models rather than large ones to do everything is more cost-effective. 

The company compared a post-trained version of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct to a smaller 8B parameter option of the same model. The 70B model, post-trained for $11.30, was 84% accurate in automated evaluations and 92% in manual evaluations. Once fine-tuned to a cost of $4.58, the 8B model achieved 82% accuracy in manual assessment, which would be suitable for more minor, more targeted use cases. 

Cost factors fit for purpose

Right-sizing models does not have to come at the cost of performance. These days, organizations understand that model choice doesn’t just mean choosing between GPT-4o or Llama-3.1; it’s knowing that some use cases, like summarization or code generation, are better served by a small model.

Daniel Hoske, chief technology officer at contact center AI products provider Cresta, said starting development with LLMs informs potential cost savings better. 

“You should start with the biggest model to see if what you’re envisioning even works at all, because if it doesn’t work with the biggest model, it doesn’t mean it would with smaller models,” he said. 

Ramgopal said LinkedIn follows a similar pattern because prototyping is the only way these issues can start to emerge.

“Our typical approach for agentic use cases begins with general-purpose LLMs as their broad generalizationability allows us to rapidly prototype, validate hypotheses and assess product-market fit,” LinkedIn’s Ramgopal said. “As the product matures and we encounter constraints around quality, cost or latency, we transition to more customized solutions.”

In the experimentation phase, organizations can determine what they value most from their AI applications. Figuring this out enables developers to plan better what they want to save on and select the model size that best suits their purpose and budget. 

The experts cautioned that while it is important to build with models that work best with what they’re developing, high-parameter LLMs will always be more expensive. Large models will always require significant computing power. 

However, overusing small and task-specific models also poses issues. Rahul Pathak, vice president of data and AI GTM at AWS, said in a blog post that cost optimization comes not just from using a model with low compute power needs, but rather from matching a model to tasks. Smaller models may not have a sufficiently large context window to understand more complex instructions, leading to increased workload for human employees and higher costs. 

Sengupta also cautioned that some distilled models could be brittle, so long-term use may not result in savings. 

Constantly evaluate

Regardless of the model size, industry players emphasized the flexibility to address any potential issues or new use cases. So if they start with a large model and a smaller model with similar or better performance and lower cost, organizations cannot be precious about their chosen model. 

Tessa Burg, CTO and head of innovation at brand marketing company Mod Op, told VentureBeat that organizations must understand that whatever they build now will always be superseded by a better version. 

“We started with the mindset that the tech underneath the workflows that we’re creating, the processes that we’re making more efficient, are going to change. We knew that whatever model we use will be the worst version of a model.”

Burg said that smaller models helped save her company and its clients time in researching and developing concepts. Time saved, she said, that does lead to budget savings over time. She added that it’s a good idea to break out high-cost, high-frequency use cases for light-weight models.

Sengupta noted that vendors are now making it easier to switch between models automatically, but cautioned users to find platforms that also facilitate fine-tuning, so they don’t incur additional costs. 

Read More »

How runtime attacks turn profitable AI into budget black holes

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

AI’s promise is undeniable, but so are its blindsiding security costs at the inference layer. New attacks targeting AI’s operational side are quietly inflating budgets, jeopardizing regulatory compliance and eroding customer trust, all of which threaten the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership of enterprise AI deployments.

AI has captivated the enterprise with its potential for game-changing insights and efficiency gains. Yet, as organizations rush to operationalize their models, a sobering reality is emerging: The inference stage, where AI translates investment into real-time business value, is under siege. This critical juncture is driving up the total cost of ownership (TCO) in ways that initial business cases failed to predict.

Security executives and CFOs who greenlit AI projects for their transformative upside are now grappling with the hidden expenses of defending these systems. Adversaries have discovered that inference is where AI “comes alive” for a business, and it’s precisely where they can inflict the most damage. The result is a cascade of cost inflation: Breach containment can exceed $5 million per incident in regulated sectors, compliance retrofits run into the hundreds of thousands and trust failures can trigger stock hits or contract cancellations that decimate projected AI ROI. Without cost containment at inference, AI becomes an ungovernable budget wildcard.

The unseen battlefield: AI inference and exploding TCO

AI inference is rapidly becoming the “next insider risk,” Cristian Rodriguez, field CTO for the Americas at CrowdStrike, told the audience at RSAC 2025.

Other technology leaders echo this perspective and see a common blind spot in enterprise strategy. Vineet Arora, CTO at WinWire, notes that many organizations “focus intensely on securing the infrastructure around AI while inadvertently sidelining inference.” This oversight, he explains, “leads to underestimated costs for continuous monitoring systems, real-time threat analysis and rapid patching mechanisms.”

Another critical blind spot, according to Steffen Schreier, SVP of product and portfolio at Telesign, is “the assumption that third-party models are thoroughly vetted and inherently safe to deploy.”

He warned that in reality, “these models often haven’t been evaluated against an organization’s specific threat landscape or compliance needs,” which can lead to harmful or non-compliant outputs that erode brand trust. Schreier told VentureBeat that “inference-time vulnerabilities — like prompt injection, output manipulation or context leakage — can be exploited by attackers to produce harmful, biased or non-compliant outputs. This poses serious risks, especially in regulated industries, and can quickly erode brand trust.”

When inference is compromised, the fallout hits multiple fronts of TCO. Cybersecurity budgets spiral, regulatory compliance is jeopardized and customer trust erodes. Executive sentiment reflects this growing concern. In CrowdStrike’s State of AI in Cybersecurity survey, only 39% of respondents felt generative AI’s rewards clearly outweigh the risks, while 40% judged them comparable. This ambivalence underscores a critical finding: Safety and privacy controls have become top requirements for new gen AI initiatives, with a striking 90% of organizations now implementing or developing policies to govern AI adoption. The top concerns are no longer abstract; 26% cite sensitive data exposure and 25% fear adversarial attacks as key risks.

Security leaders exhibit mixed sentiments regarding the overall safety of gen AI, with top concerns centered on the exposure of sensitive data to LLMs (26%) and adversarial attacks on AI tools (25%).

Anatomy of an inference attack

The unique attack surface exposed by running AI models is being aggressively probed by adversaries. To defend against this, Schreier advises, “it is critical to treat every input as a potential hostile attack.” Frameworks like the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications catalogue these threats, which are no longer theoretical but active attack vectors impacting the enterprise:

Prompt injection (LLM01) and insecure output handling (LLM02): Attackers manipulate models via inputs or outputs. Malicious inputs can cause the model to ignore instructions or divulge proprietary code. Insecure output handling occurs when an application blindly trusts AI responses, allowing attackers to inject malicious scripts into downstream systems.

Training data poisoning (LLM03) and model poisoning: Attackers corrupt training data by sneaking in tainted samples, planting hidden triggers. Later, an innocuous input can unleash malicious outputs.

Model denial of service (LLM04): Adversaries can overwhelm AI models with complex inputs, consuming excessive resources to slow or crash them, resulting in direct revenue loss.

Supply chain and plugin vulnerabilities (LLM05 and LLM07): The AI ecosystem is built on shared components. For instance, a vulnerability in the Flowise LLM tool exposed private AI dashboards and sensitive data, including GitHub tokens and OpenAI API keys, on 438 servers.

Sensitive information disclosure (LLM06): Clever querying can extract confidential information from an AI model if it was part of its training data or is present in the current context.

Excessive agency (LLM08) and Overreliance (LLM09): Granting an AI agent unchecked permissions to execute trades or modify databases is a recipe for disaster if manipulated.

Model theft (LLM10): An organization’s proprietary models can be stolen through sophisticated extraction techniques — a direct assault on its competitive advantage.

Underpinning these threats are foundational security failures. Adversaries often log in with leaked credentials. In early 2024, 35% of cloud intrusions involved valid user credentials, and new, unattributed cloud attack attempts spiked 26%, according to the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report. A deepfake campaign resulted in a fraudulent $25.6 million transfer, while AI-generated phishing emails have demonstrated a 54% click-through rate, more than four times higher than those written by humans.

The OWASP framework illustrates how various LLM attack vectors target different components of an AI application, from prompt injection at the user interface to data poisoning in the training models and sensitive information disclosure from the datastore.

Back to basics: Foundational security for a new era

Securing AI requires a disciplined return to security fundamentals — but applied through a modern lens. “I think that we need to take a step back and ensure that the foundation and the fundamentals of security are still applicable,” Rodriguez argued. “The same approach you would have to securing an OS is the same approach you would have to securing that AI model.”

This means enforcing unified protection across every attack path, with rigorous data governance, robust cloud security posture management (CSPM), and identity-first security through cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) to lock down the cloud environments where most AI workloads reside. As identity becomes the new perimeter, AI systems must be governed with the same strict access controls and runtime protections as any other business-critical cloud asset.

The specter of “shadow AI”: Unmasking hidden risks

Shadow AI, or the unsanctioned use of AI tools by employees, creates a massive, unknown attack surface. A financial analyst using a free online LLM for confidential documents can inadvertently leak proprietary data. As Rodriguez warned, queries to public models can “become another’s answers.” Addressing this requires a combination of clear policy, employee education, and technical controls like AI security posture management (AI-SPM) to discover and assess all AI assets, sanctioned or not.

Fortifying the future: Actionable defense strategies

While adversaries have weaponized AI, the tide is beginning to turn. As Mike Riemer, Field CISO at Ivanti, observes, defenders are beginning to “harness the full potential of AI for cybersecurity purposes to analyze vast amounts of data collected from diverse systems.” This proactive stance is essential for building a robust defense, which requires several key strategies:

Budget for inference security from day zero: The first step, according to Arora, is to begin with “a comprehensive risk-based assessment.” He advises mapping the entire inference pipeline to identify every data flow and vulnerability. “By linking these risks to possible financial impacts,” he explains, “we can better quantify the cost of a security breach” and build a realistic budget.

To structure this more systematically, CISOs and CFOs should start with a risk-adjusted ROI model. One approach:

Security ROI = (estimated breach cost × annual risk probability) – total security investment

For example, if an LLM inference attack could result in a $5 million loss and the likelihood is 10%, the expected loss is $500,000. A $350,000 investment in inference-stage defenses would yield a net gain of $150,000 in avoided risk. This model enables scenario-based budgeting tied directly to financial outcomes.

Enterprises allocating less than 8 to 12% of their AI project budgets to inference-stage security are often blindsided later by breach recovery and compliance costs. A Fortune 500 healthcare provider CIO, interviewed by VentureBeat and requesting anonymity, now allocates 15% of their total gen AI budget to post-training risk management, including runtime monitoring, AI-SPM platforms and compliance audits. A practical budgeting model should allocate across four cost centers: runtime monitoring (35%), adversarial simulation (25%), compliance tooling (20%) and user behavior analytics (20%).

Here’s a sample allocation snapshot for a $2 million enterprise AI deployment based on VentureBeat’s ongoing interviews with CFOs, CIOs and CISOs actively budgeting to support AI projects:

Budget categoryAllocationUse case exampleRuntime monitoring$300,000Behavioral anomaly detection (API spikes)Adversarial simulation$200,000Red team exercises to probe prompt injectionCompliance tooling$150,000EU AI Act alignment, SOC 2 inference validationsUser behavior analytics$150,000Detect misuse patterns in internal AI use

These investments reduce downstream breach remediation costs, regulatory penalties and SLA violations, all helping to stabilize AI TCO.

Implement runtime monitoring and validation: Begin by tuning anomaly detection to detect behaviors at the inference layer, such as abnormal API call patterns, output entropy shifts or query frequency spikes. Vendors like DataDome and Telesign now offer real-time behavioral analytics tailored to gen AI misuse signatures.

Teams should monitor entropy shifts in outputs, track token irregularities in model responses and watch for atypical frequency in queries from privileged accounts. Effective setups include streaming logs into SIEM tools (such as Splunk or Datadog) with tailored gen AI parsers and establishing real-time alert thresholds for deviations from model baselines.

Adopt a zero-trust framework for AI: Zero-trust is non-negotiable for AI environments. It operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” By adopting this architecture, Riemer notes, organizations can ensure that “only authenticated users and devices gain access to sensitive data and applications, regardless of their physical location.”

Inference-time zero-trust should be enforced at multiple layers:

Identity: Authenticate both human and service actors accessing inference endpoints.

Permissions: Scope LLM access using role-based access control (RBAC) with time-boxed privileges.

Segmentation: Isolate inference microservices with service mesh policies and enforce least-privilege defaults through cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs).

A proactive AI security strategy requires a holistic approach, encompassing visibility and supply chain security during development, securing infrastructure and data and implementing robust safeguards to protect AI systems in runtime during production.

Protecting AI ROI: A CISO/CFO collaboration model

Protecting the ROI of enterprise AI requires actively modeling the financial upside of security. Start with a baseline ROI projection, then layer in cost-avoidance scenarios for each security control. Mapping cybersecurity investments to avoided costs including incident remediation, SLA violations and customer churn, turns risk reduction into a measurable ROI gain.

Enterprises should model three ROI scenarios that include baseline, with security investment and post-breach recovery to show cost avoidance clearly. For example, a telecom deploying output validation prevented 12,000-plus misrouted queries per month, saving $6.3 million annually in SLA penalties and call center volume. Tie investments to avoided costs across breach remediation, SLA non-compliance, brand impact and customer churn to build a defensible ROI argument to CFOs.

Checklist: CFO-Grade ROI protection model

CFOs need to communicate with clarity on how security spending protects the bottom line. To safeguard AI ROI at the inference layer, security investments must be modeled like any other strategic capital allocation: With direct links to TCO, risk mitigation and revenue preservation.

Use this checklist to make AI security investments defensible in the boardroom — and actionable in the budget cycle.

Link every AI security spend to a projected TCO reduction category (compliance, breach remediation, SLA stability).

Run cost-avoidance simulations with 3-year horizon scenarios: baseline, protected and breach-reactive.

Quantify financial risk from SLA violations, regulatory fines, brand trust erosion and customer churn.

Co-model inference-layer security budgets with both CISOs and CFOs to break organizational silos.

Present security investments as growth enablers, not overhead, showing how they stabilize AI infrastructure for sustained value capture.

This model doesn’t just defend AI investments; it defends budgets and brands and can protect and grow boardroom credibility.

Concluding analysis: A strategic imperative

CISOs must present AI risk management as a business enabler, quantified in terms of ROI protection, brand trust preservation and regulatory stability. As AI inference moves deeper into revenue workflows, protecting it isn’t a cost center; it’s the control plane for AI’s financial sustainability. Strategic security investments at the infrastructure layer must be justified with financial metrics that CFOs can act on.

The path forward requires organizations to balance investment in AI innovation with an equal investment in its protection. This necessitates a new level of strategic alignment. As Ivanti CIO Robert Grazioli told VentureBeat: “CISO and CIO alignment will be critical to effectively safeguard modern businesses.” This collaboration is essential to break down the data and budget silos that undermine security, allowing organizations to manage the true cost of AI and turn a high-risk gamble into a sustainable, high-ROI engine of growth.

Telesign’s Schreier added: “We view AI inference risks through the lens of digital identity and trust. We embed security across the full lifecycle of our AI tools — using access controls, usage monitoring, rate limiting and behavioral analytics to detect misuse and protect both our customers and their end users from emerging threats.”

He continued: “We approach output validation as a critical layer of our AI security architecture, particularly because many inference-time risks don’t stem from how a model is trained, but how it behaves in the wild.”

Read More »

Kumo’s ‘relational foundation model’ predicts the future your LLM can’t see

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more The generative AI boom has given us powerful language models that can write, summarize and reason over vast amounts of text and other types of data. But when it comes to high-value predictive tasks like predicting customer churn or detecting fraud from structured, relational data, enterprises remain stuck in the world of traditional machine learning.  Stanford professor and Kumo AI co-founder Jure Leskovec argues that this is the critical missing piece. His company’s tool, a relational foundation model (RFM), is a new kind of pre-trained AI that brings the “zero-shot” capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to structured databases. “It’s about making a forecast about something you don’t know, something that has not happened yet,” Leskovec told VentureBeat. “And that’s a fundamentally new capability that is, I would argue, missing from the current purview of what we think of as gen AI.” Why predictive ML is a “30-year-old technology” While LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can answer questions about existing knowledge, they are fundamentally retrospective. They retrieve and reason over information that is already there. For predictive business tasks, companies still rely on classic machine learning.  For example, to build a model that predicts customer churn, a business must hire a team of data scientists who spend a considerably long time doing “feature engineering,” the process of manually creating predictive signals from the data. This involves complex data wrangling to join information from different tables, such as a customer’s purchase history and website clicks, to create a single, massive training table. “If you want to do machine learning (ML), sorry, you are stuck in the past,” Leskovec said. Expensive and time-consuming bottlenecks prevent most organizations from

Read More »

CFOs want AI that pays: real metrics, not marketing demos

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

Recent surveys and VentureBeat’s conversations with CFOs suggest the honeymoon phase of AI is rapidly drawing to a close. While 2024 was dominated by pilot programs and proof-of-concept demonstrations, in mid-2025, the pressure for measurable results is intensifying, even as CFO interest in AI remains high. 

According to a KPMG survey of 300 U.S. financial executives, investor pressure to demonstrate ROI on generative AI investments has increased significantly. For 90% of organizations, investor pressure is considered “important or very important” for demonstrating ROI in Q1 2025, a sharp increase from 68% in Q4 2024. This indicates a strong and intensifying demand for measurable returns.

Meanwhile, according to a Bain Capital Ventures survey of 50 CFOs, 79% plan to increase their AI budgets this year, with 94% believing gen AI can strongly benefit at least one finance activity. This reveals a telling pattern in how CFOs are currently measuring AI value. Those who have adopted gen AI tools report seeing initial returns primarily through efficiency gains.“We created a custom workflow that automates vendor identification to quickly prepare journal entries,” said Andrea Ellis, CFO of Fanatics Betting and Gaming. “This process used to take 20 hours during month-end close, and now, it takes us just 2 hours each month.”

Jason Whiting, CFO of Mercury Financial, echoed this efficiency focus: “Across the board, [the biggest benefit] has been the ability to increase speed of analysis. Gen AI hasn’t replaced anything, but it has made our existing processes and people better.”

But CFOs are now looking beyond simple time savings toward more strategic applications. 

The Bain data shows CFOs are most excited about applying AI to “long-standing pain points that prior generations of technology have been unable to solve.” Cosmin Pitigoi, CFO of Flywire, explained: “Forecasting trends based on large data sets has been around for a long time, but the issue has always been the model’s ability to explain the assumptions behind the forecast. AI can help not just with forecasting, but also with explaining what assumptions have changed over time.”

These recent surveys suggest that CFOs are becoming the primary gatekeepers for AI investment; however, they’re still developing the financial frameworks necessary to evaluate these investments properly. Those who develop robust evaluation methodologies first will likely gain significant competitive advantages. Those who don’t may find their AI enthusiasm outpacing their ability to measure and manage the returns.

Efficiency metrics: The first wave of AI value

The initial wave of AI value capture by finance departments has focused predominantly on efficiency metrics, with CFOs prioritizing measurable time and cost savings that deliver immediate returns. This focus on efficiency represents the low-hanging fruit of AI implementation — clear, quantifiable benefits that are easily tracked and communicated to stakeholders.

Drip Capital, a Silicon Valley-based fintech, exemplifies this approach with its AI implementation in trade finance operations. According to chief business officer Karl Boog, “We’ve been able to 30X our capacity with what we’ve done so far.” By automating document processing and enhancing risk assessment through large language models (LLMs), the company achieved a remarkable 70% productivity boost while maintaining critical human oversight for complex decisions.

