Enterprises start questioning the return on AI investments

Summary

Deirdre Bosa reports that enterprises are shifting focus from rapid AI deployment to questioning return on investment, leading to cost discipline and model routing. Companies are opting for cheaper models like DeepSeek for routine tasks, undermining the premium pricing narrative of frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

• Enterprise AI spending is under scrutiny.
• Cost gap between frontier and cheaper models is widening.
• DeepSeek costs 19 times less than Claude Opus for comparable tasks.
• Model routing allocates easy tasks to low-cost AI, difficult tasks to premium models.
• Frontier labs face narrative risk as IPO expectations rely on premium pricing.
• The broader AI trade may be affected as cost discipline spreads.