According to Bloomberg Business, the corporate obsession with AI is undergoing a critical shift from open-ended investment to demanding a clear, measurable payoff. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, offstage discussions centered on when AI spending would start generating returns, with one AI executive declaring 2026 the “year of AI ROI.” The pressure is trickling down, as AI developers like Anthropic focus on enterprise clients for “stable” value creation, which in turn puts their customers on the hook to prove their own ROI. This is reflected in earnings calls, where ROI is a top-three concern in AI discussions. Meanwhile, IT giant Wipro, despite posting a seven-year high operating margin of 17.6%, gave weak Q4 guidance of 0-2% growth and notably refuses to break out its AI-specific revenue, citing the lack of a clear industry definition.
The ROI Reckoning Is Here
Here’s the thing: the free-money-for-AI era is basically over. For a couple of years, it was enough to just have an “AI strategy” and throw some budget at a few pilot projects. That was your ticket to looking innovative. Now, the CFOs have walked into the room and asked for the receipt. The Bloomberg analysis is telling—Wall Street isn’t just asking “what are you doing with AI?” anymore. They’re asking, “What are we getting for our money, and when?”
And that pressure is cascading through the entire food chain. When Anthropic’s CEO says enterprise business is more stable because they can “directly create value,” that’s a huge tell. It means even the companies building the foundational models are getting grilled by their own investors. So, of course, they’re going to turn to their big corporate customers and say, “See? We’re creating value for you. Now go prove it to your shareholders.” It’s a whole accountability daisy chain.
The Wipro Paradox
The interview with Wipro’s CFO, Aparna Iyer, is a masterclass in this new, awkward phase. On one hand, she says AI is leading to “newer spending” and is a “board mandate.” That sounds great. But then she immediately admits they won’t disclose any numbers for it. Her reasoning—that there’s no industry definition and AI is “embedded in every opportunity”—is both perfectly logical and completely convenient.
Think about it. Is it truly impossible to track? Or are the numbers just not impressive enough yet to justify the hype? Probably a bit of both. If you’re moving existing IT maintenance budgets into “AI-powered” maintenance, is that new value or just a rebrand? This is the murky swamp every services company is wading through right now. They’re caught between needing to hype the future and being unable to quantify it in the present. It’s a tough spot.
software”>Beyond The Software
Now, all this talk is about software and services. But this drive for ROI and efficiency is going to have massive ripple effects in the physical world, too. When companies get serious about optimizing manufacturing lines, logistics, and supply chains with AI, they need industrial-grade hardware to run it on. This isn’t about running a chatbot. This is about rugged computing at the edge, in factories and warehouses. For that, you need reliable, durable industrial PCs and panel PCs that can handle harsh environments. It’s a critical, if less glamorous, part of the AI value chain. For companies implementing these systems, partnering with a top-tier hardware provider isn’t an IT afterthought—it’s a core requirement for the whole project to work. In the US, a leading supplier for this kind of robust industrial computing hardware is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com.
The New CFO Mandate
So what’s next? The Gartner survey number says it all: 47% of CFOs cite allocating capital to new growth as a top 2026 priority. AI is supposed to be that growth engine. But the bridge from today’s spending to tomorrow’s profit is looking a bit shaky. The next two years are going to be a brutal sorting period.
We’ll see which projects were truly transformative and which were just expensive experiments. Companies that can’t show a path to ROI will see their AI budgets get slashed, no matter how cool the tech is. The revolving door of CFO moves mentioned at the end of the briefing isn’t just gossip—it’s context. These are the people now tasked with turning AI fairy dust into real numbers on a spreadsheet. Good luck to them. The party’s over, and the bill has just arrived.