KPMG research indicates this approach is widespread, with one retail company audit committee director noting how automation has improved operational efficiency and ROI. This sentiment is echoed across industries as finance leaders seek to justify their AI investments with tangible productivity improvements.

These efficiency improvements translate directly to the bottom line. Companies across sectors — from insurance to oil and gas — report that AI helps identify process inefficiencies, leading to substantial organizational cost savings and improved expense management.

Beyond simple cost reduction, CFOs are developing more sophisticated efficiency metrics to evaluate AI investments. These include time-to-completion ratios comparing pre- and post-AI implementation timelines, cost-per-transaction analyses measuring reductions in resource expenditure and labor hour reallocation metrics tracking how team members shift from manual data processing to higher-value analytical work.

However, leading CFOs recognize that while efficiency metrics provide a solid foundation for initial ROI calculations, they represent just the beginning of AI’s potential value. As finance leaders gain confidence in measuring these direct returns, they’re developing more comprehensive frameworks to capture AI’s full strategic value — moving well beyond the efficiency calculations that characterized early adoption phases.

Beyond efficiency: The new financial metrics

As CFOs move beyond the initial fascination with AI-driven efficiency gains, they’re developing new financial metrics that more comprehensively capture AI’s business impact. This evolution reflects a maturing approach to AI investments, with finance leaders adopting more sophisticated evaluation frameworks that align with broader corporate objectives.

The surveys highlight a notable shift in primary ROI metrics. While efficiency gains remain important, we see productivity metrics are now overtaking pure profitability measures as the chief priority for AI initiatives in 2025. This represents a fundamental change in how CFOs assess value, focusing on AI’s ability to enhance human capabilities rather than simply reduce costs.

Time to value (TTV) is emerging as a critical new metric in investment decisions. Only about one-third of AI leaders anticipate being able to evaluate ROI within six months, making rapid time-to-value a key consideration when comparing different AI opportunities. This metric will help CFOs prioritize quick-win projects that can deliver measurable returns while building organizational confidence in larger AI initiatives.

Data quality measurements will increasingly be incorporated into evaluation frameworks, with 64% of leaders citing data quality as their most significant AI challenge. Forward-thinking CFOs now incorporate data readiness assessments and ongoing data quality metrics into their AI business cases, recognizing that even the most promising AI applications will fail without high-quality data inputs.

Adoption rate metrics have also become standard in AI evaluation. Finance leaders track how quickly and extensively AI tools are being utilized across departments, using this as a leading indicator of potential value realization. These metrics help identify implementation challenges early and inform decisions about additional training or system modifications.

“The biggest benefit has been the ability to increase speed of analysis,” noted Jason Whiting of Mercury Financial. This perspective represents the bridge between simple efficiency metrics and more sophisticated value assessments — recognizing that AI’s value often comes not from replacing existing processes but enhancing them.

Some CFOs are implementing comprehensive ROI formulas that incorporate both direct and indirect benefits (VAI Consulting):

ROI = (Net Benefit / Total Cost) × 100

Where net benefit equals the sum of direct financial benefits plus an estimated value of indirect benefits, minus total investment costs. This approach acknowledges that AI’s full value encompasses both quantifiable savings and intangible strategic advantages, such as improved decision quality and enhanced customer experience.

For companies with more mature AI implementations, these new metrics are becoming increasingly standardized and integrated into regular financial reporting. The most sophisticated organizations now produce AI value scorecards that track multiple dimensions of performance, linking AI system outputs directly to business outcomes and financial results.

As CFOs refine these new financial metrics, they’re creating a more nuanced picture of AI’s true value — one that extends well beyond the simple time and cost savings that dominated early adoption phases.

Amortization timelines: Recalibrating investment horizons

CFOs are fundamentally rethinking how they amortize AI investments, developing new approaches that acknowledge the unique characteristics of these technologies. Unlike traditional IT systems with predictable depreciation schedules, AI investments often yield evolving returns that increase as systems learn and improve over time. Leading finance executives now evaluate AI investments through the lens of sustainable competitive advantage — asking not just “How much will this save?” but “How will this transform our market position?”

“ROI directly correlates with AI maturity,” according to KPMG, which found that 61% of AI leaders report higher-than-expected ROI, compared with only 33% of beginners and implementers. This correlation is prompting CFOs to develop more sophisticated amortization models that anticipate accelerating returns as AI deployments mature.

The difficulty in establishing accurate amortization timelines remains a significant barrier to AI adoption. “Uncertain ROI/difficulty developing a business case” is cited as a challenge by 33% of executives, particularly those in the early stages of AI implementation. This uncertainty has led to a more cautious, phased approach to investment.

To address this challenge, leading finance teams are implementing pilot-to-scale methodologies to validate ROI before full deployment. This approach enables CFOs to gather accurate performance data, refine their amortization estimates, and make more informed scaling decisions.

The timeframe for expected returns varies significantly based on the type of AI implementation. Automation-focused AI typically delivers more predictable short-term returns, whereas strategic applications, such as improved forecasting, may have longer, less certain payback periods. Progressive CFOs are developing differentiated amortization schedules that reflect these variations rather than applying one-size-fits-all approaches.

Some finance leaders are adopting rolling amortization models that are adjusted quarterly based on actual performance data. This approach acknowledges the dynamic nature of AI returns and allows for ongoing refinement of financial projections. Rather than setting fixed amortization schedules at the outset, these models incorporate learning curves and performance improvements into evolving financial forecasts.

One entertainment company implemented a gen AI-driven tool that scans financial developments, identifies anomalies and automatically generates executive-ready alerts. While the immediate ROI stemmed from efficiency gains, the CFO developed an amortization model that also factored in the system’s increasing accuracy over time and its expanding application across various business units.

Many CFOs are also factoring in how AI investments contribute to building proprietary data assets that appreciate rather than depreciate over time. Unlike traditional technology investments that lose value as they age, AI systems and their associated data repositories often become more valuable as they accumulate training data and insights.

This evolving approach to amortization represents a significant departure from traditional IT investment models. By developing more nuanced timelines that reflect AI’s unique characteristics, CFOs are creating financial frameworks that better capture the true economic value of these investments and support a more strategic allocation of resources.

Strategic value integration: Linking AI to shareholder returns

Forward-thinking CFOs are moving beyond operational metrics to integrate AI investments into broader frameworks for creating shareholder value. This shift represents a fundamental evolution in how financial executives evaluate AI — positioning it not merely as a cost-saving technology but as a strategic asset that drives enterprise growth and competitive differentiation.

This more sophisticated approach assesses AI’s impact on three critical dimensions of shareholder value: revenue acceleration, risk reduction and strategic optionality. Each dimension requires different metrics and evaluation frameworks, creating a more comprehensive picture of AI’s contribution to enterprise value.

Revenue acceleration metrics focus on how AI enhances top-line growth by improving customer acquisition, increasing the share of wallet and expanding market reach. These metrics track AI’s influence on sales velocity, conversion rates, customer lifetime value and price optimization — connecting algorithmic capabilities directly to revenue performance.

Risk reduction frameworks assess how AI enhances forecasting accuracy, improves scenario planning, strengthens fraud detection and optimizes capital allocation. By quantifying risk-adjusted returns, CFOs can demonstrate how AI investments reduce earnings volatility and improve business resilience — factors that directly impact valuation multiples.

Perhaps most importantly, leading CFOs are developing methods to value strategic optionality — the capacity of AI investments to create new business possibilities that didn’t previously exist. This approach recognizes that AI often delivers its most significant value by enabling entirely new business models or unlocking previously inaccessible market opportunities.

To effectively communicate this strategic value, finance leaders are creating new reporting mechanisms tailored to different stakeholders. Some are establishing comprehensive AI value scorecards that link system performance to tangible business outcomes, incorporating both lagging indicators (financial results) and leading indicators (operational improvements) that predict future financial performance.

Executive dashboards now regularly feature AI-related metrics alongside traditional financial KPIs, making AI more visible to senior leadership. These integrated views enable executives to understand how AI investments align with strategic priorities and shareholder expectations.

For board and investor communication, CFOs are developing structured approaches that highlight both immediate financial returns and long-term strategic advantages. Rather than treating AI as a specialized technology investment, these frameworks position it as a fundamental business capability that drives sustainable competitive differentiation.

By developing these integrated strategic value frameworks, CFOs ensure that AI investments are evaluated not only on their immediate operational impact but their contribution to the company’s long-term competitive position and shareholder returns. This more sophisticated approach is rapidly becoming a key differentiator between companies that treat AI as a tactical tool and those that leverage it as a strategic asset.

Risk-adjusted returns: The risk management equation

As AI investments grow in scale and strategic importance, CFOs are incorporating increasingly sophisticated risk assessments into their financial evaluations. This evolution reflects the unique challenges AI presents — balancing unprecedented opportunities against novel risks that traditional financial models often fail to capture.

The risk landscape for AI investments is multifaceted and evolving rapidly. Recent surveys indicate that risk management, particularly in relation to data privacy, is expected to be the biggest challenge to generative AI strategies for 82% of leaders in 2025. This concern is followed closely by data quality issues (64%) and questions of trust in AI outputs (35%).

Forward-thinking finance leaders are developing comprehensive risk-adjusted return frameworks that quantify and incorporate these various risk factors. Rather than treating risk as a binary go/no-go consideration, these frameworks assign monetary values to different risk categories and integrate them directly into ROI calculations.

Data security and privacy vulnerabilities represent a primary concern, with 57% of executives citing these as top challenges. CFOs are now calculating potential financial exposure from data breaches or privacy violations and factoring these costs into their investment analyses. This includes estimating potential regulatory fines, litigation expenses, remediation costs and reputational damage.

Regulatory compliance represents another significant risk factor. With many executives concerned about ensuring compliance with changing regulations, financial evaluations increasingly include contingency allocations for regulatory adaptation. An aerospace company executive noted that “complex regulations make it difficult for us to achieve AI readiness,” highlighting how regulatory uncertainty complicates financial planning.

Beyond these external risks, CFOs are quantifying implementation risks such as adoption failures, integration challenges and technical performance issues. By assigning probability-weighted costs to these scenarios, they create more realistic projections that acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in AI deployment.

The “black box” nature of certain AI technologies presents unique challenges for risk assessment. As stakeholders become increasingly wary of trusting AI results without understanding the underlying logic, CFOs are developing frameworks to evaluate transparency risks and their potential financial implications. This includes estimating the costs of additional validation procedures, explainability tools and human oversight mechanisms.

Some companies are adopting formal risk-adjustment methodologies borrowed from other industries. One approach applies a modified weighted average cost of capital (WACC) that incorporates AI-specific risk premiums. Others use risk-adjusted net present value calculations that explicitly account for the unique uncertainty profiles of different AI applications.

The transportation sector provides an illustrative example of this evolving approach. As one chief data officer noted, “The data received from AI requires human verification, and this is an important step that we overlook.” This recognition has led transportation CFOs to build verification costs directly into their financial models rather than treating them as optional add-ons.

By incorporating these sophisticated risk adjustments into their financial evaluations, CFOs are creating more realistic assessments of AI’s true economic value. This approach enables more confident investment decisions and helps organizations maintain appropriate risk levels as they scale their AI capabilities.

The CFO’s AI evaluation playbook: From experiments to enterprise value

As AI transitions from experimental projects to enterprise-critical systems, CFOs are developing more disciplined, comprehensive frameworks for evaluating these investments. The most successful approaches strike a balance between rigor and flexibility, acknowledging both the unique characteristics of AI and its integration into broader business strategy.

The emerging CFO playbook for AI evaluation contains several key elements that differentiate leaders from followers.

First is the implementation of multi-dimensional ROI frameworks that capture both efficiency gains and strategic value creation. Rather than focusing exclusively on cost reduction, these frameworks incorporate productivity enhancements, decision quality improvements and competitive differentiation into a holistic value assessment.

Second is the adoption of phased evaluation approaches that align with AI’s evolutionary nature. Leading CFOs establish clear metrics for each development stage — from initial pilots to scaled deployment — with appropriate risk adjustments and expected returns for each phase. This approach recognizes that AI investments often follow a J-curve, with value accelerating as systems mature and applications expand.

Third is the integration of AI metrics into standard financial planning and reporting processes. Rather than treating AI as a special category with unique evaluation criteria, forward-thinking finance leaders are incorporating AI performance indicators into regular budget reviews, capital allocation decisions and investor communications. This normalization signals AI’s transition from experimental technology to core business capability.

The most sophisticated organizations are also implementing formal governance structures that connect AI investments directly to strategic objectives. These governance frameworks ensure that AI initiatives remain aligned with enterprise priorities while providing the necessary oversight to manage risks effectively. By establishing clear accountability for both technical performance and business outcomes, these structures help prevent the disconnection between AI capabilities and business value that has plagued many early adopters.

As investors and boards increasingly scrutinize AI investments, CFOs are developing more transparent reporting approaches that clearly communicate both current returns and future potential. These reports typically include standardized metrics that track AI’s contribution to operational efficiency, customer experience, employee productivity and strategic differentiation — providing a comprehensive view of how these investments enhance shareholder value.

The organizations gaining a competitive advantage through AI are those where CFOs have moved to become strategic partners in AI transformation. These finance leaders work closely with technology and business teams to identify high-value use cases, establish appropriate success metrics and create financial frameworks that support responsible innovation while maintaining appropriate risk management.

The CFOs who master these new evaluation frameworks will drive the next wave of AI adoption — one characterized not by speculative experimentation but by disciplined investment in capabilities that deliver sustainable competitive advantage. As AI continues to transform business models and market dynamics, these financial frameworks will become increasingly critical to organizational success.

The CFO’s AI evaluation framework: Key metrics and considerations

Evaluation dimensionTraditional metricsEmerging AI metricsKey considerationsEfficiency• Cost reduction• Time savings• Headcount impact• Cost-per-output• Process acceleration ratio• Labor reallocation value• Measure both direct and indirect efficiency gains• Establish clear pre-implementation baselines• Track productivity improvements beyond cost savingsAmortization• Fixed depreciation schedules• Standard ROI timelines• Uniform capital allocation• Learning curve adjustments• Value acceleration factors• Pilot-to-scale validation• Recognize AI’s improving returns over time• Apply different timelines for different AI applications• Implement phase-gated funding tied to performanceStrategic Value• Revenue impact• Margin improvement• Market share• Decision quality metrics• Data asset appreciation• Strategic optionality value• Connect AI investments to competitive differentiation• Quantify both current and future strategic benefits• Measure contribution to innovation capabilitiesRisk management• Implementation risk• Technical performance risk• Financial exposure• Data privacy risk premium• Regulatory compliance factor• Explainability/transparency risk• Apply risk-weighted adjustments to projected returns• Quantify mitigation costs and residual risk• Factor in emerging regulatory and ethical considerationsGovernance• Project-based oversight• Technical success metrics• Siloed accountability• Enterprise AI governance• Cross-functional value metrics• Integrated performance dashboards• Align AI governance with corporate governance• Establish clear ownership of business outcomes• Create transparent reporting mechanisms for all stakeholders

Read More »

Why your enterprise AI strategy needs both open and closed models: The TCO reality check

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

For the last two decades, enterprises have had a choice between open-source and closed proprietary technologies.

The original choice for enterprises was primarily centered on operating systems, with Linux offering an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. In the developer realm, open-source languages like Python and JavaScript dominate, as open-source technologies, including Kubernetes, are standards in the cloud.

The same type of choice between open and closed is now facing enterprises for AI, with multiple options for both types of models. On the proprietary closed-model front are some of the biggest, most widely used models on the planet, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the open-source side are models like Meta’s Llama, IBM Granite, Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek.

Understanding when to use an open or closed model is a critical choice for enterprise AI decision-makers in 2025 and beyond. The choice has both financial and customization implications for either options that enterprises need to understand and consider.

Understanding the difference between open and closed licenses

There is no shortage of hyperbole around the decades-old rivalry between open and closed licenses. But what does it all actually mean for enterprise users?

A closed-source proprietary technology, like OpenAI’s GPT 4o for example, does not have model code, training data, or model weights open or available for anyone to see. The model is not easily available to be fine-tuned and generally speaking, it is only available for real enterprise usage with a cost (sure, ChatGPT has a free tier, but that’s not going to cut it for a real enterprise workload).

An open technology, like Meta Llama, IBM Granite, or DeepSeek, has openly available code. Enterprises can use the models freely, generally without restrictions, including fine-tuning and customizations.

Rohan Gupta, a principal with Deloitte, told VentureBeat that the open vs. closed source debate isn’t unique or native to AI, nor is it likely to be resolved anytime soon. 

Gupta explained that closed source providers typically offer several wrappers around their model that enable ease of use, simplified scaling, more seamless upgrades and downgrades and a steady stream of enhancements. They also provide significant developer support. That includes documentation as well as hands-on advice and often delivers tighter integrations with both infrastructure and applications. In exchange, an enterprise pays a premium for these services.

 “Open-source models, on the other hand, can provide greater control, flexibility and customization options, and are supported by a vibrant, enthusiastic developer ecosystem,” Gupta said. “These models are increasingly accessible via fully managed APIs across cloud vendors, broadening their distribution.”

Making the choice between open and closed model for enterprise AI

The question that many enterprise users might ask is what’s better: an open or a closed model? The answer however is not necessarily one or the other.

“We don’t view this as a binary choice,” David Guarrera, Generative AI Leader at EY Americas, told VentureBeat. ” Open vs closed is increasingly a fluid design space, where models are selected, or even automatically orchestrated, based on tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, cost, interpretability and security at different points in a workflow.” 

Guarrera noted that closed models limit how deeply organizations can optimize or adapt behavior. Proprietary model vendors often restrict fine-tuning, charge premium rates, or hide the process in black boxes. While API-based tools simplify integration, they abstract away much of the control, making it harder to build highly specific or interpretable systems.

In contrast, open-source models allow for targeted fine-tuning, guardrail design and optimization for specific use cases. This matters more in an agentic future, where models are no longer monolithic general-purpose tools, but interchangeable components within dynamic workflows. The ability to finely shape model behavior, at low cost and with full transparency, becomes a major competitive advantage when deploying task-specific agents or tightly regulated solutions.

“In practice, we foresee an agentic future where model selection is abstracted away,” Guarrera said.

For example, a user may draft an email with one AI tool, summarize legal docs with another, search enterprise documents with a fine-tuned open-source model and interact with AI locally through an on-device LLM, all without ever knowing which model is doing what. 

“The real question becomes: what mix of models best suits your workflow’s specific demands?” Guarrera said.

Considering total cost of ownership

With open models, the basic idea is that the model is freely available for use. While in contrast, enterprises always pay for closed models.

The reality when it comes to considering total cost of ownership (TCO) is more nuanced.

Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners explained to VentureBeat that TCO has many different layers. A few key considerations include infrastructure hosting costs and engineering: Are the open-source models self-hosted by the enterprise or the cloud provider? How much engineering, including fine-tuning, guard railing and security testing, is needed to operationalize the model safely? 

Akkiraju noted that fine-tuning an open weights model can also sometimes be a very complex task. Closed frontier model companies spend enormous engineering effort to ensure performance across multiple tasks. In his view, unless enterprises deploy similar engineering expertise, they will face a complex balancing act when fine-tuning open source models. This creates cost implications when organizations choose their model deployment strategy. For example, enterprises can fine-tune multiple model versions for different tasks or use one API for multiple tasks.

