Stop Measuring AI Spend, Start Measuring Impact

InnovationStop Measuring AI Spend, Start Measuring ImpactByKarthik Kannan,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 21, 2026, 07:00am EDTKarthik Kannan is Founder and CEO of Anvilogic. getty​Every technology wave starts with the same triad: pipes, platforms and compute. Early focus on infrastructure is logical because it attracts investment, enables applications and opens the floodgates.​But visionaries who define an era don’t just build pipes or infrastructure—they control what goes through them and bring value to users. ​Even though AI leverage today is strongly associated with tokens, AI is much more than an infrastructure story. It’s a chance to decide where impact happens and how/what “killer apps”—apps so transformative they drive widespread adoption of the platform they run on—are going to get built in various domains. Companies that get this right are likely to shape the next generation of standards and value capture in their domains, while others risk optimizing for metrics that don’t translate into long-term platform influence.​AI is more than infrastructure.When cloud computing arrived, the story was infrastructure—Amazon Web Services (AWS) turning services like EC2 and S3 into clean, metered utility computing. AWS succeeded not because it invented new application models, but because it removed constraints that allowed existing ones—especially SaaS—to scale more efficiently and globally.Companies building on AWS were not primarily judged on infrastructure consumption as a success metric. Nobody walked into a board meeting saying they are succeeding because their AWS bill went up. While cloud costs mattered operationally, success was ultimately defined by the value delivered to end users through the applications built on top of that infrastructure.The AI wave is likely to follow a similar pattern. The...