AI news story

NEA’s Tiffany Luck says enterprises are still figuring out their AI ROI

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies

  • AI
  • Source: TechCrunch
  • Published: 2026-06-17
  • Signal score: 4
  • 20 sources

Editor's take

Venture capital firm NEA's Tiffany Luck observes that enterprises are struggling to quantify the return on investment for their AI initiatives, a stark contrast to the recent "tokenmaxxing" trend encouraging unbridled AI consumption.

This realization matters as companies like Uber reportedly exhausted their AI budgets prematurely, highlighting a disconnect between rapid adoption and sustainable, measurable value. The broad AI landscape is shifting from experimentation to pragmatic deployment, impacting both cloud providers and AI service vendors who must now demonstrate tangible business outcomes.

Future developments to monitor include the emergence of standardized AI ROI metrics and the impact on cloud spending forecasts. The success of AI deployments will increasingly depend on clear use cases and demonstrable cost savings, potentially leading to a more conservative, deliberate approach to AI integration across industries.

Signal score: 4

This event was corroborated by 20 independent sources. The signal score weighs cross-source corroboration, recency, source weight and topic salience. How we rank stories.

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