Ryan Gross, Head of Data & Applications at cloud native services provider Caylent told VentureBeat that from his perspective, licensing terms don’t matter, except for in edge case scenarios. The largest restrictions often pertain to model availability when data residency requirements are in place. In this case, deploying an open model on infrastructure like Amazon SageMaker may be the only way to get a state-of-the-art model that still complies. When it comes to TCO, Gross noted that the tradeoff lies between per-token costs and hosting and maintenance costs. 

“There is a clear break-even point where the economics switch from closed to open models being cheaper,” Gross said. 

In his view, for most organizations, closed models, with the hosting and scaling solved on the organization’s behalf, will have a lower TCO. However, for large enterprises, SaaS companies with very high demand on their LLMs, but simpler use-cases requiring frontier performance, or AI-centric product companies, hosting distilled open models can be more cost-effective.

How one enterprise software developer evaluated open vs closed models

Josh Bosquez, CTO at Second Front Systems is among the many firms that have had to consider and evaluate open vs closed models. 

“We use both open and closed AI models, depending on the specific use case, security requirements and strategic objectives,” Bosquez told VentureBeat.

Bosquez explained that open models allow his firm to integrate cutting-edge capabilities without the time or cost of training models from scratch. For internal experimentation or rapid prototyping, open models help his firm to iterate quickly and benefit from community-driven advancements.

“Closed models, on the other hand, are our choice when data sovereignty, enterprise-grade support and security guarantees are essential, particularly for customer-facing applications or deployments involving sensitive or regulated environments,” he said. “These models often come from trusted vendors, who offer strong performance, compliance support, and self-hosting options.”

Bosquez said that the model selection process is cross-functional and risk-informed, evaluating not only technical fit but also data handling policies, integration requirements and long-term scalability.

Looking at TCO, he said that it varies significantly between open and closed models and neither approach is universally cheaper. 

“It depends on the deployment scope and organizational maturity,” Bosquez said. “Ultimately, we evaluate TCO not just on dollars spent, but on delivery speed, compliance risk and the ability to scale securely.”

What this means for enterprise AI strategy

For smart tech decision-makers evaluating AI investments in 2025, the open vs. closed debate isn’t about picking sides. It’s about building a strategic portfolio approach that optimizes for different use cases within your organization.

The immediate action items are straightforward. First, audit your current AI workloads and map them against the decision framework outlined by the experts, considering accuracy requirements, latency needs, cost constraints, security demands and compliance obligations for each use case. Second, honestly assess your organization’s engineering capabilities for model fine-tuning, hosting and maintenance, as this directly impacts your true total cost of ownership.

Third, begin experimenting with model orchestration platforms that can automatically route tasks to the most appropriate model, whether open or closed. This positions your organization for the agentic future that industry leaders, such as EY’s Guarrera, predict, where model selection becomes invisible to end-users.

Read More »

The inference trap: How cloud providers are eating your AI margins

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

AI has become the holy grail of modern companies. Whether it’s customer service or something as niche as pipeline maintenance, organizations in every domain are now implementing AI technologies — from foundation models to VLAs — to make things more efficient. The goal is straightforward: automate tasks to deliver outcomes more efficiently and save money and resources simultaneously.

However, as these projects transition from the pilot to the production stage, teams encounter a hurdle they hadn’t planned for: cloud costs eroding their margins. The sticker shock is so bad that what once felt like the fastest path to innovation and competitive edge becomes an unsustainable budgetary blackhole – in no time. 

This prompts CIOs to rethink everything—from model architecture to deployment models—to regain control over financial and operational aspects. Sometimes, they even shutter the projects entirely, starting over from scratch.

But here’s the fact: while cloud can take costs to unbearable levels, it is not the villain. You just have to understand what type of vehicle (AI infrastructure) to choose to go down which road (the workload).

The cloud story — and where it works 

The cloud is very much like public transport (your subways and buses). You get on board with a simple rental model, and it instantly gives you all the resources—right from GPU instances to fast scaling across various geographies—to take you to your destination, all with minimal work and setup. 

The fast and easy access via a service model ensures a seamless start, paving the way to get the project off the ground and do rapid experimentation without the huge up-front capital expenditure of acquiring specialized GPUs. 

Most early-stage startups find this model lucrative as they need fast turnaround more than anything else, especially when they are still validating the model and determining product-market fit.

“You make an account, click a few buttons, and get access to servers. If you need a different GPU size, you shut down and restart the instance with the new specs, which takes minutes. If you want to run two experiments at once, you initialise two separate instances. In the early stages, the focus is on validating ideas quickly. Using the built-in scaling and experimentation frameworks provided by most cloud platforms helps reduce the time between milestones,” Rohan Sarin, who leads voice AI product at Speechmatics, told VentureBeat.

The cost of “ease”

While cloud makes perfect sense for early-stage usage, the infrastructure math becomes grim as the project transitions from testing and validation to real-world volumes. The scale of workloads makes the bills brutal — so much so that the costs can surge over 1000% overnight. 

This is particularly true in the case of inference, which not only has to run 24/7 to ensure service uptime but also scale with customer demand. 

On most occasions, Sarin explains, the inference demand spikes when other customers are also requesting GPU access, increasing the competition for resources. In such cases, teams either keep a reserved capacity to make sure they get what they need — leading to idle GPU time during non-peak hours — or suffer from latencies, impacting downstream experience.

Christian Khoury, the CEO of AI compliance platform EasyAudit AI, described inference as the new “cloud tax,” telling VentureBeat that he has seen companies go from $5K to $50K/month overnight, just from inference traffic.

It’s also worth noting that inference workloads involving LLMs, with token-based pricing, can trigger the steepest cost increases. This is because these models are non-deterministic and can generate different outputs when handling long-running tasks (involving large context windows). With continuous updates, it gets really difficult to forecast or control LLM inference costs.

Training these models, on its part, happens to be “bursty” (occurring in clusters), which does leave some room for capacity planning. However, even in these cases, especially as growing competition forces frequent retraining, enterprises can have massive bills from idle GPU time, stemming from overprovisioning.

“Training credits on cloud platforms are expensive, and frequent retraining during fast iteration cycles can escalate costs quickly. Long training runs require access to large machines, and most cloud providers only guarantee that access if you reserve capacity for a year or more. If your training run only lasts a few weeks, you still pay for the rest of the year,” Sarin explained.

And, it’s not just this. Cloud lock-in is very real. Suppose you have made a long-term reservation and bought credits from a provider. In that case, you’re locked in their ecosystem and have to use whatever they have on offer, even when other providers have moved to newer, better infrastructure. And, finally, when you get the ability to move, you may have to bear massive egress fees.

“It’s not just compute cost. You get…unpredictable autoscaling, and insane egress fees if you’re moving data between regions or vendors. One team was paying more to move data than to train their models,” Sarin emphasized.

So, what’s the workaround?

Given the constant infrastructure demand of scaling AI inference and the bursty nature of training, enterprises are moving to splitting the workloads — taking inference to colocation or on-prem stacks, while leaving training to the cloud with spot instances.

This isn’t just theory — it’s a growing movement among engineering leaders trying to put AI into production without burning through runway.

“We’ve helped teams shift to colocation for inference using dedicated GPU servers that they control. It’s not sexy, but it cuts monthly infra spend by 60–80%,” Khoury added. “Hybrid’s not just cheaper—it’s smarter.”

In one case, he said, a SaaS company reduced its monthly AI infrastructure bill from approximately $42,000 to just $9,000 by moving inference workloads off the cloud. The switch paid for itself in under two weeks.

Another team requiring consistent sub-50ms responses for an AI customer support tool discovered that cloud-based inference latency was insufficient. Shifting inference closer to users via colocation not only solved the performance bottleneck — but it halved the cost.

The setup typically works like this: inference, which is always-on and latency-sensitive, runs on dedicated GPUs either on-prem or in a nearby data center (colocation facility). Meanwhile, training, which is compute-intensive but sporadic, stays in the cloud, where you can spin up powerful clusters on demand, run for a few hours or days, and shut down. 

Broadly, it is estimated that renting from hyperscale cloud providers can cost three to four times more per GPU hour than working with smaller providers, with the difference being even more significant compared to on-prem infrastructure.

The other big bonus? Predictability. 

With on-prem or colocation stacks, teams also have full control over the number of resources they want to provision or add for the expected baseline of inference workloads. This brings predictability to infrastructure costs — and eliminates surprise bills. It also brings down the aggressive engineering effort to tune scaling and keep cloud infrastructure costs within reason. 

Hybrid setups also help reduce latency for time-sensitive AI applications and enable better compliance, particularly for teams operating in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and education — where data residency and governance are non-negotiable.

Hybrid complexity is real—but rarely a dealbreaker

As it has always been the case, the shift to a hybrid setup comes with its own ops tax. Setting up your own hardware or renting a colocation facility takes time, and managing GPUs outside the cloud requires a different kind of engineering muscle. 

However, leaders argue that the complexity is often overstated and is usually manageable in-house or through external support, unless one is operating at an extreme scale.

“Our calculations show that an on-prem GPU server costs about the same as six to nine months of renting the equivalent instance from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, even with a one-year reserved rate. Since the hardware typically lasts at least three years, and often more than five, this becomes cost-positive within the first nine months. Some hardware vendors also offer operational pricing models for capital infrastructure, so you can avoid upfront payment if cash flow is a concern,” Sarin explained.

Prioritize by need

For any company, whether a startup or an enterprise, the key to success when architecting – or re-architecting – AI infrastructure lies in working according to the specific workloads at hand. 

If you’re unsure about the load of different AI workloads, start with the cloud and keep a close eye on the associated costs by tagging every resource with the responsible team. You can share these cost reports with all managers and do a deep dive into what they are using and its impact on the resources. This data will then give clarity and help pave the way for driving efficiencies.

That said, remember that it’s not about ditching the cloud entirely; it’s about optimizing its use to maximize efficiencies. 

“Cloud is still great for experimentation and bursty training. But if inference is your core workload, get off the rent treadmill. Hybrid isn’t just cheaper… It’s smarter,” Khoury added. “Treat cloud like a prototype, not the permanent home. Run the math. Talk to your engineers. The cloud will never tell you when it’s the wrong tool. But your AWS bill will.”

Read More »

Model minimalism: The new AI strategy saving companies millions

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has made it easier for enterprises to envision the kinds of projects they can undertake, leading to a surge in pilot programs now transitioning to deployment. 

However, as these projects gained momentum, enterprises realized that the earlier LLMs they had used were unwieldy and, worse, expensive. 

Enter small language models and distillation. Models like Google’s Gemma family, Microsoft’s Phi and Mistral’s Small 3.1 allowed businesses to choose fast, accurate models that work for specific tasks. Enterprises can opt for a smaller model for particular use cases, allowing them to lower the cost of running their AI applications and potentially achieve a better return on investment. 

LinkedIn distinguished engineer Karthik Ramgopal told VentureBeat that companies opt for smaller models for a few reasons. 

“Smaller models require less compute, memory and faster inference times, which translates directly into lower infrastructure OPEX (operational expenditures) and CAPEX (capital expenditures) given GPU costs, availability and power requirements,” Ramgoapl said. “Task-specific models have a narrower scope, making their behavior more aligned and maintainable over time without complex prompt engineering.”

Model developers price their small models accordingly. OpenAI’s o4-mini costs $1.1 per million tokens for inputs and $4.4/million tokens for outputs, compared to the full o3 version at $10 for inputs and $40 for outputs. 

Enterprises today have a larger pool of small models, task-specific models and distilled models to choose from. These days, most flagship models offer a range of sizes. For example, the Claude family of models from Anthropic comprises Claude Opus, the largest model, Claude Sonnet, the all-purpose model, and Claude Haiku, the smallest version. These models are compact enough to operate on portable devices, such as laptops or mobile phones. 

The savings question

When discussing return on investment, though, the question is always: What does ROI look like? Should it be a return on the costs incurred or the time savings that ultimately means dollars saved down the line? Experts VentureBeat spoke to said ROI can be difficult to judge because some companies believe they’ve already reached ROI by cutting time spent on a task while others are waiting for actual dollars saved or more business brought in to say if AI investments have actually worked.

Normally, enterprises calculate ROI by a simple formula as described by Cognizant chief technologist Ravi Naarla in a post: ROI = (Benefits-Cost)/Costs. But with AI programs, the benefits are not immediately apparent. He suggests enterprises identify the benefits they expect to achieve, estimate these based on historical data, be realistic about the overall cost of AI, including hiring, implementation and maintenance, and understand you have to be in it for the long haul.

With small models, experts argue that these reduce implementation and maintenance costs, especially when fine-tuning models to provide them with more context for your enterprise.

Arijit Sengupta, founder and CEO of Aible, said that how people bring context to the models dictates how much cost savings they can get. For individuals who require additional context for prompts, such as lengthy and complex instructions, this can result in higher token costs. 

“You have to give models context one way or the other; there is no free lunch. But with large models, that is usually done by putting it in the prompt,” he said. “Think of fine-tuning and post-training as an alternative way of giving models context. I might incur $100 of post-training costs, but it’s not astronomical.”

Sengupta said they’ve seen about 100X cost reductions just from post-training alone, often dropping model use cost “from single-digit millions to something like $30,000.” He did point out that this number includes software operating expenses and the ongoing cost of the model and vector databases. 

“In terms of maintenance cost, if you do it manually with human experts, it can be expensive to maintain because small models need to be post-trained to produce results comparable to large models,” he said.

Experiments Aible conducted showed that a task-specific, fine-tuned model performs well for some use cases, just like LLMs, making the case that deploying several use-case-specific models rather than large ones to do everything is more cost-effective. 

The company compared a post-trained version of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct to a smaller 8B parameter option of the same model. The 70B model, post-trained for $11.30, was 84% accurate in automated evaluations and 92% in manual evaluations. Once fine-tuned to a cost of $4.58, the 8B model achieved 82% accuracy in manual assessment, which would be suitable for more minor, more targeted use cases. 

Cost factors fit for purpose

Right-sizing models does not have to come at the cost of performance. These days, organizations understand that model choice doesn’t just mean choosing between GPT-4o or Llama-3.1; it’s knowing that some use cases, like summarization or code generation, are better served by a small model.

Daniel Hoske, chief technology officer at contact center AI products provider Cresta, said starting development with LLMs informs potential cost savings better. 

“You should start with the biggest model to see if what you’re envisioning even works at all, because if it doesn’t work with the biggest model, it doesn’t mean it would with smaller models,” he said. 

Ramgopal said LinkedIn follows a similar pattern because prototyping is the only way these issues can start to emerge.

“Our typical approach for agentic use cases begins with general-purpose LLMs as their broad generalizationability allows us to rapidly prototype, validate hypotheses and assess product-market fit,” LinkedIn’s Ramgopal said. “As the product matures and we encounter constraints around quality, cost or latency, we transition to more customized solutions.”

In the experimentation phase, organizations can determine what they value most from their AI applications. Figuring this out enables developers to plan better what they want to save on and select the model size that best suits their purpose and budget. 

The experts cautioned that while it is important to build with models that work best with what they’re developing, high-parameter LLMs will always be more expensive. Large models will always require significant computing power. 

However, overusing small and task-specific models also poses issues. Rahul Pathak, vice president of data and AI GTM at AWS, said in a blog post that cost optimization comes not just from using a model with low compute power needs, but rather from matching a model to tasks. Smaller models may not have a sufficiently large context window to understand more complex instructions, leading to increased workload for human employees and higher costs. 

Sengupta also cautioned that some distilled models could be brittle, so long-term use may not result in savings. 

Constantly evaluate

Regardless of the model size, industry players emphasized the flexibility to address any potential issues or new use cases. So if they start with a large model and a smaller model with similar or better performance and lower cost, organizations cannot be precious about their chosen model. 

Tessa Burg, CTO and head of innovation at brand marketing company Mod Op, told VentureBeat that organizations must understand that whatever they build now will always be superseded by a better version. 

“We started with the mindset that the tech underneath the workflows that we’re creating, the processes that we’re making more efficient, are going to change. We knew that whatever model we use will be the worst version of a model.”

Burg said that smaller models helped save her company and its clients time in researching and developing concepts. Time saved, she said, that does lead to budget savings over time. She added that it’s a good idea to break out high-cost, high-frequency use cases for light-weight models.

Sengupta noted that vendors are now making it easier to switch between models automatically, but cautioned users to find platforms that also facilitate fine-tuning, so they don’t incur additional costs. 

Read More »

How runtime attacks turn profitable AI into budget black holes

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

AI’s promise is undeniable, but so are its blindsiding security costs at the inference layer. New attacks targeting AI’s operational side are quietly inflating budgets, jeopardizing regulatory compliance and eroding customer trust, all of which threaten the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership of enterprise AI deployments.

AI has captivated the enterprise with its potential for game-changing insights and efficiency gains. Yet, as organizations rush to operationalize their models, a sobering reality is emerging: The inference stage, where AI translates investment into real-time business value, is under siege. This critical juncture is driving up the total cost of ownership (TCO) in ways that initial business cases failed to predict.

Security executives and CFOs who greenlit AI projects for their transformative upside are now grappling with the hidden expenses of defending these systems. Adversaries have discovered that inference is where AI “comes alive” for a business, and it’s precisely where they can inflict the most damage. The result is a cascade of cost inflation: Breach containment can exceed $5 million per incident in regulated sectors, compliance retrofits run into the hundreds of thousands and trust failures can trigger stock hits or contract cancellations that decimate projected AI ROI. Without cost containment at inference, AI becomes an ungovernable budget wildcard.

The unseen battlefield: AI inference and exploding TCO

AI inference is rapidly becoming the “next insider risk,” Cristian Rodriguez, field CTO for the Americas at CrowdStrike, told the audience at RSAC 2025.

Other technology leaders echo this perspective and see a common blind spot in enterprise strategy. Vineet Arora, CTO at WinWire, notes that many organizations “focus intensely on securing the infrastructure around AI while inadvertently sidelining inference.” This oversight, he explains, “leads to underestimated costs for continuous monitoring systems, real-time threat analysis and rapid patching mechanisms.”

Another critical blind spot, according to Steffen Schreier, SVP of product and portfolio at Telesign, is “the assumption that third-party models are thoroughly vetted and inherently safe to deploy.”

He warned that in reality, “these models often haven’t been evaluated against an organization’s specific threat landscape or compliance needs,” which can lead to harmful or non-compliant outputs that erode brand trust. Schreier told VentureBeat that “inference-time vulnerabilities — like prompt injection, output manipulation or context leakage — can be exploited by attackers to produce harmful, biased or non-compliant outputs. This poses serious risks, especially in regulated industries, and can quickly erode brand trust.”

When inference is compromised, the fallout hits multiple fronts of TCO. Cybersecurity budgets spiral, regulatory compliance is jeopardized and customer trust erodes. Executive sentiment reflects this growing concern. In CrowdStrike’s State of AI in Cybersecurity survey, only 39% of respondents felt generative AI’s rewards clearly outweigh the risks, while 40% judged them comparable. This ambivalence underscores a critical finding: Safety and privacy controls have become top requirements for new gen AI initiatives, with a striking 90% of organizations now implementing or developing policies to govern AI adoption. The top concerns are no longer abstract; 26% cite sensitive data exposure and 25% fear adversarial attacks as key risks.

Security leaders exhibit mixed sentiments regarding the overall safety of gen AI, with top concerns centered on the exposure of sensitive data to LLMs (26%) and adversarial attacks on AI tools (25%).

