Is AI Worth the Cost? The ROI Reckoning and the Coming Market Correction

Prof G Markets (Live) Episode Title: Is AI Worth the Cost? The ROI Reckoning and the Coming Market Correction Location: The Castro Theatre, San Francisco, CA Hosts: Scott Galloway & Ed Nelson ED: We're going to talk about a topic not enough people talk about called AI. Nearly 50,000 workers have been laid off this year supposedly because of AI — that's almost as many as in all of 2025. For companies adopting AI, the thesis is simple: AI is supposed to do much of the work that humans do. In recent weeks, however, that thesis has hit a roadblock. More and more companies are reporting that despite the enormous power of AI, the technology is actually more expensive than the humans it is supposed to replace. Uber, for example, just blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. According to the COO, it is now getting harder to justify AI costs within the company. Microsoft is cancelling its Claude Code licenses across multiple divisions because it's simply gotten too expensive. And over at Nvidia, one executive said that the cost of compute is now "far beyond the cost of employees." Which all raises a crucial question for the AI industry: at what point does AI actually stop being worth it? This has blown up basically in the last 48 hours, with many companies coming out and saying they're not as confident about this whole AI thing as they used to be. ServiceNow is another company that just blew through their entire Anthropic budget. Technical staff at Stripe are reportedly spending nearly $100,000 on AI tokens every day. Salesforce is on track to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year. Shopify said their earnings were "partially offset by increased LLM costs." We heard similar things from Meta, Spotify, and Pinterest. One Anthropic employee said his Claude Code bill came out to $150,000 in a single month. In some cases, it's getting very, very expensive. We've also seen an incentive — especially among tech companies — to use AI as much as possible.