Anatomy of an inference attack

The unique attack surface exposed by running AI models is being aggressively probed by adversaries. To defend against this, Schreier advises, “it is critical to treat every input as a potential hostile attack.” Frameworks like the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications catalogue these threats, which are no longer theoretical but active attack vectors impacting the enterprise:

Prompt injection (LLM01) and insecure output handling (LLM02): Attackers manipulate models via inputs or outputs. Malicious inputs can cause the model to ignore instructions or divulge proprietary code. Insecure output handling occurs when an application blindly trusts AI responses, allowing attackers to inject malicious scripts into downstream systems.

Training data poisoning (LLM03) and model poisoning: Attackers corrupt training data by sneaking in tainted samples, planting hidden triggers. Later, an innocuous input can unleash malicious outputs.

Model denial of service (LLM04): Adversaries can overwhelm AI models with complex inputs, consuming excessive resources to slow or crash them, resulting in direct revenue loss.

Supply chain and plugin vulnerabilities (LLM05 and LLM07): The AI ecosystem is built on shared components. For instance, a vulnerability in the Flowise LLM tool exposed private AI dashboards and sensitive data, including GitHub tokens and OpenAI API keys, on 438 servers.

Sensitive information disclosure (LLM06): Clever querying can extract confidential information from an AI model if it was part of its training data or is present in the current context.

Excessive agency (LLM08) and Overreliance (LLM09): Granting an AI agent unchecked permissions to execute trades or modify databases is a recipe for disaster if manipulated.

Model theft (LLM10): An organization’s proprietary models can be stolen through sophisticated extraction techniques — a direct assault on its competitive advantage.

Underpinning these threats are foundational security failures. Adversaries often log in with leaked credentials. In early 2024, 35% of cloud intrusions involved valid user credentials, and new, unattributed cloud attack attempts spiked 26%, according to the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report. A deepfake campaign resulted in a fraudulent $25.6 million transfer, while AI-generated phishing emails have demonstrated a 54% click-through rate, more than four times higher than those written by humans.

The OWASP framework illustrates how various LLM attack vectors target different components of an AI application, from prompt injection at the user interface to data poisoning in the training models and sensitive information disclosure from the datastore.

Back to basics: Foundational security for a new era

Securing AI requires a disciplined return to security fundamentals — but applied through a modern lens. “I think that we need to take a step back and ensure that the foundation and the fundamentals of security are still applicable,” Rodriguez argued. “The same approach you would have to securing an OS is the same approach you would have to securing that AI model.”

This means enforcing unified protection across every attack path, with rigorous data governance, robust cloud security posture management (CSPM), and identity-first security through cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) to lock down the cloud environments where most AI workloads reside. As identity becomes the new perimeter, AI systems must be governed with the same strict access controls and runtime protections as any other business-critical cloud asset.

The specter of “shadow AI”: Unmasking hidden risks

Shadow AI, or the unsanctioned use of AI tools by employees, creates a massive, unknown attack surface. A financial analyst using a free online LLM for confidential documents can inadvertently leak proprietary data. As Rodriguez warned, queries to public models can “become another’s answers.” Addressing this requires a combination of clear policy, employee education, and technical controls like AI security posture management (AI-SPM) to discover and assess all AI assets, sanctioned or not.

Fortifying the future: Actionable defense strategies

While adversaries have weaponized AI, the tide is beginning to turn. As Mike Riemer, Field CISO at Ivanti, observes, defenders are beginning to “harness the full potential of AI for cybersecurity purposes to analyze vast amounts of data collected from diverse systems.” This proactive stance is essential for building a robust defense, which requires several key strategies:

Budget for inference security from day zero: The first step, according to Arora, is to begin with “a comprehensive risk-based assessment.” He advises mapping the entire inference pipeline to identify every data flow and vulnerability. “By linking these risks to possible financial impacts,” he explains, “we can better quantify the cost of a security breach” and build a realistic budget.

To structure this more systematically, CISOs and CFOs should start with a risk-adjusted ROI model. One approach:

Security ROI = (estimated breach cost × annual risk probability) – total security investment

For example, if an LLM inference attack could result in a $5 million loss and the likelihood is 10%, the expected loss is $500,000. A $350,000 investment in inference-stage defenses would yield a net gain of $150,000 in avoided risk. This model enables scenario-based budgeting tied directly to financial outcomes.

Enterprises allocating less than 8 to 12% of their AI project budgets to inference-stage security are often blindsided later by breach recovery and compliance costs. A Fortune 500 healthcare provider CIO, interviewed by VentureBeat and requesting anonymity, now allocates 15% of their total gen AI budget to post-training risk management, including runtime monitoring, AI-SPM platforms and compliance audits. A practical budgeting model should allocate across four cost centers: runtime monitoring (35%), adversarial simulation (25%), compliance tooling (20%) and user behavior analytics (20%).

Here’s a sample allocation snapshot for a $2 million enterprise AI deployment based on VentureBeat’s ongoing interviews with CFOs, CIOs and CISOs actively budgeting to support AI projects:

Budget categoryAllocationUse case exampleRuntime monitoring$300,000Behavioral anomaly detection (API spikes)Adversarial simulation$200,000Red team exercises to probe prompt injectionCompliance tooling$150,000EU AI Act alignment, SOC 2 inference validationsUser behavior analytics$150,000Detect misuse patterns in internal AI use

These investments reduce downstream breach remediation costs, regulatory penalties and SLA violations, all helping to stabilize AI TCO.

Implement runtime monitoring and validation: Begin by tuning anomaly detection to detect behaviors at the inference layer, such as abnormal API call patterns, output entropy shifts or query frequency spikes. Vendors like DataDome and Telesign now offer real-time behavioral analytics tailored to gen AI misuse signatures.

Teams should monitor entropy shifts in outputs, track token irregularities in model responses and watch for atypical frequency in queries from privileged accounts. Effective setups include streaming logs into SIEM tools (such as Splunk or Datadog) with tailored gen AI parsers and establishing real-time alert thresholds for deviations from model baselines.

Adopt a zero-trust framework for AI: Zero-trust is non-negotiable for AI environments. It operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” By adopting this architecture, Riemer notes, organizations can ensure that “only authenticated users and devices gain access to sensitive data and applications, regardless of their physical location.”

Inference-time zero-trust should be enforced at multiple layers:

Identity: Authenticate both human and service actors accessing inference endpoints.

Permissions: Scope LLM access using role-based access control (RBAC) with time-boxed privileges.

Segmentation: Isolate inference microservices with service mesh policies and enforce least-privilege defaults through cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs).

A proactive AI security strategy requires a holistic approach, encompassing visibility and supply chain security during development, securing infrastructure and data and implementing robust safeguards to protect AI systems in runtime during production.

Protecting AI ROI: A CISO/CFO collaboration model

Protecting the ROI of enterprise AI requires actively modeling the financial upside of security. Start with a baseline ROI projection, then layer in cost-avoidance scenarios for each security control. Mapping cybersecurity investments to avoided costs including incident remediation, SLA violations and customer churn, turns risk reduction into a measurable ROI gain.

Enterprises should model three ROI scenarios that include baseline, with security investment and post-breach recovery to show cost avoidance clearly. For example, a telecom deploying output validation prevented 12,000-plus misrouted queries per month, saving $6.3 million annually in SLA penalties and call center volume. Tie investments to avoided costs across breach remediation, SLA non-compliance, brand impact and customer churn to build a defensible ROI argument to CFOs.

Checklist: CFO-Grade ROI protection model

CFOs need to communicate with clarity on how security spending protects the bottom line. To safeguard AI ROI at the inference layer, security investments must be modeled like any other strategic capital allocation: With direct links to TCO, risk mitigation and revenue preservation.

Use this checklist to make AI security investments defensible in the boardroom — and actionable in the budget cycle.

Link every AI security spend to a projected TCO reduction category (compliance, breach remediation, SLA stability).

Run cost-avoidance simulations with 3-year horizon scenarios: baseline, protected and breach-reactive.

Quantify financial risk from SLA violations, regulatory fines, brand trust erosion and customer churn.

Co-model inference-layer security budgets with both CISOs and CFOs to break organizational silos.

Present security investments as growth enablers, not overhead, showing how they stabilize AI infrastructure for sustained value capture.

This model doesn’t just defend AI investments; it defends budgets and brands and can protect and grow boardroom credibility.

Concluding analysis: A strategic imperative

CISOs must present AI risk management as a business enabler, quantified in terms of ROI protection, brand trust preservation and regulatory stability. As AI inference moves deeper into revenue workflows, protecting it isn’t a cost center; it’s the control plane for AI’s financial sustainability. Strategic security investments at the infrastructure layer must be justified with financial metrics that CFOs can act on.

The path forward requires organizations to balance investment in AI innovation with an equal investment in its protection. This necessitates a new level of strategic alignment. As Ivanti CIO Robert Grazioli told VentureBeat: “CISO and CIO alignment will be critical to effectively safeguard modern businesses.” This collaboration is essential to break down the data and budget silos that undermine security, allowing organizations to manage the true cost of AI and turn a high-risk gamble into a sustainable, high-ROI engine of growth.

Telesign’s Schreier added: “We view AI inference risks through the lens of digital identity and trust. We embed security across the full lifecycle of our AI tools — using access controls, usage monitoring, rate limiting and behavioral analytics to detect misuse and protect both our customers and their end users from emerging threats.”

He continued: “We approach output validation as a critical layer of our AI security architecture, particularly because many inference-time risks don’t stem from how a model is trained, but how it behaves in the wild.”

Read More »

Kumo’s ‘relational foundation model’ predicts the future your LLM can’t see

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more The generative AI boom has given us powerful language models that can write, summarize and reason over vast amounts of text and other types of data. But when it comes to high-value predictive tasks like predicting customer churn or detecting fraud from structured, relational data, enterprises remain stuck in the world of traditional machine learning.  Stanford professor and Kumo AI co-founder Jure Leskovec argues that this is the critical missing piece. His company’s tool, a relational foundation model (RFM), is a new kind of pre-trained AI that brings the “zero-shot” capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to structured databases. “It’s about making a forecast about something you don’t know, something that has not happened yet,” Leskovec told VentureBeat. “And that’s a fundamentally new capability that is, I would argue, missing from the current purview of what we think of as gen AI.” Why predictive ML is a “30-year-old technology” While LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can answer questions about existing knowledge, they are fundamentally retrospective. They retrieve and reason over information that is already there. For predictive business tasks, companies still rely on classic machine learning.  For example, to build a model that predicts customer churn, a business must hire a team of data scientists who spend a considerably long time doing “feature engineering,” the process of manually creating predictive signals from the data. This involves complex data wrangling to join information from different tables, such as a customer’s purchase history and website clicks, to create a single, massive training table. “If you want to do machine learning (ML), sorry, you are stuck in the past,” Leskovec said. Expensive and time-consuming bottlenecks prevent most organizations from

Read More »

Chevron Field in Israel Allowed to Resume Production

Israeli authorities have allowed the Chevron Corp.-operated Leviathan natural gas and condensate field to restart production, after ordering a pause about two weeks ago amid Israel’s exchange of attacks with Iran. The Leviathan consortium had invoked a force majeure after the Energy and Infrastructures Ministry, acting on a “security recommendation”, asked that production at the field be temporarily halted, according to NewMed Energy LP, one of the consortium partners. NewMed Energy has now said that order had been lifted. It said it intends to seek state compensation for losses. “According to the Partnership’s [NewMed Energy] initial estimate, based, inter alia, on the forecasted production from the Leviathan reservoir and from the Karish lease, the halting of production for the said period resulted in a loss of income from the sale of natural gas and condensate (gross, before royalties) and income from overriding royalties from the Karish lease in the sum total of approx. $38.8 million”, NewMed Energy, a gas and condensate exploration and production company owned by Israel’s Delek Group, told the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. “The Partnership intends to explore the possibility of receiving compensation from the State in connection with the halting of the gas production, although at this stage there is no certainty as to receipt of such compensation and the amount thereof”, it added. The Israel-Hamas war has also delayed the construction of a third pipeline for the field. A regulatory disclosure by NewMed Energy October 6, 2024, said the suspension of the project could last about six months. The new conduit is expected to grow the maximum delivery to Israel Natural Gas Lines Ltd. from about 1.2 billion cubic feet a day (Bcfd) to around 1.4 Bcfd from mid-2025, according to a NewMed Energy filing July 2, 2023, that announced an investment of approximately $568

Read More »

USA Crude Oil Inventories Drop by Almost 6 Million Barrels WoW

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), decreased by 5.8 million barrels from the week ending June 13 to the week ending June 20, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report. This report, which was released on June 25 and included data for the week ending June 20, showed that crude oil stocks, not including the SPR, stood at 415.1 million barrels on June 20, 420.9 million barrels on June 13, and 460.7 million barrels on June 21, 2024. Crude oil in the SPR stood at 402.5 million barrels on June 20, 402.3 million barrels on June 13, and 372.2 million barrels on June 21, 2024, the report revealed. Total petroleum stocks – including crude oil, total motor gasoline, fuel ethanol, kerosene type jet fuel, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, propane/propylene, and other oils – stood at 1.633 billion barrels on June 20, the report highlighted. Total petroleum stocks were down 3.9 million barrels week on week and down 35.0 million barrels year on year, the report showed. “At 415.1 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about 11 percent below the five year average for this time of year,” the EIA noted in its latest weekly petroleum status report. “Total motor gasoline inventories decreased by 2.1 million barrels from last week and are about three percent below the five year average for this time of year. Both Finished gasoline inventories and blending components inventories decreased last week,” it added. “Distillate fuel inventories decreased by 4.1 million barrels last week and are about 20 percent below the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories increased by 5.1 million barrels from last week and are nine percent above the five year average for this

Read More »

UAE Oil Partners Face Trading Losses after Surprise Supply Cut

An unexpected move by the United Arab Emirates to cut volumes of a key oil grade sold to project partners including BP Plc and TotalEnergies SE is set to put a dent in some trading books. The hit stems from a mismatch in positions taken in the derivatives market to hedge against their expected supply of Murban crude for July, according to people familiar with the matter. The discrepancy may have led to losses as high as $12 a barrel for some equity shareholders, which is considered steep given profits can be as little as a few cents for each barrel, they added.  It’s unclear why state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. allocated volumes that were lower than contracted levels to international partners, but the reduction was not related to production constraints, the people said, asking not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak on the matter. Adnoc declined to comment. The six partners in the UAE’s onshore production – BP, TotalEnergies, China National Petroleum Corp., Inpex Corp., Zhenhua Oil Co., and GS Energy Corp. – did not respond to requests for comment. The size of the cuts was outside the so-called operational-tolerance clause in contracts, which only allows for a small variance in volume, according to the people. The reduction translates to cargoes around 20 percent smaller on average than the standard 500,000-barrel shipment, they added. According to estimates from traders, equity partners that chose to fill their net-short positions after they were informed of lower volumes could have locked in a loss of as much as $12 a barrel, compared with official selling prices. At the time, oil had surged due to the conflict between Israel and Iran. There’s precedent for Adnoc cutting volumes, such as when OPEC+ shaved output quotas to manage prices, but those curbs were smaller and

Read More »

Equinor Files Development Plan for Fram South in Norwegian North Sea

Equinor ASA and its partners have agreed on a NOK-21 billion ($2.09 billion) investment to develop Fram South, which will unlock new gas for Europe, the operator said. The consortium forwarded the development plan to Norway’s Energy Ministry on Thursday, the majority state-owned energy major said. The project, a subsea tieback to the existing Troll C platform, holds estimated recoverable volumes of 116 million barrels of oil equivalent. Oil comprises 75 percent and gas 25 percent, according to Equinor. It expects the project to start production 2029. “We have done a thorough job maturing the new resources discovered in the Fram and Troll area in recent years”, Kjetil Hove, Equinor executive vice president for Norwegian exploration and production, said in an online statement. Fram Vest and Fram East started production 2003 and 2006 respectively. Both are tied back to Troll C. “We have a large portfolio of projects that will phase in discoveries to our producing fields. Equinor expects to put more than 50 such projects on stream by 2035”, Hove added. The Fram South development consists of Echino South, discovered 2019; Blasto, discovered 2021; and two smaller discoveries. Fram South is in the northern part of the North Sea, about 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) north of Troll C and around 120 kilometers northwest of Bergen. It has a water depth of approximately 350 meters (1,148.29 feet), while the reservoir depth is 1,800-2,800 meters, according to Equinor. The development will have 4×4 subsea templates. Initially 12 wells will be started up, with plans for a later development. Oil from the Fram field goes through Troll Oil Pipeline II to Mongstad, and gas is exported to Kollsnes via the Troll A platform. “As the first on the NCS [Norwegian continental shelf], Fram Sor will use all-electric Christmas trees that eliminate the

Read More »

MedcoEnergi to Acquire Stake in Corridor PSC in South Sumatra

PT Medco Energi Internasional Tbk. has agreed to acquire Fortuna International (Barbados) Inc. from Repsol E&P S.a.r.l. The company said in a media release it will shell out $425 million in the process. It expects to close the transaction in the third quarter of 2025. MedcoEnergi said Fortuna International holds an indirect 24 percent interest in the Corridor Production Sharing Contract (PSC). The Corridor PSC has seven producing gas fields and one producing oil field, all located onshore in South Sumatra, Indonesia, MedcoEnergi said. The gas is sold under long-term contracts to high-quality buyers in Indonesia and Singapore, it said. “This acquisition supports our strategy of owning and developing high-quality, cash-generative assets and reaffirms our commitment to national development where natural gas is a vital bridge to a lower-carbon future”, Hilmi Panigoro, President Director, stated. Last month MedcoEnergi signed a gas swap agreement through its subsidiaries, Medco E&P Natuna Ltd. (part of the West Natuna Group Supply Group) and Medco E&P Grissik Ltd. (from the South Sumatra Sellers). The agreement, signed with various key parties including PT Pertamina (Persero) and PT Perusahaan Gas Negara (Persero) Tbk (PGN), reallocates gas volumes. Specifically, the West Natuna Supply Group will now supply gas to Singapore, replacing volumes previously sent from the South Sumatra Sellers. These redirected South Sumatra volumes will then be supplied to PGN to meet Indonesia’s domestic gas demands, MedcoEnergi said. Additionally, Medco E&P Natuna Ltd., along with Premier Oil Natuna Sea B.V. and Star Energy (Kakap) Ltd., signed a separate Domestic Gas Sales Agreement with PGN. In other developments, MedcoEnergi earlier this month started commercial operations at its 25-megawatt peak East Bali Solar Photovoltaic Plant, PT Medcosolar Bali Timur, located in Karangasem, East Bali. To contact the author, email [email protected] What do you think? We’d love to hear from you,

Read More »

USA Allows Ethane Cargoes to Sail to China But Not Discharge

The Trump administration has eased recent export limits on a critical petroleum product that’s used to make plastics — a shift that represents a modest pullback on curbs used as leverage in trade negotiations with China.  Under the change, Enterprise Products Partners LP and Energy Transfer LP are being allowed to load that gas, known as ethane, onto tankers and transport it to Chinese ports. However, they are still barred from unloading that cargo for use by Chinese entities, said people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named.  Enterprise Products “may not complete” ethane exports to Chinese entities “without further BIS authorization,” the US Bureau of Industry and Security said in a letter Thursday to the firm. Energy Transfer was also notified of the change, the people said. The shift follows weeks of lobbying by oil industry advocates who told administration officials the restrictions were inflicting more pain on the US than China. The use of ethane, which China depends almost entirely on America for, as a trade war bargaining chip has disrupted supply chains and redirected flows. While US inventories of ethane — essentially a byproduct of shale production in West Texas — climbed, expensive ships purpose-built to carry the fuel have been forced to idle or sail to new destinations like India after previously only plying dedicated routes between the US and China.  As of late last week, INEOS Group Holdings SA had one tanker full of ethane waiting to ship and Enterprise Products Partners had three to four cargo ships stuck in limbo, according to a person familiar with the matter. Representatives of Enterprise Products, Energy Transfer and the Commerce Department, which oversees BIS, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the shift, first reported by Reuters.  While the revised licensing requirements will ease congestion at US Gulf

Read More »

West of Orkney developers helped support 24 charities last year

The developers of the 2GW West of Orkney wind farm paid out a total of £18,000 to 24 organisations from its small donations fund in 2024. The money went to projects across Caithness, Sutherland and Orkney, including a mental health initiative in Thurso and a scheme by Dunnet Community Forest to improve the quality of meadows through the use of traditional scythes. Established in 2022, the fund offers up to £1,000 per project towards programmes in the far north. In addition to the small donations fund, the West of Orkney developers intend to follow other wind farms by establishing a community benefit fund once the project is operational. West of Orkney wind farm project director Stuart McAuley said: “Our donations programme is just one small way in which we can support some of the many valuable initiatives in Caithness, Sutherland and Orkney. “In every case we have been immensely impressed by the passion and professionalism each organisation brings, whether their focus is on sport, the arts, social care, education or the environment, and we hope the funds we provide help them achieve their goals.” In addition to the local donations scheme, the wind farm developers have helped fund a £1 million research and development programme led by EMEC in Orkney and a £1.2m education initiative led by UHI. It also provided £50,000 to support the FutureSkills apprenticeship programme in Caithness, with funds going to employment and training costs to help tackle skill shortages in the North of Scotland. The West of Orkney wind farm is being developed by Corio Generation, TotalEnergies and Renewable Infrastructure Development Group (RIDG). The project is among the leaders of the ScotWind cohort, having been the first to submit its offshore consent documents in late 2023. In addition, the project’s onshore plans were approved by the

Read More »

Biden bans US offshore oil and gas drilling ahead of Trump’s return

US President Joe Biden has announced a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling across vast swathes of the country’s coastal waters. The decision comes just weeks before his successor Donald Trump, who has vowed to increase US fossil fuel production, takes office. The drilling ban will affect 625 million acres of federal waters across America’s eastern and western coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. The decision does not affect the western Gulf of Mexico, where much of American offshore oil and gas production occurs and is set to continue. In a statement, President Biden said he is taking action to protect the regions “from oil and natural gas drilling and the harm it can cause”. “My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said. “It is not worth the risks. “As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren.” Offshore drilling ban The White House said Biden used his authority under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which allows presidents to withdraw areas from mineral leasing and drilling. However, the law does not give a president the right to unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without congressional approval. This means that Trump, who pledged to “unleash” US fossil fuel production during his re-election campaign, could find it difficult to overturn the ban after taking office. Sunset shot of the Shell Olympus platform in the foreground and the Shell Mars platform in the background in the Gulf of Mexico Trump

Read More »

The Download: our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025 Each year, we spend months researching and discussing which technologies will make the cut for our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. We try to highlight a mix of items that reflect innovations happening in various fields. We look at consumer technologies, large industrial­-scale projects, biomedical advances, changes in computing, climate solutions, the latest in AI, and more.We’ve been publishing this list every year since 2001 and, frankly, have a great track record of flagging things that are poised to hit a tipping point. It’s hard to think of another industry that has as much of a hype machine behind it as tech does, so the real secret of the TR10 is really what we choose to leave off the list.Check out the full list of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025, which is front and center in our latest print issue. It’s all about the exciting innovations happening in the world right now, and includes some fascinating stories, such as: + How digital twins of human organs are set to transform medical treatment and shake up how we trial new drugs.+ What will it take for us to fully trust robots? The answer is a complicated one.+ Wind is an underutilized resource that has the potential to steer the notoriously dirty shipping industry toward a greener future. Read the full story.+ After decades of frustration, machine-learning tools are helping ecologists to unlock a treasure trove of acoustic bird data—and to shed much-needed light on their migration habits. Read the full story. 
+ How poop could help feed the planet—yes, really. Read the full story.
Roundtables: Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025 Last week, Amy Nordrum, our executive editor, joined our news editor Charlotte Jee to unveil our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025 in an exclusive Roundtable discussion. Subscribers can watch their conversation back here. And, if you’re interested in previous discussions about topics ranging from mixed reality tech to gene editing to AI’s climate impact, check out some of the highlights from the past year’s events. This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases For as long as there’s been domesticated wheat (about 8,000 years), there has been harvest-devastating rust. Breeding efforts in the mid-20th century led to rust-resistant wheat strains that boosted crop yields, and rust epidemics receded in much of the world.But now, after decades, rusts are considered a reemerging disease in Europe, at least partly due to climate change.  An international initiative hopes to turn the tide by scaling up a system to track wheat diseases and forecast potential outbreaks to governments and farmers in close to real time. And by doing so, they hope to protect a crop that supplies about one-fifth of the world’s calories. Read the full story. —Shaoni Bhattacharya

The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Meta has taken down its creepy AI profiles Following a big backlash from unhappy users. (NBC News)+ Many of the profiles were likely to have been live from as far back as 2023. (404 Media)+ It also appears they were never very popular in the first place. (The Verge) 2 Uber and Lyft are racing to catch up with their robotaxi rivalsAfter abandoning their own self-driving projects years ago. (WSJ $)+ China’s Pony.ai is gearing up to expand to Hong Kong.  (Reuters)3 Elon Musk is going after NASA He’s largely veered away from criticising the space agency publicly—until now. (Wired $)+ SpaceX’s Starship rocket has a legion of scientist fans. (The Guardian)+ What’s next for NASA’s giant moon rocket? (MIT Technology Review) 4 How Sam Altman actually runs OpenAIFeaturing three-hour meetings and a whole lot of Slack messages. (Bloomberg $)+ ChatGPT Pro is a pricey loss-maker, apparently. (MIT Technology Review) 5 The dangerous allure of TikTokMigrants’ online portrayal of their experiences in America aren’t always reflective of their realities. (New Yorker $) 6 Demand for electricity is skyrocketingAnd AI is only a part of it. (Economist $)+ AI’s search for more energy is growing more urgent. (MIT Technology Review) 7 The messy ethics of writing religious sermons using AISkeptics aren’t convinced the technology should be used to channel spirituality. (NYT $)
8 How a wildlife app became an invaluable wildfire trackerWatch Duty has become a safeguarding sensation across the US west. (The Guardian)+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review) 9 Computer scientists just love oracles 🔮 Hypothetical devices are a surprisingly important part of computing. (Quanta Magazine)
10 Pet tech is booming 🐾But not all gadgets are made equal. (FT $)+ These scientists are working to extend the lifespan of pet dogs—and their owners. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “The next kind of wave of this is like, well, what is AI doing for me right now other than telling me that I have AI?” —Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, tells Wired a lot of companies’ AI claims are overblown.
The big story Broadband funding for Native communities could finally connect some of America’s most isolated places September 2022 Rural and Native communities in the US have long had lower rates of cellular and broadband connectivity than urban areas, where four out of every five Americans live. Outside the cities and suburbs, which occupy barely 3% of US land, reliable internet service can still be hard to come by.
The covid-19 pandemic underscored the problem as Native communities locked down and moved school and other essential daily activities online. But it also kicked off an unprecedented surge of relief funding to solve it. Read the full story. —Robert Chaney We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Rollerskating Spice Girls is exactly what your Monday morning needs.+ It’s not just you, some people really do look like their dogs!+ I’m not sure if this is actually the world’s healthiest meal, but it sure looks tasty.+ Ah, the old “bitten by a rabid fox chestnut.”

Read More »

Equinor Secures $3 Billion Financing for US Offshore Wind Project

Equinor ASA has announced a final investment decision on Empire Wind 1 and financial close for $3 billion in debt financing for the under-construction project offshore Long Island, expected to power 500,000 New York homes. The Norwegian majority state-owned energy major said in a statement it intends to farm down ownership “to further enhance value and reduce exposure”. Equinor has taken full ownership of Empire Wind 1 and 2 since last year, in a swap transaction with 50 percent co-venturer BP PLC that allowed the former to exit the Beacon Wind lease, also a 50-50 venture between the two. Equinor has yet to complete a portion of the transaction under which it would also acquire BP’s 50 percent share in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal lease, according to the latest transaction update on Equinor’s website. The lease involves a terminal conversion project that was intended to serve as an interconnection station for Beacon Wind and Empire Wind, as agreed on by the two companies and the state of New York in 2022.  “The expected total capital investments, including fees for the use of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, are approximately $5 billion including the effect of expected future tax credits (ITCs)”, said the statement on Equinor’s website announcing financial close. Equinor did not disclose its backers, only saying, “The final group of lenders includes some of the most experienced lenders in the sector along with many of Equinor’s relationship banks”. “Empire Wind 1 will be the first offshore wind project to connect into the New York City grid”, the statement added. “The redevelopment of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and construction of Empire Wind 1 will create more than 1,000 union jobs in the construction phase”, Equinor said. On February 22, 2024, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced

Read More »

USA Crude Oil Stocks Drop Week on Week

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), decreased by 1.2 million barrels from the week ending December 20 to the week ending December 27, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on January 2. Crude oil stocks, excluding the SPR, stood at 415.6 million barrels on December 27, 416.8 million barrels on December 20, and 431.1 million barrels on December 29, 2023, the report revealed. Crude oil in the SPR came in at 393.6 million barrels on December 27, 393.3 million barrels on December 20, and 354.4 million barrels on December 29, 2023, the report showed. Total petroleum stocks – including crude oil, total motor gasoline, fuel ethanol, kerosene type jet fuel, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, propane/propylene, and other oils – stood at 1.623 billion barrels on December 27, the report revealed. This figure was up 9.6 million barrels week on week and up 17.8 million barrels year on year, the report outlined. “At 415.6 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about five percent below the five year average for this time of year,” the EIA said in its latest report. “Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 7.7 million barrels from last week and are slightly below the five year average for this time of year. Finished gasoline inventories decreased last week while blending components inventories increased last week,” it added. “Distillate fuel inventories increased by 6.4 million barrels last week and are about six percent below the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories decreased by 0.6 million barrels from last week and are 10 percent above the five year average for this time of year,” it went on to state. In the report, the EIA noted

Read More »

More telecom firms were breached by Chinese hackers than previously reported

Broader implications for US infrastructure The Salt Typhoon revelations follow a broader pattern of state-sponsored cyber operations targeting the US technology ecosystem. The telecom sector, serving as a backbone for industries including finance, energy, and transportation, remains particularly vulnerable to such attacks. While Chinese officials have dismissed the accusations as disinformation, the recurring breaches underscore the pressing need for international collaboration and policy enforcement to deter future attacks. The Salt Typhoon campaign has uncovered alarming gaps in the cybersecurity of US telecommunications firms, with breaches now extending to over a dozen networks. Federal agencies and private firms must act swiftly to mitigate risks as adversaries continue to evolve their attack strategies. Strengthening oversight, fostering industry-wide collaboration, and investing in advanced defense mechanisms are essential steps toward safeguarding national security and public trust.

Read More »

We’re learning more about what weight-loss drugs do to the body

Weight-loss drugs are this decade’s blockbuster medicines. Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro help people with diabetes get their blood sugar under control and help overweight and obese people reach a healthier weight. And they’re fast becoming a trendy must-have for celebrities and other figure-conscious individuals looking to trim down. They became so hugely popular so quickly that not long after their approval for weight loss, we saw global shortages of the drugs. Prescriptions have soared over the last five years, but even people who don’t have prescriptions are seeking these drugs out online. A 2024 health tracking poll by KFF found that around 1 in 8 US adults said they had taken one. We know they can suppress appetite, lower blood sugar, and lead to dramatic weight loss. We also know that they come with side effects, which can include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. But we are still learning about some of their other effects. On the one hand, these seemingly miraculous drugs appear to improve health in other ways, helping to protect against heart failure, kidney disease, and potentially even substance-use disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer.
But on the other, they appear to be harmful to some people. Their use has been linked to serious conditions, pregnancy complications, and even some deaths. This week let’s take a look at what weight-loss drugs can do. Ozempic, Wegovy, and other similar drugs are known as GLP-1 agonists; they mimic a chemical made in the intestine, GLP-1, that increases insulin and lowers blood levels of glucose. Originally developed to treat diabetes, they are now known to be phenomenal at suppressing appetite. One key trial, published in 2015, found that over the course of around a year, people who took one particular drug lost between around 4.7% and 6% of their body weight, depending on the dose they took.
Newer versions of that drug were shown to have even bigger effects. A 2021 trial of semaglutide—the active ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy—found that people who took it for 68 weeks lost around 15% of their body weight—equivalent to around 15 kilograms. But there appear to be other benefits, too. In 2024, an enormous study that included 17,604 people in 41 countries found that semaglutide appeared to reduce heart failure in people who were overweight or obese and had cardiovascular disease. That same year, the US approved Wegovy to “reduce the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, and stroke in [overweight] adults with cardiovascular disease.” This year, Ozempic was approved to reduce the risk of kidney disease. And it doesn’t end there. The many users of GLP-1 agonists have been reporting some unexpected positive side effects. Not only are they less interested in food, but they are less interested in alcohol, tobacco, opioids, and other addictive substances. The more we learn about GLP-1 agonists, the more miraculous they seem to be. What can’t they do?! you might wonder. Unfortunately, like any drug, GLP-1 agonists carry safety warnings. They can often cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea ,and their use has also been linked to inflammation of the pancreas—a condition that can be fatal. They increase the risk of gall bladder disease. There are other concerns. Weight-loss drugs can help people trim down on fat, but lean muscle can make up around 10% of the body weight lost by people taking them. That muscle is important, especially as we get older. Muscle loss can affect strength and mobility, and it also can also leave people more vulnerable to falls, which are the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. And, as with most drugs, we don’t fully understand the effects weight-loss drugs might have in pregnancy. That’s important; even though the drugs are not recommended during pregnancy, health agencies point out that some people who take these drugs might be more likely to get pregnant, perhaps because they interfere with the effects of contraceptive drugs. And we don’t really know how they might affect the development of a fetus, if at all. A study published in January found that people who took the drugs either before or during pregnancy didn’t seem to face increased risk of birth defects. But other research due to be presented at a conference in the coming days found that such individuals were more likely to experience obstetrical complications and preeclampsia. So yes, while the drugs are incredibly helpful for many people, they are not for everyone. It might be fashionable to be thin, but it’s not necessarily healthy. No drug comes without risks. Even one that 1 in 8 American adults have taken. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Read More »

This battery recycling company is now cleaning up AI data centers

In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small AI data center. Redwood Materials, one of the US’s largest battery recycling companies, showed off this array of energy storage modules, sitting on cinder blocks and wrapped in waterproof plastic, during a press tour at its headquarters on June 26.  The event marked the launch of the company’s new business line, Redwood Energy, which will initially repurpose (rather than recycle) batteries with years of remaining life to create renewable-powered microgrids. Such small-scale energy systems can operate on or off the larger electricity grid, providing electricity for businesses or communities. Redwood Materials says many of the batteries it takes in for processing retain more than half their capacity. 
“We can extract a lot more value from that material by using it as an energy storage project before recycling it,” JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and chief executive, said at the event.  This first microgrid, housed at the company’s facility in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, is powered by solar panels and capable of generating 64 megawatt-hours of electricity, making it one of the nation’s largest such systems. That power flows to Crusoe, a cryptocurrency miner that pivoted into developing AI data centers, which has built a facility with 2,000 graphics processing units adjacent to the lot of repurposed EV batteries. 
(That’s tiny as modern data centers go: Crusoe is developing a $500 billion AI data center for OpenAI and others in Abilene, Texas, where it expects to install 100,000 GPUs across its first two facilities by the end of the year, according to Forbes.) Redwood’s project underscores a growing interest in powering data centers partially or entirely outside the electric grid. Not only would such microgrids be quicker to build than conventional power plants, but consumer ratepayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the cost of new grid-connected power plants developed to serve AI data centers. Since Redwood’s batteries are used, and have already been removed from vehicles, the company says its microgrids should also be substantially cheaper than ones assembled from new batteries. COURTESY REDWOOD MATERIALS Redwood Energy’s microgrids could generate electricity for any kind of operation. But the company stresses they’re an ideal fit for addressing the growing energy needs and climate emissions of data centers. The energy consumption of such facilities could double by 2030, mainly due to the ravenous appetite of AI, according to an April report by the International Energy Agency. “Storage is this perfectly positioned technology, especially low-cost storage, to attack each of those problems,” Straubel says. The Tahoe Reno Industrial Center is the epicenter of a data center development boom in northern Nevada that has sparked growing concerns about climate emissions and excessive demand for energy and water, as MIT Technology Review recently reported. Straubel says the litany of data centers emerging around it “would be logical targets” for its new business line, but adds there are growth opportunities across the expanding data center clusters in Texas, Virginia and the Midwest as well. “We’re talking to a broad cross section of those companies,” he says. Crusoe, which also provides cloud services, recently announced a joint venture with the investment firm Engine No. 1 to provide “powered data center real estate solutions” to AI companies by constructing 4.5 gigawatts of new natural-gas plants.

Redwood’s microgrid should provide more than 99% of the electricity Crusoe’s local facilities need. In the event of extended periods with little sunlight, a rarity in the Nevada desert, the company could still draw from the standard power grid. Cully Cavness, cofounder and operating chief of Crusoe, says the company is already processing AI queries and producing conclusions for its customers at the Nevada facility. (Its larger data centers are dedicated to the more computationally intensive process of training AI models.) Redwood’s new business division offers a test case for a strategy laid out in a paper late last year, which highlighted the potential for solar-powered microgrids to supply the energy that AI data centers need. The authors of that paper found that microgrids could be built much faster than natural-gas plants and would generally be only a little more expensive as an energy source for data centers, so long as the facilities could occasionally rely on natural-gas generators to get them through extended periods of low sunlight. If solar-powered microgrids were used to power 30 gigawatts of new AI data centers, with just 10% backup from natural gas, it would eliminate 400 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions relative to running the centers entirely on natural gas, the study found.  “Having a data center running off solar and storage is more or less what we were advocating for in our paper,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate lead at the payments company Stripe and a coauthor of the paper. He hopes that Redwood’s new microgrid will establish that “these sorts of systems work in the real world” and encourage other data center developers to look for similar solutions.  Redwood Materials says electric vehicles are its fastest-growing source of used batteries, and it estimates that more than 100,000 EVs will come off US roads this year. The company says it tests each battery to determine whether it can be reused. Those that qualify will be integrated into its modular storage systems, which can then store up energy from wind and solar installations or connect to the grid. As those batteries reach the end of their life, they’ll be swapped out of the microgrids and moved into the company’s recycling process. 
Redwood says it already has enough reusable batteries to build a gigawatt-hour’s worth of microgrids, capable of powering a little more than a million homes for an hour. In addition, the company’s new division has begun designing microgrids that are 10 times larger than the one it unveiled this week. Straubel expects Redwood Energy to become a major business line, conceivably surpassing the company’s core recycling operation someday. “We’re confident this is the lowest-cost solution out there,” he says.

Read More »

The hidden scaling cliff that’s about to break your agent rollouts

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Enterprises that want to build and scale agents also need to embrace another reality: agents aren’t built like other software.  Agents are “categorically different” in how they’re built, how they operate, and how they’re improved, according to Writer CEO and co-founder May Habib. This means ditching the traditional software development life cycle when dealing with adaptive systems. “Agents don’t reliably follow rules,” Habib said on Wednesday while on stage at VB Transform. “They are outcome-driven. They interpret. They adapt. And the behavior really only emerges in real-world environments.” Knowing what works — and what doesn’t work — comes from Habib’s experience helping hundreds of enterprise clients build and scale enterprise-grade agents. According to Habib, more than 350 of the Fortune 1000 are Writer customers, and more than half of the Fortune 500 will be scaling agents with Writer by the end of 2025. Using non-deterministic tech to produce powerful outputs can even be “really nightmarish,” Habib said — especially when trying to scale agents systemically. Even if enterprise teams can spin up agents without product managers and designers, Habib thinks a “PM mindset” is still needed for collaborating, building, iterating and maintaining agents. “Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, IT is going to be left holding the bag if they don’t lead their business counterparts into that new way of building.” >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<< Why goal-based agents is the right approach  One of the shifts in thinking includes understanding the outcome-based nature of agents. For example, she said that many customers request agents to assist their legal teams in reviewing or redlining contracts. But that’s too open-ended. Instead, a goal-oriented approach means designing an agent

Read More »

Walmart cracks enterprise AI at scale: Thousands of use cases, one framework

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Walmart continues to make strides in cracking the code on deploying agentic AI at enterprise scale. Their secret? Treating trust as an engineering requirement, not some compliance checkbox you tick at the end. During the “Trust in the Algorithm: How Walmart’s Agentic AI Is Redefining Consumer Confidence and Retail Leadership” session at VB Transform 2025, Walmart’s VP of Emerging Technology Desirée Gosby, explained how the retail giant operationalizes thousands of AI use cases. One of the retailer’s primary objectives is to consistently maintain and strengthen customer confidence among its 255 million weekly shoppers. “We see this as a pretty big inflection point, very similar to the internet,” Gosby told industry analyst Susan Etlinger during Tuesday’s morning session. “It’s as profound in terms of how we’re actually going to operate, how we actually do work.” The session delivered valuable lessons learned from Walmart’s AI deployment experiences. Implicit throughout the discussion is the retail giant’s continual search for new ways to apply distributed systems architecture principles, thereby avoiding the creation of technical debt. >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<< Four-stakeholder framework structures AI deployment Walmart’s AI architecture rejects horizontal platforms for targeted stakeholder solutions. Each group receives purpose-built tools that address specific operational frictions. Customers engage Sparky for natural language shopping. Field associates get inventory and workflow optimization tools. Merchants access decision-support systems for category management. Sellers receive business integration capabilities. “And then, of course, we’ve got developers, and really, you know, giving them the superpowers and charging them up with, you know, the new agent of tools,” Gosby explained. “We have hundreds, if not thousands, of different use cases across the company that we’re bringing to life,” Gosby revealed.

Read More »

What enterprise leaders can learn from LinkedIn’s success with AI agents

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more AI agents are one of the hottest topics in tech right now — but how many enterprises have actually deployed and are actively using them?  LinkedIn says it has with its LinkedIn hiring assistant. Going beyond its popular recommender systems and AI-powered search, the company’s AI agent sources and recruits job candidates through a simple natural language interface.  “This is not a demo product,” Deepak Agarwal, chief AI officer at LinkedIn, said onstage this week at VB Transform. “This is live. It’s saving a lot of time for recruiters so that they can spend their time doing what they really love to do, which is nurturing candidates and hiring the best talent for the job.” >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<< Relying on a multi-agent system LinkedIn is taking a multi-agent approach, using what Agarwal described as a collection of agents collaborating to get the job done. A supervisor agent orchestrates all the tasks among other agents, including intake and sourcing agents that are “good at one and only one job.”  All communication happens through the supervisor agent, which takes input from human users around role qualifications and other details. That agent then provides context to a sourcing agent, which culls through recruiter search stacks and sources candidates along with descriptions on why they might be a good fit for the job. That information is then returned to the supervisor agent, which begins actively interacting with the human user.  “Then you can collaborate with it, right?” said Agarwal. “You can modify it. No longer do you have to talk to the platform in keywords. You can talk to the platform in natural language, and it’s going

Read More »

Lessons learned from agentic AI leaders reveal critical deployment strategies for enterprises

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Companies are rushing AI agents into production — and many of them will fail. But the reason has nothing to do with their AI models. On day two of VB Transform 2025, industry leaders shared hard-won lessons from deploying AI agents at scale. A panel moderated by Joanne Chen, general partner at Foundation Capital, included Sean Malhotra, CTO at Rocket Companies, which uses agents across the home ownership journey from mortgage underwriting to customer chat; Shailesh Nalawadi, head of product at Sendbird, which builds agentic customer service experiences for companies across multiple verticals; and Thys Waanders, SVP of AI transformation at Cognigy, whose platform automates customer experiences for large enterprise contact centers. Their shared discovery: Companies that build evaluation and orchestration infrastructure first are successful, while those rushing to production with powerful models fail at scale. >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<< The ROI reality: Beyond simple cost cutting A key part of engineering AI agent for success is understanding the return on investment (ROI). Early AI agent deployments focused on cost reduction. While that remains a key component, enterprise leaders now report more complex ROI patterns that demand different technical architectures. Cost reduction wins Malhotra shared the most dramatic cost example from Rocket Companies. “We had an engineer [who] in about two days of work was able to build a simple agent to handle a very niche problem called ‘transfer tax calculations’ in the mortgage underwriting part of the process. And that two days of effort saved us a million dollars a year in expense,” he said. For Cognigy, Waanders noted that cost per call is a key metric. He said that if AI agents

Read More »

CFOs want AI that pays: real metrics, not marketing demos

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

Recent surveys and VentureBeat’s conversations with CFOs suggest the honeymoon phase of AI is rapidly drawing to a close. While 2024 was dominated by pilot programs and proof-of-concept demonstrations, in mid-2025, the pressure for measurable results is intensifying, even as CFO interest in AI remains high. 

According to a KPMG survey of 300 U.S. financial executives, investor pressure to demonstrate ROI on generative AI investments has increased significantly. For 90% of organizations, investor pressure is considered “important or very important” for demonstrating ROI in Q1 2025, a sharp increase from 68% in Q4 2024. This indicates a strong and intensifying demand for measurable returns.

Meanwhile, according to a Bain Capital Ventures survey of 50 CFOs, 79% plan to increase their AI budgets this year, with 94% believing gen AI can strongly benefit at least one finance activity. This reveals a telling pattern in how CFOs are currently measuring AI value. Those who have adopted gen AI tools report seeing initial returns primarily through efficiency gains.“We created a custom workflow that automates vendor identification to quickly prepare journal entries,” said Andrea Ellis, CFO of Fanatics Betting and Gaming. “This process used to take 20 hours during month-end close, and now, it takes us just 2 hours each month.”

Jason Whiting, CFO of Mercury Financial, echoed this efficiency focus: “Across the board, [the biggest benefit] has been the ability to increase speed of analysis. Gen AI hasn’t replaced anything, but it has made our existing processes and people better.”

But CFOs are now looking beyond simple time savings toward more strategic applications. 

The Bain data shows CFOs are most excited about applying AI to “long-standing pain points that prior generations of technology have been unable to solve.” Cosmin Pitigoi, CFO of Flywire, explained: “Forecasting trends based on large data sets has been around for a long time, but the issue has always been the model’s ability to explain the assumptions behind the forecast. AI can help not just with forecasting, but also with explaining what assumptions have changed over time.”

These recent surveys suggest that CFOs are becoming the primary gatekeepers for AI investment; however, they’re still developing the financial frameworks necessary to evaluate these investments properly. Those who develop robust evaluation methodologies first will likely gain significant competitive advantages. Those who don’t may find their AI enthusiasm outpacing their ability to measure and manage the returns.

Efficiency metrics: The first wave of AI value

The initial wave of AI value capture by finance departments has focused predominantly on efficiency metrics, with CFOs prioritizing measurable time and cost savings that deliver immediate returns. This focus on efficiency represents the low-hanging fruit of AI implementation — clear, quantifiable benefits that are easily tracked and communicated to stakeholders.

Drip Capital, a Silicon Valley-based fintech, exemplifies this approach with its AI implementation in trade finance operations. According to chief business officer Karl Boog, “We’ve been able to 30X our capacity with what we’ve done so far.” By automating document processing and enhancing risk assessment through large language models (LLMs), the company achieved a remarkable 70% productivity boost while maintaining critical human oversight for complex decisions.

KPMG research indicates this approach is widespread, with one retail company audit committee director noting how automation has improved operational efficiency and ROI. This sentiment is echoed across industries as finance leaders seek to justify their AI investments with tangible productivity improvements.

These efficiency improvements translate directly to the bottom line. Companies across sectors — from insurance to oil and gas — report that AI helps identify process inefficiencies, leading to substantial organizational cost savings and improved expense management.

Beyond simple cost reduction, CFOs are developing more sophisticated efficiency metrics to evaluate AI investments. These include time-to-completion ratios comparing pre- and post-AI implementation timelines, cost-per-transaction analyses measuring reductions in resource expenditure and labor hour reallocation metrics tracking how team members shift from manual data processing to higher-value analytical work.

However, leading CFOs recognize that while efficiency metrics provide a solid foundation for initial ROI calculations, they represent just the beginning of AI’s potential value. As finance leaders gain confidence in measuring these direct returns, they’re developing more comprehensive frameworks to capture AI’s full strategic value — moving well beyond the efficiency calculations that characterized early adoption phases.

Beyond efficiency: The new financial metrics

As CFOs move beyond the initial fascination with AI-driven efficiency gains, they’re developing new financial metrics that more comprehensively capture AI’s business impact. This evolution reflects a maturing approach to AI investments, with finance leaders adopting more sophisticated evaluation frameworks that align with broader corporate objectives.

The surveys highlight a notable shift in primary ROI metrics. While efficiency gains remain important, we see productivity metrics are now overtaking pure profitability measures as the chief priority for AI initiatives in 2025. This represents a fundamental change in how CFOs assess value, focusing on AI’s ability to enhance human capabilities rather than simply reduce costs.

Time to value (TTV) is emerging as a critical new metric in investment decisions. Only about one-third of AI leaders anticipate being able to evaluate ROI within six months, making rapid time-to-value a key consideration when comparing different AI opportunities. This metric will help CFOs prioritize quick-win projects that can deliver measurable returns while building organizational confidence in larger AI initiatives.

Data quality measurements will increasingly be incorporated into evaluation frameworks, with 64% of leaders citing data quality as their most significant AI challenge. Forward-thinking CFOs now incorporate data readiness assessments and ongoing data quality metrics into their AI business cases, recognizing that even the most promising AI applications will fail without high-quality data inputs.

Adoption rate metrics have also become standard in AI evaluation. Finance leaders track how quickly and extensively AI tools are being utilized across departments, using this as a leading indicator of potential value realization. These metrics help identify implementation challenges early and inform decisions about additional training or system modifications.

“The biggest benefit has been the ability to increase speed of analysis,” noted Jason Whiting of Mercury Financial. This perspective represents the bridge between simple efficiency metrics and more sophisticated value assessments — recognizing that AI’s value often comes not from replacing existing processes but enhancing them.

Some CFOs are implementing comprehensive ROI formulas that incorporate both direct and indirect benefits (VAI Consulting):

ROI = (Net Benefit / Total Cost) × 100

Where net benefit equals the sum of direct financial benefits plus an estimated value of indirect benefits, minus total investment costs. This approach acknowledges that AI’s full value encompasses both quantifiable savings and intangible strategic advantages, such as improved decision quality and enhanced customer experience.

For companies with more mature AI implementations, these new metrics are becoming increasingly standardized and integrated into regular financial reporting. The most sophisticated organizations now produce AI value scorecards that track multiple dimensions of performance, linking AI system outputs directly to business outcomes and financial results.

As CFOs refine these new financial metrics, they’re creating a more nuanced picture of AI’s true value — one that extends well beyond the simple time and cost savings that dominated early adoption phases.

Amortization timelines: Recalibrating investment horizons

CFOs are fundamentally rethinking how they amortize AI investments, developing new approaches that acknowledge the unique characteristics of these technologies. Unlike traditional IT systems with predictable depreciation schedules, AI investments often yield evolving returns that increase as systems learn and improve over time. Leading finance executives now evaluate AI investments through the lens of sustainable competitive advantage — asking not just “How much will this save?” but “How will this transform our market position?”

“ROI directly correlates with AI maturity,” according to KPMG, which found that 61% of AI leaders report higher-than-expected ROI, compared with only 33% of beginners and implementers. This correlation is prompting CFOs to develop more sophisticated amortization models that anticipate accelerating returns as AI deployments mature.

The difficulty in establishing accurate amortization timelines remains a significant barrier to AI adoption. “Uncertain ROI/difficulty developing a business case” is cited as a challenge by 33% of executives, particularly those in the early stages of AI implementation. This uncertainty has led to a more cautious, phased approach to investment.

To address this challenge, leading finance teams are implementing pilot-to-scale methodologies to validate ROI before full deployment. This approach enables CFOs to gather accurate performance data, refine their amortization estimates, and make more informed scaling decisions.

The timeframe for expected returns varies significantly based on the type of AI implementation. Automation-focused AI typically delivers more predictable short-term returns, whereas strategic applications, such as improved forecasting, may have longer, less certain payback periods. Progressive CFOs are developing differentiated amortization schedules that reflect these variations rather than applying one-size-fits-all approaches.

Some finance leaders are adopting rolling amortization models that are adjusted quarterly based on actual performance data. This approach acknowledges the dynamic nature of AI returns and allows for ongoing refinement of financial projections. Rather than setting fixed amortization schedules at the outset, these models incorporate learning curves and performance improvements into evolving financial forecasts.

One entertainment company implemented a gen AI-driven tool that scans financial developments, identifies anomalies and automatically generates executive-ready alerts. While the immediate ROI stemmed from efficiency gains, the CFO developed an amortization model that also factored in the system’s increasing accuracy over time and its expanding application across various business units.

Many CFOs are also factoring in how AI investments contribute to building proprietary data assets that appreciate rather than depreciate over time. Unlike traditional technology investments that lose value as they age, AI systems and their associated data repositories often become more valuable as they accumulate training data and insights.

This evolving approach to amortization represents a significant departure from traditional IT investment models. By developing more nuanced timelines that reflect AI’s unique characteristics, CFOs are creating financial frameworks that better capture the true economic value of these investments and support a more strategic allocation of resources.

Strategic value integration: Linking AI to shareholder returns

Forward-thinking CFOs are moving beyond operational metrics to integrate AI investments into broader frameworks for creating shareholder value. This shift represents a fundamental evolution in how financial executives evaluate AI — positioning it not merely as a cost-saving technology but as a strategic asset that drives enterprise growth and competitive differentiation.

This more sophisticated approach assesses AI’s impact on three critical dimensions of shareholder value: revenue acceleration, risk reduction and strategic optionality. Each dimension requires different metrics and evaluation frameworks, creating a more comprehensive picture of AI’s contribution to enterprise value.

Revenue acceleration metrics focus on how AI enhances top-line growth by improving customer acquisition, increasing the share of wallet and expanding market reach. These metrics track AI’s influence on sales velocity, conversion rates, customer lifetime value and price optimization — connecting algorithmic capabilities directly to revenue performance.

Risk reduction frameworks assess how AI enhances forecasting accuracy, improves scenario planning, strengthens fraud detection and optimizes capital allocation. By quantifying risk-adjusted returns, CFOs can demonstrate how AI investments reduce earnings volatility and improve business resilience — factors that directly impact valuation multiples.

Perhaps most importantly, leading CFOs are developing methods to value strategic optionality — the capacity of AI investments to create new business possibilities that didn’t previously exist. This approach recognizes that AI often delivers its most significant value by enabling entirely new business models or unlocking previously inaccessible market opportunities.

To effectively communicate this strategic value, finance leaders are creating new reporting mechanisms tailored to different stakeholders. Some are establishing comprehensive AI value scorecards that link system performance to tangible business outcomes, incorporating both lagging indicators (financial results) and leading indicators (operational improvements) that predict future financial performance.

Executive dashboards now regularly feature AI-related metrics alongside traditional financial KPIs, making AI more visible to senior leadership. These integrated views enable executives to understand how AI investments align with strategic priorities and shareholder expectations.

For board and investor communication, CFOs are developing structured approaches that highlight both immediate financial returns and long-term strategic advantages. Rather than treating AI as a specialized technology investment, these frameworks position it as a fundamental business capability that drives sustainable competitive differentiation.

By developing these integrated strategic value frameworks, CFOs ensure that AI investments are evaluated not only on their immediate operational impact but their contribution to the company’s long-term competitive position and shareholder returns. This more sophisticated approach is rapidly becoming a key differentiator between companies that treat AI as a tactical tool and those that leverage it as a strategic asset.

Risk-adjusted returns: The risk management equation

As AI investments grow in scale and strategic importance, CFOs are incorporating increasingly sophisticated risk assessments into their financial evaluations. This evolution reflects the unique challenges AI presents — balancing unprecedented opportunities against novel risks that traditional financial models often fail to capture.

The risk landscape for AI investments is multifaceted and evolving rapidly. Recent surveys indicate that risk management, particularly in relation to data privacy, is expected to be the biggest challenge to generative AI strategies for 82% of leaders in 2025. This concern is followed closely by data quality issues (64%) and questions of trust in AI outputs (35%).

Forward-thinking finance leaders are developing comprehensive risk-adjusted return frameworks that quantify and incorporate these various risk factors. Rather than treating risk as a binary go/no-go consideration, these frameworks assign monetary values to different risk categories and integrate them directly into ROI calculations.

Data security and privacy vulnerabilities represent a primary concern, with 57% of executives citing these as top challenges. CFOs are now calculating potential financial exposure from data breaches or privacy violations and factoring these costs into their investment analyses. This includes estimating potential regulatory fines, litigation expenses, remediation costs and reputational damage.

Regulatory compliance represents another significant risk factor. With many executives concerned about ensuring compliance with changing regulations, financial evaluations increasingly include contingency allocations for regulatory adaptation. An aerospace company executive noted that “complex regulations make it difficult for us to achieve AI readiness,” highlighting how regulatory uncertainty complicates financial planning.

Beyond these external risks, CFOs are quantifying implementation risks such as adoption failures, integration challenges and technical performance issues. By assigning probability-weighted costs to these scenarios, they create more realistic projections that acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in AI deployment.

The “black box” nature of certain AI technologies presents unique challenges for risk assessment. As stakeholders become increasingly wary of trusting AI results without understanding the underlying logic, CFOs are developing frameworks to evaluate transparency risks and their potential financial implications. This includes estimating the costs of additional validation procedures, explainability tools and human oversight mechanisms.

Some companies are adopting formal risk-adjustment methodologies borrowed from other industries. One approach applies a modified weighted average cost of capital (WACC) that incorporates AI-specific risk premiums. Others use risk-adjusted net present value calculations that explicitly account for the unique uncertainty profiles of different AI applications.

The transportation sector provides an illustrative example of this evolving approach. As one chief data officer noted, “The data received from AI requires human verification, and this is an important step that we overlook.” This recognition has led transportation CFOs to build verification costs directly into their financial models rather than treating them as optional add-ons.

By incorporating these sophisticated risk adjustments into their financial evaluations, CFOs are creating more realistic assessments of AI’s true economic value. This approach enables more confident investment decisions and helps organizations maintain appropriate risk levels as they scale their AI capabilities.

The CFO’s AI evaluation playbook: From experiments to enterprise value

As AI transitions from experimental projects to enterprise-critical systems, CFOs are developing more disciplined, comprehensive frameworks for evaluating these investments. The most successful approaches strike a balance between rigor and flexibility, acknowledging both the unique characteristics of AI and its integration into broader business strategy.

The emerging CFO playbook for AI evaluation contains several key elements that differentiate leaders from followers.

First is the implementation of multi-dimensional ROI frameworks that capture both efficiency gains and strategic value creation. Rather than focusing exclusively on cost reduction, these frameworks incorporate productivity enhancements, decision quality improvements and competitive differentiation into a holistic value assessment.

Second is the adoption of phased evaluation approaches that align with AI’s evolutionary nature. Leading CFOs establish clear metrics for each development stage — from initial pilots to scaled deployment — with appropriate risk adjustments and expected returns for each phase. This approach recognizes that AI investments often follow a J-curve, with value accelerating as systems mature and applications expand.

Third is the integration of AI metrics into standard financial planning and reporting processes. Rather than treating AI as a special category with unique evaluation criteria, forward-thinking finance leaders are incorporating AI performance indicators into regular budget reviews, capital allocation decisions and investor communications. This normalization signals AI’s transition from experimental technology to core business capability.

The most sophisticated organizations are also implementing formal governance structures that connect AI investments directly to strategic objectives. These governance frameworks ensure that AI initiatives remain aligned with enterprise priorities while providing the necessary oversight to manage risks effectively. By establishing clear accountability for both technical performance and business outcomes, these structures help prevent the disconnection between AI capabilities and business value that has plagued many early adopters.

As investors and boards increasingly scrutinize AI investments, CFOs are developing more transparent reporting approaches that clearly communicate both current returns and future potential. These reports typically include standardized metrics that track AI’s contribution to operational efficiency, customer experience, employee productivity and strategic differentiation — providing a comprehensive view of how these investments enhance shareholder value.

The organizations gaining a competitive advantage through AI are those where CFOs have moved to become strategic partners in AI transformation. These finance leaders work closely with technology and business teams to identify high-value use cases, establish appropriate success metrics and create financial frameworks that support responsible innovation while maintaining appropriate risk management.

The CFOs who master these new evaluation frameworks will drive the next wave of AI adoption — one characterized not by speculative experimentation but by disciplined investment in capabilities that deliver sustainable competitive advantage. As AI continues to transform business models and market dynamics, these financial frameworks will become increasingly critical to organizational success.

The CFO’s AI evaluation framework: Key metrics and considerations

Evaluation dimensionTraditional metricsEmerging AI metricsKey considerationsEfficiency• Cost reduction• Time savings• Headcount impact• Cost-per-output• Process acceleration ratio• Labor reallocation value• Measure both direct and indirect efficiency gains• Establish clear pre-implementation baselines• Track productivity improvements beyond cost savingsAmortization• Fixed depreciation schedules• Standard ROI timelines• Uniform capital allocation• Learning curve adjustments• Value acceleration factors• Pilot-to-scale validation• Recognize AI’s improving returns over time• Apply different timelines for different AI applications• Implement phase-gated funding tied to performanceStrategic Value• Revenue impact• Margin improvement• Market share• Decision quality metrics• Data asset appreciation• Strategic optionality value• Connect AI investments to competitive differentiation• Quantify both current and future strategic benefits• Measure contribution to innovation capabilitiesRisk management• Implementation risk• Technical performance risk• Financial exposure• Data privacy risk premium• Regulatory compliance factor• Explainability/transparency risk• Apply risk-weighted adjustments to projected returns• Quantify mitigation costs and residual risk• Factor in emerging regulatory and ethical considerationsGovernance• Project-based oversight• Technical success metrics• Siloed accountability• Enterprise AI governance• Cross-functional value metrics• Integrated performance dashboards• Align AI governance with corporate governance• Establish clear ownership of business outcomes• Create transparent reporting mechanisms for all stakeholders

Read More »

Why your enterprise AI strategy needs both open and closed models: The TCO reality check

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

For the last two decades, enterprises have had a choice between open-source and closed proprietary technologies.

The original choice for enterprises was primarily centered on operating systems, with Linux offering an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. In the developer realm, open-source languages like Python and JavaScript dominate, as open-source technologies, including Kubernetes, are standards in the cloud.

The same type of choice between open and closed is now facing enterprises for AI, with multiple options for both types of models. On the proprietary closed-model front are some of the biggest, most widely used models on the planet, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the open-source side are models like Meta’s Llama, IBM Granite, Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek.

Understanding when to use an open or closed model is a critical choice for enterprise AI decision-makers in 2025 and beyond. The choice has both financial and customization implications for either options that enterprises need to understand and consider.

Understanding the difference between open and closed licenses

There is no shortage of hyperbole around the decades-old rivalry between open and closed licenses. But what does it all actually mean for enterprise users?

A closed-source proprietary technology, like OpenAI’s GPT 4o for example, does not have model code, training data, or model weights open or available for anyone to see. The model is not easily available to be fine-tuned and generally speaking, it is only available for real enterprise usage with a cost (sure, ChatGPT has a free tier, but that’s not going to cut it for a real enterprise workload).

An open technology, like Meta Llama, IBM Granite, or DeepSeek, has openly available code. Enterprises can use the models freely, generally without restrictions, including fine-tuning and customizations.

Rohan Gupta, a principal with Deloitte, told VentureBeat that the open vs. closed source debate isn’t unique or native to AI, nor is it likely to be resolved anytime soon. 

Gupta explained that closed source providers typically offer several wrappers around their model that enable ease of use, simplified scaling, more seamless upgrades and downgrades and a steady stream of enhancements. They also provide significant developer support. That includes documentation as well as hands-on advice and often delivers tighter integrations with both infrastructure and applications. In exchange, an enterprise pays a premium for these services.

 “Open-source models, on the other hand, can provide greater control, flexibility and customization options, and are supported by a vibrant, enthusiastic developer ecosystem,” Gupta said. “These models are increasingly accessible via fully managed APIs across cloud vendors, broadening their distribution.”

Making the choice between open and closed model for enterprise AI

The question that many enterprise users might ask is what’s better: an open or a closed model? The answer however is not necessarily one or the other.

“We don’t view this as a binary choice,” David Guarrera, Generative AI Leader at EY Americas, told VentureBeat. ” Open vs closed is increasingly a fluid design space, where models are selected, or even automatically orchestrated, based on tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, cost, interpretability and security at different points in a workflow.” 

Guarrera noted that closed models limit how deeply organizations can optimize or adapt behavior. Proprietary model vendors often restrict fine-tuning, charge premium rates, or hide the process in black boxes. While API-based tools simplify integration, they abstract away much of the control, making it harder to build highly specific or interpretable systems.

In contrast, open-source models allow for targeted fine-tuning, guardrail design and optimization for specific use cases. This matters more in an agentic future, where models are no longer monolithic general-purpose tools, but interchangeable components within dynamic workflows. The ability to finely shape model behavior, at low cost and with full transparency, becomes a major competitive advantage when deploying task-specific agents or tightly regulated solutions.

“In practice, we foresee an agentic future where model selection is abstracted away,” Guarrera said.

For example, a user may draft an email with one AI tool, summarize legal docs with another, search enterprise documents with a fine-tuned open-source model and interact with AI locally through an on-device LLM, all without ever knowing which model is doing what. 

“The real question becomes: what mix of models best suits your workflow’s specific demands?” Guarrera said.

Considering total cost of ownership

With open models, the basic idea is that the model is freely available for use. While in contrast, enterprises always pay for closed models.

The reality when it comes to considering total cost of ownership (TCO) is more nuanced.

Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners explained to VentureBeat that TCO has many different layers. A few key considerations include infrastructure hosting costs and engineering: Are the open-source models self-hosted by the enterprise or the cloud provider? How much engineering, including fine-tuning, guard railing and security testing, is needed to operationalize the model safely? 

Akkiraju noted that fine-tuning an open weights model can also sometimes be a very complex task. Closed frontier model companies spend enormous engineering effort to ensure performance across multiple tasks. In his view, unless enterprises deploy similar engineering expertise, they will face a complex balancing act when fine-tuning open source models. This creates cost implications when organizations choose their model deployment strategy. For example, enterprises can fine-tune multiple model versions for different tasks or use one API for multiple tasks.

Ryan Gross, Head of Data & Applications at cloud native services provider Caylent told VentureBeat that from his perspective, licensing terms don’t matter, except for in edge case scenarios. The largest restrictions often pertain to model availability when data residency requirements are in place. In this case, deploying an open model on infrastructure like Amazon SageMaker may be the only way to get a state-of-the-art model that still complies. When it comes to TCO, Gross noted that the tradeoff lies between per-token costs and hosting and maintenance costs. 

“There is a clear break-even point where the economics switch from closed to open models being cheaper,” Gross said. 

In his view, for most organizations, closed models, with the hosting and scaling solved on the organization’s behalf, will have a lower TCO. However, for large enterprises, SaaS companies with very high demand on their LLMs, but simpler use-cases requiring frontier performance, or AI-centric product companies, hosting distilled open models can be more cost-effective.

How one enterprise software developer evaluated open vs closed models

Josh Bosquez, CTO at Second Front Systems is among the many firms that have had to consider and evaluate open vs closed models. 

“We use both open and closed AI models, depending on the specific use case, security requirements and strategic objectives,” Bosquez told VentureBeat.

Bosquez explained that open models allow his firm to integrate cutting-edge capabilities without the time or cost of training models from scratch. For internal experimentation or rapid prototyping, open models help his firm to iterate quickly and benefit from community-driven advancements.

“Closed models, on the other hand, are our choice when data sovereignty, enterprise-grade support and security guarantees are essential, particularly for customer-facing applications or deployments involving sensitive or regulated environments,” he said. “These models often come from trusted vendors, who offer strong performance, compliance support, and self-hosting options.”

Bosquez said that the model selection process is cross-functional and risk-informed, evaluating not only technical fit but also data handling policies, integration requirements and long-term scalability.

Looking at TCO, he said that it varies significantly between open and closed models and neither approach is universally cheaper. 

“It depends on the deployment scope and organizational maturity,” Bosquez said. “Ultimately, we evaluate TCO not just on dollars spent, but on delivery speed, compliance risk and the ability to scale securely.”

What this means for enterprise AI strategy

For smart tech decision-makers evaluating AI investments in 2025, the open vs. closed debate isn’t about picking sides. It’s about building a strategic portfolio approach that optimizes for different use cases within your organization.

The immediate action items are straightforward. First, audit your current AI workloads and map them against the decision framework outlined by the experts, considering accuracy requirements, latency needs, cost constraints, security demands and compliance obligations for each use case. Second, honestly assess your organization’s engineering capabilities for model fine-tuning, hosting and maintenance, as this directly impacts your true total cost of ownership.

Third, begin experimenting with model orchestration platforms that can automatically route tasks to the most appropriate model, whether open or closed. This positions your organization for the agentic future that industry leaders, such as EY’s Guarrera, predict, where model selection becomes invisible to end-users.

Read More »

The inference trap: How cloud providers are eating your AI margins

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

AI has become the holy grail of modern companies. Whether it’s customer service or something as niche as pipeline maintenance, organizations in every domain are now implementing AI technologies — from foundation models to VLAs — to make things more efficient. The goal is straightforward: automate tasks to deliver outcomes more efficiently and save money and resources simultaneously.

However, as these projects transition from the pilot to the production stage, teams encounter a hurdle they hadn’t planned for: cloud costs eroding their margins. The sticker shock is so bad that what once felt like the fastest path to innovation and competitive edge becomes an unsustainable budgetary blackhole – in no time. 

This prompts CIOs to rethink everything—from model architecture to deployment models—to regain control over financial and operational aspects. Sometimes, they even shutter the projects entirely, starting over from scratch.

But here’s the fact: while cloud can take costs to unbearable levels, it is not the villain. You just have to understand what type of vehicle (AI infrastructure) to choose to go down which road (the workload).

The cloud story — and where it works 

The cloud is very much like public transport (your subways and buses). You get on board with a simple rental model, and it instantly gives you all the resources—right from GPU instances to fast scaling across various geographies—to take you to your destination, all with minimal work and setup. 

The fast and easy access via a service model ensures a seamless start, paving the way to get the project off the ground and do rapid experimentation without the huge up-front capital expenditure of acquiring specialized GPUs. 

Most early-stage startups find this model lucrative as they need fast turnaround more than anything else, especially when they are still validating the model and determining product-market fit.

“You make an account, click a few buttons, and get access to servers. If you need a different GPU size, you shut down and restart the instance with the new specs, which takes minutes. If you want to run two experiments at once, you initialise two separate instances. In the early stages, the focus is on validating ideas quickly. Using the built-in scaling and experimentation frameworks provided by most cloud platforms helps reduce the time between milestones,” Rohan Sarin, who leads voice AI product at Speechmatics, told VentureBeat.

The cost of “ease”

While cloud makes perfect sense for early-stage usage, the infrastructure math becomes grim as the project transitions from testing and validation to real-world volumes. The scale of workloads makes the bills brutal — so much so that the costs can surge over 1000% overnight. 

This is particularly true in the case of inference, which not only has to run 24/7 to ensure service uptime but also scale with customer demand. 

On most occasions, Sarin explains, the inference demand spikes when other customers are also requesting GPU access, increasing the competition for resources. In such cases, teams either keep a reserved capacity to make sure they get what they need — leading to idle GPU time during non-peak hours — or suffer from latencies, impacting downstream experience.

Christian Khoury, the CEO of AI compliance platform EasyAudit AI, described inference as the new “cloud tax,” telling VentureBeat that he has seen companies go from $5K to $50K/month overnight, just from inference traffic.

It’s also worth noting that inference workloads involving LLMs, with token-based pricing, can trigger the steepest cost increases. This is because these models are non-deterministic and can generate different outputs when handling long-running tasks (involving large context windows). With continuous updates, it gets really difficult to forecast or control LLM inference costs.

Training these models, on its part, happens to be “bursty” (occurring in clusters), which does leave some room for capacity planning. However, even in these cases, especially as growing competition forces frequent retraining, enterprises can have massive bills from idle GPU time, stemming from overprovisioning.

“Training credits on cloud platforms are expensive, and frequent retraining during fast iteration cycles can escalate costs quickly. Long training runs require access to large machines, and most cloud providers only guarantee that access if you reserve capacity for a year or more. If your training run only lasts a few weeks, you still pay for the rest of the year,” Sarin explained.

And, it’s not just this. Cloud lock-in is very real. Suppose you have made a long-term reservation and bought credits from a provider. In that case, you’re locked in their ecosystem and have to use whatever they have on offer, even when other providers have moved to newer, better infrastructure. And, finally, when you get the ability to move, you may have to bear massive egress fees.

“It’s not just compute cost. You get…unpredictable autoscaling, and insane egress fees if you’re moving data between regions or vendors. One team was paying more to move data than to train their models,” Sarin emphasized.

So, what’s the workaround?

Given the constant infrastructure demand of scaling AI inference and the bursty nature of training, enterprises are moving to splitting the workloads — taking inference to colocation or on-prem stacks, while leaving training to the cloud with spot instances.

This isn’t just theory — it’s a growing movement among engineering leaders trying to put AI into production without burning through runway.

“We’ve helped teams shift to colocation for inference using dedicated GPU servers that they control. It’s not sexy, but it cuts monthly infra spend by 60–80%,” Khoury added. “Hybrid’s not just cheaper—it’s smarter.”

In one case, he said, a SaaS company reduced its monthly AI infrastructure bill from approximately $42,000 to just $9,000 by moving inference workloads off the cloud. The switch paid for itself in under two weeks.

Another team requiring consistent sub-50ms responses for an AI customer support tool discovered that cloud-based inference latency was insufficient. Shifting inference closer to users via colocation not only solved the performance bottleneck — but it halved the cost.

The setup typically works like this: inference, which is always-on and latency-sensitive, runs on dedicated GPUs either on-prem or in a nearby data center (colocation facility). Meanwhile, training, which is compute-intensive but sporadic, stays in the cloud, where you can spin up powerful clusters on demand, run for a few hours or days, and shut down. 

Broadly, it is estimated that renting from hyperscale cloud providers can cost three to four times more per GPU hour than working with smaller providers, with the difference being even more significant compared to on-prem infrastructure.

The other big bonus? Predictability. 

With on-prem or colocation stacks, teams also have full control over the number of resources they want to provision or add for the expected baseline of inference workloads. This brings predictability to infrastructure costs — and eliminates surprise bills. It also brings down the aggressive engineering effort to tune scaling and keep cloud infrastructure costs within reason. 

Hybrid setups also help reduce latency for time-sensitive AI applications and enable better compliance, particularly for teams operating in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and education — where data residency and governance are non-negotiable.

Hybrid complexity is real—but rarely a dealbreaker

As it has always been the case, the shift to a hybrid setup comes with its own ops tax. Setting up your own hardware or renting a colocation facility takes time, and managing GPUs outside the cloud requires a different kind of engineering muscle. 

However, leaders argue that the complexity is often overstated and is usually manageable in-house or through external support, unless one is operating at an extreme scale.

“Our calculations show that an on-prem GPU server costs about the same as six to nine months of renting the equivalent instance from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, even with a one-year reserved rate. Since the hardware typically lasts at least three years, and often more than five, this becomes cost-positive within the first nine months. Some hardware vendors also offer operational pricing models for capital infrastructure, so you can avoid upfront payment if cash flow is a concern,” Sarin explained.

Prioritize by need

For any company, whether a startup or an enterprise, the key to success when architecting – or re-architecting – AI infrastructure lies in working according to the specific workloads at hand. 

If you’re unsure about the load of different AI workloads, start with the cloud and keep a close eye on the associated costs by tagging every resource with the responsible team. You can share these cost reports with all managers and do a deep dive into what they are using and its impact on the resources. This data will then give clarity and help pave the way for driving efficiencies.

That said, remember that it’s not about ditching the cloud entirely; it’s about optimizing its use to maximize efficiencies. 

“Cloud is still great for experimentation and bursty training. But if inference is your core workload, get off the rent treadmill. Hybrid isn’t just cheaper… It’s smarter,” Khoury added. “Treat cloud like a prototype, not the permanent home. Run the math. Talk to your engineers. The cloud will never tell you when it’s the wrong tool. But your AWS bill will.”

Read More »

Model minimalism: The new AI strategy saving companies millions

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has made it easier for enterprises to envision the kinds of projects they can undertake, leading to a surge in pilot programs now transitioning to deployment. 

However, as these projects gained momentum, enterprises realized that the earlier LLMs they had used were unwieldy and, worse, expensive. 

Enter small language models and distillation. Models like Google’s Gemma family, Microsoft’s Phi and Mistral’s Small 3.1 allowed businesses to choose fast, accurate models that work for specific tasks. Enterprises can opt for a smaller model for particular use cases, allowing them to lower the cost of running their AI applications and potentially achieve a better return on investment. 

LinkedIn distinguished engineer Karthik Ramgopal told VentureBeat that companies opt for smaller models for a few reasons. 

“Smaller models require less compute, memory and faster inference times, which translates directly into lower infrastructure OPEX (operational expenditures) and CAPEX (capital expenditures) given GPU costs, availability and power requirements,” Ramgoapl said. “Task-specific models have a narrower scope, making their behavior more aligned and maintainable over time without complex prompt engineering.”

Model developers price their small models accordingly. OpenAI’s o4-mini costs $1.1 per million tokens for inputs and $4.4/million tokens for outputs, compared to the full o3 version at $10 for inputs and $40 for outputs. 

Enterprises today have a larger pool of small models, task-specific models and distilled models to choose from. These days, most flagship models offer a range of sizes. For example, the Claude family of models from Anthropic comprises Claude Opus, the largest model, Claude Sonnet, the all-purpose model, and Claude Haiku, the smallest version. These models are compact enough to operate on portable devices, such as laptops or mobile phones. 

The savings question

When discussing return on investment, though, the question is always: What does ROI look like? Should it be a return on the costs incurred or the time savings that ultimately means dollars saved down the line? Experts VentureBeat spoke to said ROI can be difficult to judge because some companies believe they’ve already reached ROI by cutting time spent on a task while others are waiting for actual dollars saved or more business brought in to say if AI investments have actually worked.

Normally, enterprises calculate ROI by a simple formula as described by Cognizant chief technologist Ravi Naarla in a post: ROI = (Benefits-Cost)/Costs. But with AI programs, the benefits are not immediately apparent. He suggests enterprises identify the benefits they expect to achieve, estimate these based on historical data, be realistic about the overall cost of AI, including hiring, implementation and maintenance, and understand you have to be in it for the long haul.

With small models, experts argue that these reduce implementation and maintenance costs, especially when fine-tuning models to provide them with more context for your enterprise.

Arijit Sengupta, founder and CEO of Aible, said that how people bring context to the models dictates how much cost savings they can get. For individuals who require additional context for prompts, such as lengthy and complex instructions, this can result in higher token costs. 

“You have to give models context one way or the other; there is no free lunch. But with large models, that is usually done by putting it in the prompt,” he said. “Think of fine-tuning and post-training as an alternative way of giving models context. I might incur $100 of post-training costs, but it’s not astronomical.”

Sengupta said they’ve seen about 100X cost reductions just from post-training alone, often dropping model use cost “from single-digit millions to something like $30,000.” He did point out that this number includes software operating expenses and the ongoing cost of the model and vector databases. 

“In terms of maintenance cost, if you do it manually with human experts, it can be expensive to maintain because small models need to be post-trained to produce results comparable to large models,” he said.

Experiments Aible conducted showed that a task-specific, fine-tuned model performs well for some use cases, just like LLMs, making the case that deploying several use-case-specific models rather than large ones to do everything is more cost-effective. 

The company compared a post-trained version of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct to a smaller 8B parameter option of the same model. The 70B model, post-trained for $11.30, was 84% accurate in automated evaluations and 92% in manual evaluations. Once fine-tuned to a cost of $4.58, the 8B model achieved 82% accuracy in manual assessment, which would be suitable for more minor, more targeted use cases. 

Cost factors fit for purpose

Right-sizing models does not have to come at the cost of performance. These days, organizations understand that model choice doesn’t just mean choosing between GPT-4o or Llama-3.1; it’s knowing that some use cases, like summarization or code generation, are better served by a small model.

Daniel Hoske, chief technology officer at contact center AI products provider Cresta, said starting development with LLMs informs potential cost savings better. 

“You should start with the biggest model to see if what you’re envisioning even works at all, because if it doesn’t work with the biggest model, it doesn’t mean it would with smaller models,” he said. 

Ramgopal said LinkedIn follows a similar pattern because prototyping is the only way these issues can start to emerge.

“Our typical approach for agentic use cases begins with general-purpose LLMs as their broad generalizationability allows us to rapidly prototype, validate hypotheses and assess product-market fit,” LinkedIn’s Ramgopal said. “As the product matures and we encounter constraints around quality, cost or latency, we transition to more customized solutions.”

In the experimentation phase, organizations can determine what they value most from their AI applications. Figuring this out enables developers to plan better what they want to save on and select the model size that best suits their purpose and budget. 

The experts cautioned that while it is important to build with models that work best with what they’re developing, high-parameter LLMs will always be more expensive. Large models will always require significant computing power. 

However, overusing small and task-specific models also poses issues. Rahul Pathak, vice president of data and AI GTM at AWS, said in a blog post that cost optimization comes not just from using a model with low compute power needs, but rather from matching a model to tasks. Smaller models may not have a sufficiently large context window to understand more complex instructions, leading to increased workload for human employees and higher costs. 

Sengupta also cautioned that some distilled models could be brittle, so long-term use may not result in savings. 

Constantly evaluate

Regardless of the model size, industry players emphasized the flexibility to address any potential issues or new use cases. So if they start with a large model and a smaller model with similar or better performance and lower cost, organizations cannot be precious about their chosen model. 

Tessa Burg, CTO and head of innovation at brand marketing company Mod Op, told VentureBeat that organizations must understand that whatever they build now will always be superseded by a better version. 

“We started with the mindset that the tech underneath the workflows that we’re creating, the processes that we’re making more efficient, are going to change. We knew that whatever model we use will be the worst version of a model.”

Burg said that smaller models helped save her company and its clients time in researching and developing concepts. Time saved, she said, that does lead to budget savings over time. She added that it’s a good idea to break out high-cost, high-frequency use cases for light-weight models.

Sengupta noted that vendors are now making it easier to switch between models automatically, but cautioned users to find platforms that also facilitate fine-tuning, so they don’t incur additional costs. 

Read More »

How runtime attacks turn profitable AI into budget black holes

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

AI’s promise is undeniable, but so are its blindsiding security costs at the inference layer. New attacks targeting AI’s operational side are quietly inflating budgets, jeopardizing regulatory compliance and eroding customer trust, all of which threaten the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership of enterprise AI deployments.

AI has captivated the enterprise with its potential for game-changing insights and efficiency gains. Yet, as organizations rush to operationalize their models, a sobering reality is emerging: The inference stage, where AI translates investment into real-time business value, is under siege. This critical juncture is driving up the total cost of ownership (TCO) in ways that initial business cases failed to predict.

Security executives and CFOs who greenlit AI projects for their transformative upside are now grappling with the hidden expenses of defending these systems. Adversaries have discovered that inference is where AI “comes alive” for a business, and it’s precisely where they can inflict the most damage. The result is a cascade of cost inflation: Breach containment can exceed $5 million per incident in regulated sectors, compliance retrofits run into the hundreds of thousands and trust failures can trigger stock hits or contract cancellations that decimate projected AI ROI. Without cost containment at inference, AI becomes an ungovernable budget wildcard.

The unseen battlefield: AI inference and exploding TCO

AI inference is rapidly becoming the “next insider risk,” Cristian Rodriguez, field CTO for the Americas at CrowdStrike, told the audience at RSAC 2025.

Other technology leaders echo this perspective and see a common blind spot in enterprise strategy. Vineet Arora, CTO at WinWire, notes that many organizations “focus intensely on securing the infrastructure around AI while inadvertently sidelining inference.” This oversight, he explains, “leads to underestimated costs for continuous monitoring systems, real-time threat analysis and rapid patching mechanisms.”

Another critical blind spot, according to Steffen Schreier, SVP of product and portfolio at Telesign, is “the assumption that third-party models are thoroughly vetted and inherently safe to deploy.”

He warned that in reality, “these models often haven’t been evaluated against an organization’s specific threat landscape or compliance needs,” which can lead to harmful or non-compliant outputs that erode brand trust. Schreier told VentureBeat that “inference-time vulnerabilities — like prompt injection, output manipulation or context leakage — can be exploited by attackers to produce harmful, biased or non-compliant outputs. This poses serious risks, especially in regulated industries, and can quickly erode brand trust.”

When inference is compromised, the fallout hits multiple fronts of TCO. Cybersecurity budgets spiral, regulatory compliance is jeopardized and customer trust erodes. Executive sentiment reflects this growing concern. In CrowdStrike’s State of AI in Cybersecurity survey, only 39% of respondents felt generative AI’s rewards clearly outweigh the risks, while 40% judged them comparable. This ambivalence underscores a critical finding: Safety and privacy controls have become top requirements for new gen AI initiatives, with a striking 90% of organizations now implementing or developing policies to govern AI adoption. The top concerns are no longer abstract; 26% cite sensitive data exposure and 25% fear adversarial attacks as key risks.

Security leaders exhibit mixed sentiments regarding the overall safety of gen AI, with top concerns centered on the exposure of sensitive data to LLMs (26%) and adversarial attacks on AI tools (25%).

Anatomy of an inference attack

The unique attack surface exposed by running AI models is being aggressively probed by adversaries. To defend against this, Schreier advises, “it is critical to treat every input as a potential hostile attack.” Frameworks like the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications catalogue these threats, which are no longer theoretical but active attack vectors impacting the enterprise:

Prompt injection (LLM01) and insecure output handling (LLM02): Attackers manipulate models via inputs or outputs. Malicious inputs can cause the model to ignore instructions or divulge proprietary code. Insecure output handling occurs when an application blindly trusts AI responses, allowing attackers to inject malicious scripts into downstream systems.

Training data poisoning (LLM03) and model poisoning: Attackers corrupt training data by sneaking in tainted samples, planting hidden triggers. Later, an innocuous input can unleash malicious outputs.

Model denial of service (LLM04): Adversaries can overwhelm AI models with complex inputs, consuming excessive resources to slow or crash them, resulting in direct revenue loss.

Supply chain and plugin vulnerabilities (LLM05 and LLM07): The AI ecosystem is built on shared components. For instance, a vulnerability in the Flowise LLM tool exposed private AI dashboards and sensitive data, including GitHub tokens and OpenAI API keys, on 438 servers.

Sensitive information disclosure (LLM06): Clever querying can extract confidential information from an AI model if it was part of its training data or is present in the current context.

Excessive agency (LLM08) and Overreliance (LLM09): Granting an AI agent unchecked permissions to execute trades or modify databases is a recipe for disaster if manipulated.

Model theft (LLM10): An organization’s proprietary models can be stolen through sophisticated extraction techniques — a direct assault on its competitive advantage.

Underpinning these threats are foundational security failures. Adversaries often log in with leaked credentials. In early 2024, 35% of cloud intrusions involved valid user credentials, and new, unattributed cloud attack attempts spiked 26%, according to the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report. A deepfake campaign resulted in a fraudulent $25.6 million transfer, while AI-generated phishing emails have demonstrated a 54% click-through rate, more than four times higher than those written by humans.

The OWASP framework illustrates how various LLM attack vectors target different components of an AI application, from prompt injection at the user interface to data poisoning in the training models and sensitive information disclosure from the datastore.

Back to basics: Foundational security for a new era

Securing AI requires a disciplined return to security fundamentals — but applied through a modern lens. “I think that we need to take a step back and ensure that the foundation and the fundamentals of security are still applicable,” Rodriguez argued. “The same approach you would have to securing an OS is the same approach you would have to securing that AI model.”

This means enforcing unified protection across every attack path, with rigorous data governance, robust cloud security posture management (CSPM), and identity-first security through cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) to lock down the cloud environments where most AI workloads reside. As identity becomes the new perimeter, AI systems must be governed with the same strict access controls and runtime protections as any other business-critical cloud asset.

The specter of “shadow AI”: Unmasking hidden risks

Shadow AI, or the unsanctioned use of AI tools by employees, creates a massive, unknown attack surface. A financial analyst using a free online LLM for confidential documents can inadvertently leak proprietary data. As Rodriguez warned, queries to public models can “become another’s answers.” Addressing this requires a combination of clear policy, employee education, and technical controls like AI security posture management (AI-SPM) to discover and assess all AI assets, sanctioned or not.

Fortifying the future: Actionable defense strategies

While adversaries have weaponized AI, the tide is beginning to turn. As Mike Riemer, Field CISO at Ivanti, observes, defenders are beginning to “harness the full potential of AI for cybersecurity purposes to analyze vast amounts of data collected from diverse systems.” This proactive stance is essential for building a robust defense, which requires several key strategies:

Budget for inference security from day zero: The first step, according to Arora, is to begin with “a comprehensive risk-based assessment.” He advises mapping the entire inference pipeline to identify every data flow and vulnerability. “By linking these risks to possible financial impacts,” he explains, “we can better quantify the cost of a security breach” and build a realistic budget.

To structure this more systematically, CISOs and CFOs should start with a risk-adjusted ROI model. One approach:

Security ROI = (estimated breach cost × annual risk probability) – total security investment

For example, if an LLM inference attack could result in a $5 million loss and the likelihood is 10%, the expected loss is $500,000. A $350,000 investment in inference-stage defenses would yield a net gain of $150,000 in avoided risk. This model enables scenario-based budgeting tied directly to financial outcomes.

Enterprises allocating less than 8 to 12% of their AI project budgets to inference-stage security are often blindsided later by breach recovery and compliance costs. A Fortune 500 healthcare provider CIO, interviewed by VentureBeat and requesting anonymity, now allocates 15% of their total gen AI budget to post-training risk management, including runtime monitoring, AI-SPM platforms and compliance audits. A practical budgeting model should allocate across four cost centers: runtime monitoring (35%), adversarial simulation (25%), compliance tooling (20%) and user behavior analytics (20%).

Here’s a sample allocation snapshot for a $2 million enterprise AI deployment based on VentureBeat’s ongoing interviews with CFOs, CIOs and CISOs actively budgeting to support AI projects:

Budget categoryAllocationUse case exampleRuntime monitoring$300,000Behavioral anomaly detection (API spikes)Adversarial simulation$200,000Red team exercises to probe prompt injectionCompliance tooling$150,000EU AI Act alignment, SOC 2 inference validationsUser behavior analytics$150,000Detect misuse patterns in internal AI use

These investments reduce downstream breach remediation costs, regulatory penalties and SLA violations, all helping to stabilize AI TCO.

Implement runtime monitoring and validation: Begin by tuning anomaly detection to detect behaviors at the inference layer, such as abnormal API call patterns, output entropy shifts or query frequency spikes. Vendors like DataDome and Telesign now offer real-time behavioral analytics tailored to gen AI misuse signatures.

Teams should monitor entropy shifts in outputs, track token irregularities in model responses and watch for atypical frequency in queries from privileged accounts. Effective setups include streaming logs into SIEM tools (such as Splunk or Datadog) with tailored gen AI parsers and establishing real-time alert thresholds for deviations from model baselines.

Adopt a zero-trust framework for AI: Zero-trust is non-negotiable for AI environments. It operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” By adopting this architecture, Riemer notes, organizations can ensure that “only authenticated users and devices gain access to sensitive data and applications, regardless of their physical location.”

Inference-time zero-trust should be enforced at multiple layers:

Identity: Authenticate both human and service actors accessing inference endpoints.

Permissions: Scope LLM access using role-based access control (RBAC) with time-boxed privileges.

Segmentation: Isolate inference microservices with service mesh policies and enforce least-privilege defaults through cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs).

A proactive AI security strategy requires a holistic approach, encompassing visibility and supply chain security during development, securing infrastructure and data and implementing robust safeguards to protect AI systems in runtime during production.

Protecting AI ROI: A CISO/CFO collaboration model

Protecting the ROI of enterprise AI requires actively modeling the financial upside of security. Start with a baseline ROI projection, then layer in cost-avoidance scenarios for each security control. Mapping cybersecurity investments to avoided costs including incident remediation, SLA violations and customer churn, turns risk reduction into a measurable ROI gain.

Enterprises should model three ROI scenarios that include baseline, with security investment and post-breach recovery to show cost avoidance clearly. For example, a telecom deploying output validation prevented 12,000-plus misrouted queries per month, saving $6.3 million annually in SLA penalties and call center volume. Tie investments to avoided costs across breach remediation, SLA non-compliance, brand impact and customer churn to build a defensible ROI argument to CFOs.

Checklist: CFO-Grade ROI protection model

CFOs need to communicate with clarity on how security spending protects the bottom line. To safeguard AI ROI at the inference layer, security investments must be modeled like any other strategic capital allocation: With direct links to TCO, risk mitigation and revenue preservation.

Use this checklist to make AI security investments defensible in the boardroom — and actionable in the budget cycle.

Link every AI security spend to a projected TCO reduction category (compliance, breach remediation, SLA stability).

Run cost-avoidance simulations with 3-year horizon scenarios: baseline, protected and breach-reactive.

Quantify financial risk from SLA violations, regulatory fines, brand trust erosion and customer churn.

Co-model inference-layer security budgets with both CISOs and CFOs to break organizational silos.

Present security investments as growth enablers, not overhead, showing how they stabilize AI infrastructure for sustained value capture.

This model doesn’t just defend AI investments; it defends budgets and brands and can protect and grow boardroom credibility.

Concluding analysis: A strategic imperative

CISOs must present AI risk management as a business enabler, quantified in terms of ROI protection, brand trust preservation and regulatory stability. As AI inference moves deeper into revenue workflows, protecting it isn’t a cost center; it’s the control plane for AI’s financial sustainability. Strategic security investments at the infrastructure layer must be justified with financial metrics that CFOs can act on.

The path forward requires organizations to balance investment in AI innovation with an equal investment in its protection. This necessitates a new level of strategic alignment. As Ivanti CIO Robert Grazioli told VentureBeat: “CISO and CIO alignment will be critical to effectively safeguard modern businesses.” This collaboration is essential to break down the data and budget silos that undermine security, allowing organizations to manage the true cost of AI and turn a high-risk gamble into a sustainable, high-ROI engine of growth.

Telesign’s Schreier added: “We view AI inference risks through the lens of digital identity and trust. We embed security across the full lifecycle of our AI tools — using access controls, usage monitoring, rate limiting and behavioral analytics to detect misuse and protect both our customers and their end users from emerging threats.”

He continued: “We approach output validation as a critical layer of our AI security architecture, particularly because many inference-time risks don’t stem from how a model is trained, but how it behaves in the wild.”

Read More »

Kumo’s ‘relational foundation model’ predicts the future your LLM can’t see

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more The generative AI boom has given us powerful language models that can write, summarize and reason over vast amounts of text and other types of data. But when it comes to high-value predictive tasks like predicting customer churn or detecting fraud from structured, relational data, enterprises remain stuck in the world of traditional machine learning.  Stanford professor and Kumo AI co-founder Jure Leskovec argues that this is the critical missing piece. His company’s tool, a relational foundation model (RFM), is a new kind of pre-trained AI that brings the “zero-shot” capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to structured databases. “It’s about making a forecast about something you don’t know, something that has not happened yet,” Leskovec told VentureBeat. “And that’s a fundamentally new capability that is, I would argue, missing from the current purview of what we think of as gen AI.” Why predictive ML is a “30-year-old technology” While LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can answer questions about existing knowledge, they are fundamentally retrospective. They retrieve and reason over information that is already there. For predictive business tasks, companies still rely on classic machine learning.  For example, to build a model that predicts customer churn, a business must hire a team of data scientists who spend a considerably long time doing “feature engineering,” the process of manually creating predictive signals from the data. This involves complex data wrangling to join information from different tables, such as a customer’s purchase history and website clicks, to create a single, massive training table. “If you want to do machine learning (ML), sorry, you are stuck in the past,” Leskovec said. Expensive and time-consuming bottlenecks prevent most organizations from

Read More »

Stay Ahead with the Paperboy Newsletter

Your weekly dose of insights into AI, Bitcoin mining, Datacenters and Energy indusrty news. Spend 3-5 minutes and catch-up on 1 week of news.

Smarter with ONMINE

Streamline Your Growth with ONMINE